In defense of managed integration
Fuerst, J.S. & Petty, Roy
sly vMPERFECT TOOL IN AN IMPERFECT SOCIETY In defense of managed integration J. S. FUERST & ROY PETTY N IORE THAN THREE DECADES after the Supreme Court rejected legal segregation in schooling,...
...Now this is to be unlearned and we are told that this is not a matter of fundamental principle but only a matter of whose ox is gored...
...and a compelling interest was preservation of integration and relieving of overcrowding...
...Today's debate over integration has erupted at the national level, in President Reagan's appointments to the U.S...
...One of these opposes preferences or policies, of any kind, for any reason, that differentiate between people on the basis of race...
...Their interest is in getting good housing, good jobs, and good services, whether the setting is integrated or not...
...Further, racial balance will not be the same in employment, schools, or in housing even in the same area...
...T HE CASE for policies involving racially based distinctions becomes more troublesome, however, when one moves from the typical affirmative action controversies in areas like employment or college admissions to instances like Starrett City...
...Here arises one of the strongest objections not only to the uses of quotas in affirmative action but even more so to their use in managed integration...
...But it also rests on three other perceptions: first, that integration is possible...
...The limits on black tenancy at LeClaire Courts and Cabrini were both lifted, more blacks moved in, and the whites fled...
...On the contrary, a number of black communities in urban and suburban areas have become excellent places to live...
...Ultimately, the courts have had to deal with those questions on a case-bycase basis...
...One method, not necessarily salutary, is simply economic: where homes are expensive, many blacks will be excluded because they cannot afford to live there...
...If it is a matter of down-to-earth reality that separate is not likely to be equal on any large scale in this country, it is also a matter of reality that integration is likely to be achieved and 14 February 1986:75maintained only as a result of careful management...
...It has pitted against one another ideals that have long appeared complementary, like racial integration and racial equality...
...The town's leaders have not attempted to use "quotas," per se, but instead have resorted to keeping pressure on banks and real estate firms, and to encouraging "benign steering" of potential new residents as much as possible...
...Kean had the "temporary" veterans' projects torn down, eliminating those integrated developments...
...The reasons are immensely complex and involve a couple of centuries of history, but the reality is known to every objective urban dweller...
...Where a community is an all-white suburb or fringe area, chances are that it should be integrated on a carefully "managed" basis...
...Imposition of affirmative action plans or quotas serves the purpose, not of thaking blacks "more equal," but of approximating true, functional equality...
...There are not two contending approaches but at least three...
...Furthermore, it is undeniably true that a great many blacks are no more enamored of integration than their white counterparts...
...There is, however, evidence that integration can occur, at least with the support of people of good will...
...As Lyndon B. Johnson declared in his famous 1965 speech at Howard University: "You don't take a person who has been for years hobbled by chains and liberate him by bringing him up to the starting line of a race and saying, 'You're free to compete,' and then believe you have been fair...
...Starrett City is a tenyearold apartment development in Brooklyn for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers...
...Other evidence of successful integration can be found in the substantial black populations in suburban communities like Oak Park, Evanston, and Park Forest, near Chicago...
...Bickel found the idea of using the Constitution's guarantees of racial equality to justify any policies involving distinctions on the basis of race to be illogical and improper, and he said so in no uncertain terms: The lesson of the great decisions of the Supreme Court and the lesson of contemporary history have been the same for at least a generation: discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society...
...Louis, to name only a few...
...B~t it is precisely this interest in concrete improvements that leads many black families to prefer life in an integrated setting rather than a segregated one...
...14 February 1986:77...
...The students told to transfer to other high schools and their parents brought suit...
...The Starrett City controversy essentially ended in a "draw" which meant, as in any split decision, a victory for the status quo...
...Some of the most successful integrated developments were located in all-white neighborhoods -- Ashburn Homes on the southwest side, Sauganash Homes on the northwest side, LeClaire Courts on the far west side, and Frances Cabtini on the near-north side...
