#20
View attachment 424090
Summer, 1981
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Headline: Feds Open Local Redlining Lawsuit
Federal prosecutors filed suit today against the city of Lakewood and Cleveland housing development firm Pleasantview Homes for a number of violations of the Fair Housing Act.
Since his appointment, Attorney General Samuel Pierce has ordered the prosecution of 103 cases of so-called redlining, the systematic attempt to exclude minorities from a given neighborhood. Today’s announcement marks case number 104, the third to be issued in Ohio and the first in the Cleveland area. All signs indicate it will be far from the last, as an alliance of liberal Democrats and Republicans in congress give approval to significant budget increases for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
The Justice Department is also aided by recent changes in the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires lenders to make available a large amount of data on their lenders and lending practices. [CONT'D B6]
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Late 1982
Wichita, Kansas
Mary Angles was making a difference. Mary Angles was changing lives for the better. Mary Angles was on the front lines of building a more prosperous, more equitable United States.
Mary Angles was miserable.
The fact that Mary Angles hated her job was a prime example of how personal vantage could color even the most vibrant picture in Picasso blues.
She was a volunteer for the Wichita Unified School District. Her official title was “Integration Ambassador,” but like most of her fellow African American volunteers she had come to think of herself by a much more demeaning term. They called themselves “Floor Models.”
Here’s how Mary Angles spent her days: Every day, Monday to Saturday, she hosted meetings for parents with a school board-approved team, which included two other Floor Models besides Mary and a white man named Jerry Evans (the only one of them getting paid, and termed in the Newspeak of the program a “Facilitator”). The meetings were intimate, usually no more than six parents. They talked for one to two hours a session, and they usually squeezed in three meetings a day.
Their job was to assuage doubts (which of course meant white doubts) about busing and integration. In reality, they were there to put an acceptable face on the black community, which made up about 10% of Wichita’s population. All of the volunteers the Wichita school board used (and there were 24 “Ambassador Teams” operating currently) had to be middle class, well-spoken, pleasant-looking, and patient. They had to make the community look good. They had to make the white parents feel like they were in the driver’s seat; that integration was a decision *they* made, rather than one forced upon them by the Feds; a decision *they* came to, so that they could feel like they were the do-gooders advancing society, worthy of thanks and praise.
It was awful. Being a Floor Model meant ingratiating oneself to a community that barely grasped the concept of racial justice and treating them like they, personally, were doing more for the black community than Martin Luther King ever did.
But damned if it wasn’t working.
In every school district where Margaret Heckler’s Boston-based playbook was being implemented (and there were currently about 500 districts in the program) acceptance of integration was rising dramatically. Enrollment discrepancies were disappearing. Even in the short time the program had been in operation, minority graduation rates were trending up, as were grades in the districts that tracked them. Truancy was down significantly, and there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that extracurricular participation was way up. At the same time, statistics for white students hadn’t gone down at all, despite common fears to the contrary. The expected violence had largely not arrived, aside from a few isolated incidents.
Of course Mary Angles never saw this side of things. From her perspective, the parents came in, angry and mistrustful (if not openly hostile). They left, cowed, smug, and sanctimonious. And a new batch of angry, mistrustful people would be out there waiting in the hall. Another round of personal debasement, of sublimated anger, of principles (hopefully only temporarily) abandoned.
Her entire perspective rarely extended beyond the dreary front lines in this fight against subtle (or not-so-subtle) racism.
And the kicker? The real knock-you-on-your-pants annoying part of the story? Her children didn’t even need busing to attend integrated schools. Her husband was one of the only African Americans in the management team at Boeing, brought in after twenty years in the Air Force. The company had bought their house for them, anticipating problems with realtors and attempting to sidestep any embarrassing incidents. They lived in a very pleasant, mostly white neighborhood with well-performing, mostly white schools a short bike ride away for her kids. Such places came with their own problems (problems she didn’t have much time or strength to think about these days). But she’d made sure everyone within five blocks knew exactly who she and her kids were. She baked 65 fruitcakes at Christmas and gave them out to every neighbor in the subdivision. It didn’t solve everything. But it seemed to keep the worst of the trouble away, and the best thing she could say was that her kids seemed to have found some measure of acceptance, even as she couldn’t help feeling isolated and lonely.
It was all so exhausting. So unfair. So...necessary.
When asked to serve as an Integration Ambassador by her pastor, she’d found herself utterly without the moral strength to resist.
So here she was, advocating on behalf of others, trying to feel good about it, and mostly failing. She only prayed she had the strength to stay committed. She only hoped that if she did her time and made it through, she could look back with pride on the result.