variety had no bearing on Kitty’s point of view on the matter. If you’ve been happily married with children for any amount of time, you can probably guess that the stronger conviction won out—which really says something about Kitty, and maybe about me as well.
While I was a civil rights attorney fighting to integrate northern public schools, Kitty was the daughter of a Pittsburgh cop. She grew up in a working-class Irish neighborhood. None of her fellow students from either the local public school or the Catholic high school she attended went to college. More than fifty years later, Kitty still reminds me about this smoldering recollection of her growing up.
“I took typing and home economics while you were reading Chaucer and Shakespeare in high school,” the argument began. “I was taking a secretarial course. And while you went to Harvard, I was singing ‘This Is My Beloved’ while Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom was holding a microphone to the bowl as he flushed a toilet offstage. You can talk all you want, but our children are going to private schools. I won’t have your mother looking down her nose at our children the way she does at me.”
“Half the kids who went to Harvard went to public schools,” I replied, “and anyway if there are problems with the local public school, we can get involved and help make it better. Be a part of the change—”
“You won’t do it,” she said, cutting me off.
“I will.”
“Not with your work schedule. You won’t do it. I want our children to go to private school.”
By the time Janine reached kindergarten age, the die had been cast. She went to the Ethical Culture School a few blocks down from our apartment building. “Ethical,” as it was called by those who knew about the world of private schools in New York City, was known for being liberal and socially activist. It made an effort to have one or two black kids in each class. Beyond that, however, it was private and white and for the children of the ever-striving wealthy classes. I had surrendered, without much of a fight.
Our children all grew up well, mainly due to Kitty’s caring. Their private school education taught them that they are members of an elite stratum of society, and the fallacy that they earned their place in that world by their own hard work. Although my children never said such things (or, as far as I know, thought such things), some of their schoolmates believed that the kids they saw who didn’t make it out of the ghetto were lazy—and it was their fault that their possibilities seemed so rotten when the buses rolled through their neighborhoods on the way to Riverdale. While over the years our children have learned about the incredible difficulties of growing up in barely functional settings where young men dealt drugs or worked other hustles, always on one side or the other of prison’s revolving door, it was only in an intellectual way, and with very little of the firsthand experience they would have had at a public school, where empathy could flow out of friendships. But what’s done is done.
For me the regret for not sending our children to integrated public schools goes deeper. Although we never left New York City, my family and I engaged in a form of white flight. We withdrew, leaving it to other people who did not have our financial and social resources to make the public schools work and try to make integration a reality. Every time I say that I can understand the lawyers who fought against the NAACP’s Northern school desegregation cases and the judges who did not comprehend what was at stake, or have the fortitude to make the hard decisions to go against their friends and neighbors, I think of myself because I gave them their excuse.
* * *
While Kitty was winning the private school war at home, I was fighting Northern campaign cases in Indiana—one in South Bend and the other in Kokomo. In both instances black children were assigned to broken-down, impoverished schools located in the spreading urban blight that was then an epidemic at precisely the same time those municipalities were building brand-new public schools for white middle-class families creating new, racially segregated suburbs on the outskirts of both cities.
Despite losses in Gary, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, Bob wanted the NAACP to take a leading role in South Bend and Kokomo. His assumption was that the local federal judges would rule