...Thus, the concepts of white flight, resegregation, and subsequent deterioration of housing quality are not merely theories...
...but for now and for some time to come, upward-striving black families either want to move into integrated neighborhoods or send their children to stable, racially integrated schools...
...that event -- exacerbated by widespread block-busting by real-estate agencies -destabilized the Community's integration, and longtime residents, both white and black, began moving out in droves...
...Associated with President Reagan and with current Civil Rights Commissioners like Abrams (when he is not lawyering for someone else), this point of view probably found its most vigorous and articulate defender in the late Alexander Bickel of Yale Law School...
...Another determinant is the current racial composition of an area...
...Thus, in the integrated developments, black tenancy was limited to about 20 percent...
...A complex consent decree called for a very gradual, small increase in the number of minority tenants in Starrett City and a somewhat larger increase in other projects funded by the New York State Housing Agency...
...A majority of the current black tenants said they preferred the present system of maintaining integration by a policy of quotas...
...The civil-rights groups whose lawyers mounted the challenge must have known that if they won the ease Starrett City was likely to become resegregated...
...We have written about the pressures they face in "How Much Due Process Is Enough...
...A familiar lawyerly explanation: "Business is business...
...Racial balances will not be the same at one time as another, or in one setting as another...
...A major concomitant of the resegregation of the CHA, as any long-term resident will testify, was a serious decline in maintenance and services, severe deterioration of the quality of existing housing stock, and a virtual end to any construction of desperately needed new public housing...
...As two black women from a once-integrated south shore neighborhood of Chicago told a reporter for the Sun-Times a few years ago, "With integration we have good schools with innovative and progressive programs...
...but both the district court and the court of appeals ruled against them: "The plaintiff has maintained that racial quotas were unnecessary...
...That principle was fully accepted,, for example, in the Queens, New York, case of Andrew Jackson High School, where a concentration of black students had been justified on the grounds that dispersing them to other schools in the area would have precipitated white flight and resegregation...
...and that for a complex array of largely disgraceful historical and social reasons, black citizens on the whole have wound up with the short end of the stick...
...Even if they are not undemocratic in principle, in practice could they be successfully administered only by "philosopher-kings," of whom our society -- and notably our local, state, and federal governments -- are in rather short supply...
...A particularly interesting example of housing integration is found in Calumet Park, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago...
...These examples should be honored and imitated, not ignored or, worse, disparaged...
...We find otherwise...
...In Otero, the plaintiffs were former residents of a low-income New York area who had been relocated in order to permit a new housing development to be built...
...There is a danger of reading Brown v. Board of Education's rejection of the old doctrine of separate but equal as a paternalistic and inaccurate claim that excellent all-black schools and stable, desirable all-black neighborhoods are simply not possible...
...The court agreed, and even proposed guidelines for defining a "tipping .point...
...Fundamentally, they argue, the purpose of quotas or affirmative action plans is to create equality, not inequality...
...That premise, articulated by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, says that a schoolroom or community containing only blacks will not measure up to one in which whites are also present...
...It involves questions of high principle as well as everyday practicality...
...On a more philosophical level, they argue that the basic premise of integration is not only incorrect in some respects but downright racist in its implications...
...When we did it, this is what happened, and who were the first people to leave...
...That difference makes the issue much tougher...
...It would be ironic," the court said, "if by granting the validity of the priority claims of the original black residents and giving them better housing, we should put them back in a resegregated neighborhood...
...Where whites live, the schools are apt to be better, the garbage gets picked up, apartments are available and well-maintained...
...At Starrett City, the problem is that minority applicants for apartments far outnumber white applicants, and for a very good reason...
...They maintain that large segments of the country's black population who now live in all-black com14 February 1986:73munities wish to do so, and certainly have that right...
...The Cook County Department of Public Aid began moving inner-city black families with multiple social problems into apartment buildings in HarVey...
...The levels of successful integration may, in addition, be much different in twenty or thirty years from what they are now...
