John Walker has a point, but not a case in his latest injection of the Little Rock public schools into the all-too-familiar federal courtroom.
The civil-rights icon's point is one to which I was sensitized a couple of decades ago.
It happened at one of those Our Town retreats by which whites and blacks from Little Rock gathered at DeGray Lodge for a couple of days to ponder their racial divide.
In one session a black man expressed his outrage that he'd heard a white man describe the Little Rock schools as "more than half-black and getting worse."
Get that? Black equals bad. Blacker equals worse.
Most likely the man who said it hadn't grasped the plantation-worthy racism of it. Most likely many white people, and I include myself, would have to admit, if honest, that they've harbored versions of the same thought--that it's bad in itself for public schools in Little Rock that white people have fled to leave mostly black people, and that any hope of restoring good public education locally is to get the white people back.
Think about that, and about how Walker and his clients ought to resent it: White people choose to flee the public schools after black kids win the legal right to attend. Then the white business community laments that the mostly black public schools are woefully substandard. It contends that our only hope of changing that is to chase the fleeing white folks to build new public schools for them in their safe havens.
Last week Walker filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of both identified and unidentified plaintiffs, alleging that the recent state government takeover of the Little Rock schools essentially was 1957 extended.
His pleading describes white people in Little Rock as looking up one day to see the public schools dominated both in attendance and governance by the black people who'd stayed, and decreeing that such a circumstance simply could not stand.
His suit says the state takeover should be voided because it's racially discriminatory. He means that it restores the old racist and state-centric sense of order in the face of the newly court-granted unitary status.
Otherwise, you see, unitary status would leave the Little Rock schools--for the first time in decades, really--to their own natural and independent local devices.
Walker's point is a compelling one. He is entitled by a lifetime's work--and by the validity of the point itself--to make it. His clients are entitled to claim it. Any parties in the community who accept and espouse it are fully entitled to share it.
It fails only as a relevant allegation in the context of this particular lawsuit over this particular action.
The suit assails plans to build schools in western Little Rock by citing woefully run-down existing school facilities.
But those inferior facilities exist in conditions allowed not by the state takeover, but by the former local school board and administration that Walker would reinstate.
Building new schools in west Little Rock is a matter merely of adapting the local public school district to the residential pattern of the kids it's supposed to serve.
The suit sees as sinister that only six schools actually were failing academically, but that the state took over the entire district. That ignores the powerful logic that you can't effectively run individual schools without wresting control of their overseeing authority.
The suit also alleges a scheme in which business leaders in Little Rock, and so-called education reformers such as the Walton Family Foundation, exploited the failure of these six schools to lobby the state to take over the entire district so that they could push their charter-school and school-choice agenda.
It alleges that the former and discredited superintendent, Dexter Suggs, who--remember--was first permitted to stay under the state takeover, had been prevailed upon by these forces--and had agreed--to allow the six failed schools to be made into charter schools with the district handling only transportation and cafeteria operations.
That allegation, even if so, doesn't support a claim of racial discrimination. It simply reveals a difference of opinion about how best to improve six failing schools.
It is hardly racist to believe black students in a failing school would be better served if the failing schools were converted to charter schools.
Presuming as Walker does to draw a straight line from Orval Faubus to Baker Kurrus--from the court-defying segregationist governor of 1957 to the heroically hardworking superintendent trying to save Little Rock's public schools today--is an overreach, perhaps even an outrage.
Again, to be clear: That's not to say those presuming to draw that straight line don't make a strong point along the way.
Race is the profoundly defining problem in Little Rock. But it just so happens not to be the defining issue in this state takeover.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/11/2015