A Times Editorial

NAACP withdrawal

The NAACP shouldn't walk away from negotiations over Hillsborough County's school desegregation plan when there are voices it needs to represent.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 19, 2000

The decision by the NAACP to withdraw from negotiations over Hillsborough County's school desegregation plan raises a disturbing question: Who will notice? The local chapter has been silent, uninvolved and strategically bereft for years, even though a federal judge has hinted she is ready to end four decades of court-ordered integration.

The NAACP could not have picked a worse time to send the wrong message. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth A. Kovachevich has charted a short course for Hillsborough to achieve unitary status, which would end court protection of the race-conscious academic programs that have integrated classrooms and boosted scholastic achievement for black and white students alike.

Does the NAACP think it can cut a better deal once the court order goes away? Or has the group deluded itself to believe the no-budge strategy pursued by its legal arm, the Legal Defense Fund, will prevail, thus keeping the sorry state of resegregation, inferior schools and court-ordered busing here to stay?

The strategy and goals are all wrong. By leaving the talks, the NAACP prevents black leaders from shaping Hillsborough's school-choice plan during a time when the district will make substantive decisions on busing, school boundaries and the use of a wide array of desegregation tools, including expansion of high-quality magnet programs. Retreating is a self-defeating route that likely will limit choices for the poorest black families. It rewards district administrators who dragged their feet for years on integration and takes pressure off the elected school board to rebuild older schools in black neighborhoods.

In a letter to superintendent Earl Lennard explaining why the NAACP was withdrawing from talks, president Sam Horton accused the district of "deception" and "obfuscation." He faults the school plan for ignoring race ratios, even though ratios were never a major component of Hillsborough's court order. Even under federal supervision, Hillsborough schools have resegregated. The court has been clear it won't micromanage the county's post-busing plan. But rather than help find ways to blunt resegregation -- a collaborative approach being taken by district and black leaders in Pinellas -- Hillsborough's NAACP is betting against the national trend of lifting court-ordered desegregation plans.

The NAACP has changed America for the better in part by framing desegregation as both moral imperative and good public policy. That change in the national psyche could not have occurred had black leaders stalked off every time leaders like Horton perceived a "general tenor" of disrespect. This isn't 1954. The NAACP has earned a seat at the table it rightly deserves. It should not walk away from the success it started in the courts.

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