...services and facilities: and (3) the atti~,,Of t~la~iii '~' group residents who might be persuaded by subjecti.~e~ . , , . , ' reaction into leaving...
...Justice Harry Blackmun effectively replied when he wisely observed in his dissent in the 1978 Bakke case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race...
...If carried to its ultimate, this trend can again lead to a black versus white society -- the kind of apartheid that existed before the 1950s...
...Supreme Court decisions...
...The exception among the Supreme Court cases is Firefighters Local Union No...
...and before long, stability, maintenance, management, and the quality of life in general would almost certainly decline...
...If we are ever to achieve our national goal of a "color-blind" society, can it ever be accomplished except through a policy that recognizes that racial balance and managed integration are necessary at least in some places and for some time to come...
...It was that issue which clouded the Bakke, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and U.S...
...The answer will rest on one's judgment of the practical possibilities of citizen participation for negotiating agreements between minorities and whites in each community...
...It boasts nearly six thousand apartments in forty-six buildings...
...while in Hyde Park, where integration has been the rule for forty years, minority residency may be much higher...
...to a long-established policy of careful racial balance...
...The staff believed blacks and whites could and should live together, yet recognized that if too many blacks moved into any one project, the whites would, move out and resegregation would occur...
...Tom Pearson, a white businessman who grew up in Harvey, remembers the change with bitterness: "We had realtors who told us 'quotas' and 'balanced housing' were discriminatory and that the Fourteenth Amendment demanded that we allow black families to move in without limit...
...They worry that "benign" quotas may not turn out to be all that benign in the long run...
...Defenders of affirmative action in other contexts find themselves troubled by the subjugation of individual rights to community goals in the course of managed integration...
...What was he doing defending quotas in the Starrett City suit...
...If white families move out -- and they will, if too many black families move in -- tradesmen and professional services move out, schools deteriorate, and city services in the areas become nonexistent...
...Since Starrett City's policy of deliberate racial balance makes this greater number of minority applicants eligible for a smaller pool of apartments, obviously minority families must be on the waiting list considerably longer...
...Prevention of resegregation is most important...
...Bickel's eloquence was obviously directed against the supporters of a second approach, identified by the terms of "affirmative action" or in a different context, "positive quotas...
...T HE REALITY, then, at least in urban housing and perhaps in other situations as well, is that integration can work but that it is a fragile condition, one that occurs "naturally" on an infrequent basis...
...In employment or admissions cases, affirmative action or quotas operate to increase the number of minority individuals...
...Having found support in the Constitution for equality, they now claim support for inequality under the same Constitution...
...and educational opportunities for blacks, regardless of the impact on segregation...
...No inference should be made that it is impossible for all-black neighborhoods and schools to be good...
...In housing and neighborhood controversies, and in some school desegregation plans, preferences based on race are intended -- because of the inexorable tendency toward white flight and resegregation -- to limit minority presence...
...of the willingness and skill of courts and legislatures to watch over the process and set sensible guidelines within which discretionary judgments must be exercised...
...The success of gradual but affirmative approaches to integration is evident in Project Concern, a voluntary suburban school integration program outside of Hartford, Connecticut, developed by establishment executives some fifteen years ago...
...Abrams, best known these days as a Reagan appointee to the U.S...
...In Shannon v. HUD, for example the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in 1970 that neighborhood racial stability could and should be considered in deciding whether a subsidized housing project, Fairmount Manor, could be built in an integrated neighborhood in Philadelphia...
...Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, near Cleveland...
...Decent housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income blacks and Hispanics in New York, as elsewhere, are severely limited...
...The resulting alliances are sometimes surprising...
...Yet as reported in a Commonweal article on Calumet Park [June 19, 1982], many residents believe there is instability, and that unless the town adopts a. s tfi'ct ordinance man.dating racial balance, Calumet Park's whites may someday move out Commonweal: 74]11 II I I and be replaced by an all-black population...
...To claim that racially based preferences will make blacks "more equal than others" is, in their estimation, absurd...
