the black neighborhoods so overenrolled that they were on half-day sessions. So kids were going to school in shifts, which put a strain on families where often both parents had to punch a work clock.
Across the river, white flight was already a reality, with white families having left in large numbers for the rapidly forming suburbs around the city. As a result schools on the west side of town were underenrolled.
To reduce the overcrowding, some black kids were bused to the white side of town, where they were completely segregated within the white schools. They ate separately, were taught separately, and were allowed to go to the bathroom only once a day. The busing angered both whites and blacks. Whites didn’t like black kids being shipped into their neighborhood schools, and blacks didn’t like their kids being completely segregated in those schools. As tensions flared in the city, the board of education decided to build new schools on the east side of the Cuyahoga and return the black students to those buildings when they were completed. The end result would obviously harden the patterns of segregation and freeze them in place. The school board justified what it was doing based on a rule of thumb known as the neighborhood school plan, used almost universally in U.S. cities, which placed kids in schools near their homes, but it ignored the rule whenever it suited its purposes.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a newly emerging civil rights organization, had played a big role in shaping a response to Cleveland’s schools. Working with a local group called the United Freedom Movement (UFM), which the local NAACP helped form in 1963, CORE played a leading role in opposing the board’s plan. When the board of education announced its intention to quickly build new schools on the east side, CORE and UFM organized demonstrations at the proposed sites. Then, on April 7, 1964, the Reverend Bruce W. Klunder, a white Presbyterian minister who headed the local CORE chapter, was killed by a bulldozer.
I had been aware of the deaths of civil rights workers in the South and the vicious attacks inflicted on the Freedom Riders, but this one was different. It was in the North, and much closer to home. Klunder and I were the same age, but unlike me he was on the front lines of civil rights activism, while until then I had been working the seams of the Movement from the safety of Freedom House in New York City. Around the time of Klunder’s death, the NAACP began a lawsuit in federal court to stop the board of education from further segregating the Cleveland schools. The case was called Craggett v. Board of Education of Cleveland City. The lead plaintiff was a student named Charles Craggett. Bob and local NAACP lawyers sought a preliminary injunction to stop the school construction until the court could hold a full trial to determine the legality of the board’s plan, which the NAACP argued violated the Constitution. After a hearing Judge Girard Kalbfleisch ruled that the board’s building program would not cause prohibited public school segregation under the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, and denied an injunction. Carter and the local NAACP attorneys immediately decided to appeal. And that meant another major project for our office.
* * *
That’s where I came into the picture. Maria and Barbara, who normally drafted the important briefs, had more work than they could handle, and Bob was constantly on the road. There was everything from boycotts, the constant drumroll of demonstration arrests, school cases, and labor-related cases. A fairly pure form of chaos existed in the NAACP legal office, as there were only so many hours in the day or night to get the work done. That’s the reason it wasn’t entirely a shock when Bob told me that, despite my inexperience, I would be putting together the appeal of the Craggett case. Still, this would be my first assignment on a key school case involving Bob’s Northern campaign strategy.
As with most of the work I did as assistant counsel, it just kind of happened. Bob told me what he needed, talked me through the case, handed me an accordion file bursting with court papers, transcripts, and exhibits, and, on his way to the next thing, said something about me having ten days to get the brief done.
I must have looked stunned.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Barbara and Maria will help if you run into any problems.”