Alabama: “Desegregation” = Maintaining Segregation, Sort Of

The old civil rights anthem proclaimed “We Shall Overcome,” and, believe me, no place had more to overcome than Alabama (I grew up there, and know [“for once,” some of you may think] whereof I speak).

Still, “desegregation,” as it has operated under court order in Alabama higher education since the early 1970s, has about as much to do with civil rights and non-discrimination as racial preferences do with non-discriminatory, colorblind equality.

This history is too convoluted even to summarize here. The state’s higher education system itself, completely aside from race, is so non-sensically fragmented that even the best-intentioned courts would have found it difficult to make sense of it. For example, Troy State University, which was a small teachers college in Troy where and when I grew up, has become a colossus, with tentacles across the state (and even overseas). Thus there is a Troy State campus in Montgomery. There is also an Auburn campus in Montgomery (the main Auburn campus is in, not surprisingly, Auburn). And now to throw race into the mix, Alabama State Universiy, a historically and now predominantly black institution, is in Montgmomery.

Under U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy’s various orders, “desegregation” has taken the path of requiring extra state funds to beef up the plant and programs at Alabama State and Alabama A&M, another predominantly black school, and to prevent their geographically neighboring “white” (though now integrated) schools from competing with them in certain academic areas. In other words, “desegregation” means requiring extra state funds to keep black schools viable. In that effort, lawyers for the two schools have just filed motions to prevent Judge Murphy from terminating some of the old remedies he ordered along the road to “desegregation.” (See this article in the Birmingham News for a summary of these recent filings.”

But even this policy is not without its contradictions. For example, lawyers for the two black school have also asked Judge Murphy “to require some of the state’s historically white institutions to boost black faculty and administrator numbers to ‘a critical mass.'” Of course, if Judge Murphy agreed and issued such an order, the University of Alabama and Auburn would in all likelihood begin their attempt to build “a critical mass” of black faculty and administrators by raiding the Alabama State and Alabama A&M. campuses.

Interestingly, Judge Murphy also ordered the state to fund “diversity scholarships” at Alabama State and Alabama A&M. Although the lawyers for those two schools want this program continued, it has produced no small amount of resentment among students denied aid to black school because they are black. But race is not the only, or even primary, source of resentment. It seems the beneficiaries of this court-mandated, state-funded racial discrimination were — you guessed it — not as qualified as those not preferred. As David Tell of the Center of Individual Rights wrote back in 1999:

Alabama’s system of public higher education has operated under a court-supervised, affirmative-action-saturated “desegregation” mandate since 1972. In 1995, U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy approved a plan whereby Alabama State University, in particular, would expand opportunity for statistically underrepresented students. Under ASU’s subsequent “Diversity Scholarship Program,” funded in part by an annual $1 million set-aside from the state legislature, applicants with just the right amount of melanin get up to 14 semesters of free tuition, room, board, and textbooks-plus life and health insurance and $900 a year in walking-around money.

The university’s administration sees a smashing success in the early results of this scheme: Enrollment of the underrepresented students has grown to 10 percent from less than 3 percent. So the school is aggressively expanding the new financial aid package, which already absorbs 40 percent of ASU’s academic grant budget. To qualify for a Diversity Scholarship, you now needn’t even come from a high school in Alabama, the jurisdiction whose discriminatory “vestiges” the program pretends to be redressing.

In fact, you needn’t have graduated from high school at all; a General Education Development certificate-and C-minus grades once you arrive-will do just fine. Which is what’s made ASU’s diversity scholars the object of some resentment among other students. “It’s not that they’re minority students,” the editor of the school newspaper told the Wall Street Journal in December 1997. “It’s that they’re not competitive.” Not competitive, that is, with the likes of 39-year-old Ph.D. candidate Jessie Tompkins, a married father of four who works part time but still manages to maintain a 3.5 grade point average. This gentleman lost his own modest ASU scholarship in 1995 because the school needed that money for people with another skin color.

Jessie Tompkins, incidentally, is black. Diversity Scholarships at ASU, a traditionally black institution, are restricted to “white students” only….

Segregation was both legally and morally offensive, but if you granted the assumptions on which it was based it at least made a certain amount of sense. “Desegregation,” as implemented in Alabama and elsewhere, is also often also legally and morally offensive, but it doesn’t make any sense.