...This is the crux of the issue...
...second, that integration is fragile...
...The debate over racial integration, then, divides not only those who would argue that public policy has to be totally "color blind" from those who say realism demands some racially based considerations to remedy what President Johnson called "the scars of centuries...
...sly vMPERFECT TOOL IN AN IMPERFECT SOCIETY In defense of managed integration J. S. FUERST & ROY PETTY N IORE THAN THREE DECADES after the Supreme Court rejected legal segregation in schooling, more than two Idecades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, indeed at the very moment when the life and dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., has come to be officially memorialized by a national holiday, the United States is still debating the issue of racial integration -- not only how to achieve it, but whether it is worth achieving at all...
...Otero v. New York City Housing Authority in 1973 followed the same pattern, though it was a much more complex and difficult case...
...depending on the family, the .location, and the particular circumstances at the time, an applicant might or might not be admitted...
...This one local example shows how complicated the debate over racial integration has become...
...Managers of hundreds of housing projects around the country quietly but deliberately use race-conscious techniques to maintain integration, although they are reluctant to admit doing so...
...Yet every federal court that has weighed the argument thus far -- not to mention many mayors of all political persuasions -- has rejected the Justice Department's position in no uncertain terms...
...These proportions have been maintained deliberately for some years in the belief that increasing the proportion of minority tenants, notably of blacks, would cause white tenants (and some blacks) to leave...
...Even more ironic was the fact that Starrett City's defense of its quota system was argued by the prominent New York attorney Morris Abrams...
...Civil Rights Commission, ordinarily proclaims the view that racial quotas of any kind, no matter how benign or for what purpose, are morally and legally Commonweal: 72repugnant...
...and given the prospects for continuing educational and residential segregation well into the future, the growing interest in successful all-black schools and neighborhoods is understandable...
...It begins with this practical perception of why integration is important...
...See box...
...A quota must be different at different times, different places, and for different people...
...In the Bogen area on the southwest side of Chicago, for example, a store or factory may have 50 percent black employees...
...Neither whites nor blacks view this prospect as a tragedy, but most whites and many blacks prefer the village the way it is now...
...They monitor all real estate transactions, and they maintain high quality infrastructure, services, and schools...
...the other units went to white residents of an adjacent neighborhood, who had been consciously selected to maintain a better racial balance in the area...
...A survey of 700 residential neighborhoods by Dr...
...Integration has also worked in subsidized housing projects, but not without similar concerns...
...Such criticisms -- for the most part -- raise questions which have proved more valid in appearance then reality...
...The Reagan administration, through a wildly inaccurate and thoroughly unprincipled reading of this decision, has launched a campaign to end quota-based relief in major employment discrimination cases all around the country...
...The historical evidence, of course, is otherwise...
...The builders carefully marketed the co-ops to achieve a good balance between black and white families...
...Consequently, these outspoken leaders place first priority on expanding housing, employment...
...Critics of quotas -- and of managed integration -- may try to take comfort in a number of U.S...
...They have also urged private landlords to maintain racially balanced rental buildings...
...it was made clear that they were temporary and frequently subject to review...
...These phenomena in the area of housing underscore the more general truth that white citizens, by and large, have not voluntarily shared their neighborhoods, schools, jobs, or anything else with black citizens...
...It has divided whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, civil rights activists and constitutional thinkers in ways that are new and often puzzling...
...Any sensitive administrator must recognize that racial balance, to be successful, must be flexible...
...It may be shameful but it is a reality, and the result is resegregation...
...and he then instituted a "color-blind," first-come, first-served policy for admitting tenants to CHA developments...
...Added to these variables is the problem of different perceptions of what constitutes racial balance between blacks and whites: many blacks may feel that a neighborhood with 50 percent black residents is balanced, while whites may feel that 20 percent black residents in the same neighborhood would be too much, beyond the "tipping point" for resegregation...
...Where that managed balance ends, resegregation occurs, conditions deteriorate rapidly, and often many people are worse off than before...
