of the mobs that tried to block the integration of a school in Little Rock. My eyes were opened by news accounts about those coward bombers—churches attacked, children killed, random people lynched—but until I started to work for the NAACP, I didn’t understand the harsh realities of racism in the North.
* * *
In the summer of 1964, right after I became an NAACP lawyer, Bob traveled to Mississippi to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. While he was there the county attorney, Rayford Jones, kept calling Bob by his first name—he said “Robert”—rather than “Mr. Carter.” Bob knew there had been a conspiracy to kill Chaney and his companions, and still he stood up to Jones. Bob called Jones “Rayford,” an unheard-of violation of Mississippi’s racial rules.
That was around the time I met my first Southern judge in Baton Rouge, but otherwise my days were spent at Freedom House preparing for trial in another of the Northern campaign cases against the Cincinnati school board, while Bob was in Neshoba County. Bob was hopeful that this new round of cases in Cincinnati and Springfield would offset the disappointments in the Gary, Indiana, case, as well as in Cleveland.
Soon I was off to Cincinnati to supervise our trial preparation. My plane landed at an airport in Kentucky across the Ohio River from the “Queen City.” Since slavery had been abolished, Cincinnati was a terminal city for the so-called great migration. Blacks traveled north to escape Jim Crow laws and to find work in industrial jobs that whites also wanted. What they found in Cincinnati’s flat downtown, surrounded by seven hills, was another kind of segregation, one that wasn’t as evident as Jim Crow but whose effect was to lock the city’s black children into mostly segregated schools while keeping the great majority of them out of white schools.
In the 1960s the black population was crammed into downtown Cincinnati, living in small worn-out houses or packed into old working-class apartments that were often literally falling apart, in the shadows of defunct factories. Jobs were moving out to the suburbs along with the city’s white population. The inner-city blacks were trapped. As urban renewal projects tore down their neighborhoods, they were forced into ghettos at the base of the hills, as well as a few of the more rundown arteries that led to the suburbs.
Bob told me to work with Norris Muldrow, a volunteer attorney at the local NAACP branch to prepare the case, which was called Tina Deal v. Cincinnati Board of Education. A small but powerful-looking black man in his thirties, Norris had worked his way through law school, attending at night, and was a single practitioner. He was one of the few lawyers in the city who served the black community. We met at the downtown Hilton, where I was staying, his briefcase bulging with legal papers, maps, and other documents that he thought might help us put together the case. Norris suggested a drive around the city, so I could get a feel for the various neighborhoods and schools. While we drove around, he told me about the case, stopping the tour repeatedly to drop in on or call this or that client, with me fuming as I waited in his car, not entirely sympathetic to his day filled with too many people with too many problems.
The Cincinnati Board of Education had operated a small number of totally segregated elementary schools, which it called “voluntary Negro schools,” until 1955. Norris said that recently there had been NAACP demonstrations that led to halfhearted promises to look into the segregation issue, and the appointment of one lone black member to the school board, but absolutely no action was taken to integrate the schools, and the demonstrations had petered out.
“They just wait you out,” Norris said. “And people have to get back to work. They’re relying on us to do the job.”
When it closed these “voluntary” schools, the board’s administrators put most of the students into nearly all-black schools. Since then segregation among the elementary schools was maintained by the careful placement of new buildings within gerrymandered district lines, and crazy, crisscrossing busing patterns that could exist only for the purpose of keeping white and black children separate. There was a little more integration at the junior high and high school levels, but board officials had worked hard to limit black attendance in the more elite white schools. The few schools with large numbers