...This position also appeals for support to the Constitution generally, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the Civil Rights Act as outlawing all legal distinctions based on race...
...Where an all-black community is adjacent to an all-white area, it may well be that managed integration on both sides of the color line can be effective sociologically as well as politically...
...The Supreme Court did not feel that racial preferences were per se improper, but they have continued to express dismay over the rigidity of fixed quotas which in Bakke required absolutely and without exception that 16 percent of each medical school class at the University of California at Davis must be minority members...
...It also divides those who would limit racial considerations to affirmative action from those who would support managed integration...
...This position insists each person ought to be judged solely on his or her own merits and not on any extraneous facts, such as membership in a racial group...
...There is another group that swings between affirming "color blind" policies in some circumstances and supporting the use of race-conscious categories or quotas in other circumstances...
...From the point of view of the black community, the understandable anguish of the black parents whose children must remain in segregated schools like Andrew Jackson must be considered alongside of the anguish of black parents whose children may be deprived of the benefit of attendance at relatively integrated schools if white flight is not checked...
...parallel fears haunt "stable '~ integrated areas such as Evanston and Oak Park in the suburbs of Chicago...
...Civil Rights Commission, in the Justice Department's attacks on established affirmative action programs for municipal hiring, in the White House's reconsideration of federal hiring policy...
...It is true that the situation for all-black areas or schools may -- and should -- improve...
...The same kinds of fears have been expressed in Bloomfield, Connecticut, adjacent to Hartford, where a growing pattern of housing integration and the voluntary school integration mentioned above have brought about a well-integrated middle-class community...
...Most blacks may not be so fortunate, but certainly we need a great emphasis on providing better services to all-black neighborhoods and schools...
...In short, the court concurred in Starrett City's deliberate practice of racial balancing...
...From 1970 to 1979, the percentage of black, very low-income families and welfare families had constantly increased, and the neighborhood had experienced rapid deterioration...
...There is no other way...
...That requires some confidence in our political and administrative processes and institutions, however imperfect they may be at times...
...These liberal and minority leaders approve racial considerations for purposes of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions, but they protest such considerations when used for purposes of managed integration...
...These "quotas" were flexible...
...They are long-established and oft-demonstrated facts...
...which result in the deterioration Of the neighbo~oo~ ~: environment...
...II I . . . . . . 101 fllli...
...A case that was a mirror-image of.the Andrew Jackson situation...
...Conservative scholars such as Rodney Smolla manage to find that all integration maintenance plans are per se unconstitutional...
...but was also parallel in some respects, occurred in Chicago, with a similar decision reached by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the same year...
...To combat white flight, the city school board drew up a plan under which no more than 48 percent of the students at either of two south-side high schools could be black...
...M ONE OF THESE considerations completely eliminates the objections mentioned earlier...
...In spite of the racial segregation that existed in the city generally at that time, the CHA successfully integrated a number of housing developments, particularly the "temporary" veterans' housing projects built after the war...
...In the case of Cabrini, it seriously limited the development of the near-north side of Chicago on an interracial basis...
...The criteria to determine whe~tex an ares: has reached or is reaching this point are (1)the gtos~ number of minority families...
...In this camp, for instance, one finds the lawyers from the NAACP and other civil rights groups that challenged the policies at Starrett City...
...When completed, only a third of the former area residents who applied were given apartments...
...Many all-black urban schools, without any fanfare, have become (or were in the past) superior facilities thanks to dedicated faculty and active parents' groups...
...A large portion of the support for "color blind" policies, for example, comes from people who are neither beset by constitutional scruples nor worded about promoting equal protection under the laws but who are simply interested in preventing blacks from moving in across the street, sending their children to previously all-white schools, or taking jobs once reserved exclusively for whites...
...v. Beer cases...
...One of the clearest decisions evidencing court recognition of the need for racial balance in housing was King v. Harris, a 1979 New York case over a low-income housing project called Tenhill, which HUD had recommended for an area in Staten Island...
...The debate today involves more than racial prejudice, although that remains an important factor...
...I F INTEGRATION were not even a realistic possibility, as some discouraged black leaders have come to believe, then the minority families kept out of neighborhoods or housing developments in the name of managed integration would be, in effect, casualties in a futile war...
...But one does so to increase minority representation, the other to restrain it...
...In social scientists' jargon, this phenomenon *is referred to as "white flight" from a housing project (or neighborhood, or school system) after a "tipping point" has been reached...
...Richard Obermann of the Cleveland Heights Community Congress found seventy-four areas -- more than 10 percent -- containing white and black families, where at least 5 percent of the 9 population was black...
...What is more, college admissions, job placements, and even housing preferments have long been made on grounds other than individual merit or first come, first served when larger social purposes were at stake...
...It also boasts a reputation as a stable, pleasant community, well-managed and racially integrated...
...That achievement, its developers say, is in large part owed J.S.FUERST i$ a professor of social welfai'e policy at the School of Social Work at Loyola University of Chicago...
...2) the quality of~n~:'i...
...They are joined by a number of black activists who havre concluded that racial integration is neither achievable nor particularly desirable...
...In one Chicago neighborhood, for example, the maximum minority residency that will remain stable maybe only 5 to 10 percent...
...They conduct tough housing inspections, and require certification of every vacant apartment so that housing quality does not deteriorate...
...Not so a growing number of black conservatives, such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and others...
...a school may have 20 percent black students...
...Take the particularly tragic example of Rochdale Village, a Long Island, New York, cooperative housing development...
...Our black friends who said they could not stand the tiff-raft...
...that influx, combined with tensions aroused by a long and bitter schoolteachers' strike, eventually led to a mass exodus of white families and a deterioration of the model Rochdale cooperative...
...We think that without quotas the schools would have become segregated...
...Consider the case of Starrett City...
...to counterbalance other forces, for example, that have effectively barred blacks from jobs or opportunities for higher education 9 ey were otherwise qualified for...
...of the capacities of local officials and housing managers to make generally sound -- not necessarily perfect -- decisions...
...third, that we have the capacity, as communities and administrators, to make prudent, flexible judgments...
...But Elizabeth Wood, whose policies were considered problack, was replaced in 1955 with General William Kean...
...There is a very strong case for managed integration...
...Similar events occurred in the Chicago suburb of Harvey, Illinois, which had been successfully integrated for generations...
...Commonweal: 76urban setting...
...A survey showed that when asked what they would do if a substantial number of additional black families were permitted to move into Starrett City, 40 percent of the present black tenants replied that they would move out...
...The area's residents believed that the neighborhood was racially balanced, but that any further increase in the number of low-income families (most likely to be blacks) in public housing projects would create an intolerable situation for both black and white residents...
...The neighborhood in which Tenhill was to be built was already filled with a large number of low-income public housing units and a large black population...
...Central to the success of the plan were good local schools with equally good racial balance, and at first the schools were in fact very good...
...Period...
...and University City, near St...
...ROY PETFY is a civil rights lawyer working for a non-profit public interest agency, in Chicago...
...This area has managed to maintain for some years a population that is 45 percent white, 25 to 30 percent black, with the balance Hispanic and other races, a~ad to do so with no concentration of minorities in any one block or area...
...The "pure" and "color-blind" view of Bickel and others may be persuasive in theory, they would argue, but the sheltered confines of Yale's Law School are not exactly a good vantage point from which to observe reality...
...School integration cases provide equally good support for the concept of managed integration...
...and after close scrutiny of each factual setting, the federal courts have, over the past decade or more, generally upheld quota-based integration maintenance plans...
...Obviously flexibility implies that someone enjoys a latitude of judgment...
...Such an outcome, furthermore, was against the wishes of the current black residents...
...A great many children from adjacent black neighborhoods began attending the Rochdale Village schools...
...To meet that goal, the court concluded, the city housing authority had broad discretion to use whatever tools were necessary...
...The authority is obligated to take affitmalivc action tO.~ promote racial integration even though this rrmyl in some instances not operate for the advantage of ~nwhite per, ~. sons...
...Eventually, however, the school district insisted on redrawing school attendance boundaries in order to relieve pressure on other neighboring schools with concentrations of black and economically underprivileged children...
...Again and again successful integration must withstand the threats of white flight and consequent resegregation...
...at least four of these once lily-white suburbs have between 5 to 20 percent black residents...
...Flexibility may also be required in deciding which areas should be integrated by design and which methods should be employed...
...Where a community is presently all-black, it probably should remain so in most cases, with extensive improvements in services and facilities if necessary...
...Some black activists ask why they, of all people, should be expected to shoulder any share of the burdens of integration...
...But the question of rigidity is, in a sense, a straw man...
...Judge Gurfein of the appellate court argued, "'The plan is intended to preserve integration in as many schools as possible even though it prevents certain black children from attending schools of their choice...
...The critics' point is well taken...
...The legal challenge to Starrett City's policy was full of ironies...
...but in fact the Court, up to now, has in every instance except one voted against rigid quotas as distinguished from quotas in general...
...Often, such leaders suspect that efforts at managed integration are in fact racist in origin, intended to dilute the power that could arise from black concentrations of population...
...About two-thirds of its tenants are white, one-fifth are black, and the remainder are Hispanic or Oriental...
...Both affirmative action and managed integration may involve, at times, the use of quotas in the name of integration...
...The phenomenon may not be common but it is not rare, either...
...but a housing development may be able to have no more than 5 to 10 percent black residents, at present, before an exodus of whites would begin...
...The Public Interest, Spring 1985...
...The court held, as in Shannon, that racial balance was an important criterion to consider, though not the only one...
...But the case for managed integration also rests on a recognition of how limited our options are...
...A quota should properly function not as a red light, but as a yellow light...
...Those for whom racial equality was demanded are to be more equal than others...
...1784 v. Stotts...
...Within a decade the CHA projects became completely segregated...
...But the debate is taking place at the local level as well, in battles being waged in neighborhoods, schools, colleges, and workplaces throughout the country...
...For the purposes of[his litigation, the 'tippin$ pg!nt": of a community is that point at which a set of'condifio~ .., ~ has been created that will lead m the rapid [light of ~ existing majority class under cireumstames of instabili...
...Another portion comes from archconservatives who view judicial or legislative intervention in the design or management of any institution as unconscionable meddling...
...For all their distrust of managed integration, however, many such leaders are apt to be firmly supportive of affirmative action and dismissive of Reagan administration pretensions to "color blindness...
...Under the program, suburban schools accepted minority youngsters from Hartford up to somewhere between 3 and 8 percent of their school populations...
...Managed integration involves political decisions, i.e., matters of prudence and policy rather than of fixed "right...
...Almost overnight LeClaire Courts and Frances Cabrini changed from integrated developments in all-white areas to all-black developments, which had a tipple effect on local schools and the surrounding neighborhoods...
...The same thing happened in the Chicago Housing Authority, where one of the authors worked from 1946 to 1954 when the authority was under the far-sighted leadership of Elizabeth Wood...
...Both these school cases underline the difficult issues that can arise when an attempt is made to achieve integration in an "We do not view the ability' to integrate as a one-wa~" " street," the court said in King v. Harris, "limited to introducing nonwhites ~nto a predominantly white area...
...As Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research was pivotal in the original Brown v. Board of Education case, has said, "How can we have a nonracial selection in a society that is so racial...
...For example, in a 500-unit housing development where there was a theoretical tipping point of 30 percent minorities, how would the quota wo~rk if a vacancy occurred after the limit of 150 minority re, dent families had been reached, and an eligible black family applied...
...This realistic down-to-earth view may well be the best place to enter the current debate about the value of integration and whether it is a good idea to maintain it, at least in some circumstances, by the use of deliberate limits on minority presence...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
