6 | F RIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
world
When she saw the news images of angry
white mobs pelting school buses with
rocks and bottles, Sherlonda Lewis was
glad that she was not among the black
students being bused to a school in a
white neighborhood.
It was 1975, and Louisville, Ky., had
begun a court-ordered effort to inte-
grate its public schools by busing stu-
dents out of their racially segregated
communities. As a high school senior
that year, Ms. Lewis was exempt from
being bused from her predominantly
black neighborhood of Smoketown in
central Louisville. Having seen the vio-
lent resistance, she considered herself
lucky.
“I didn’t think it would last,” Ms. Lew-
is, 60, said of the busing plan.
Little did she know, that same integra-
tion program would go on to be widely
embraced by members of the communi-
ty, educating three generations of her
family.
While some desegregation plans fal-
tered in the face of white resistance,
Louisville’s has proved remarkably re-
silient. It has survived riots and court
rulings, skeptical superintendents and
conservative lawmakers, making Jef-
ferson County Public Schools, which in-
cludes Louisville, one of the most ra-
cially integrated districts in the United
States.
But if Louisville is proof that busing
can work when there is the political will
to have an integrated school system, its
community is now grappling with what
happens when that political will starts to
dry up.
These tensions — coming at a time
when the nation is once again battling
over the effectiveness of school integra-
tion — are the latest development in a
series of changes that, in recent dec-
ades, have steadily chipped away at
Louisville’s original integration plan.
A recent survey commissioned by the
district showed dwindling support for
the plan and a decreased interest in di-
versity among parents. Struggling
schools and a yawning achievement gap
between black and white students are
drawing more attention these days than
the benefits of maintaining racially inte-
grated classrooms.
As the district’s schools slowly be-
come more segregated, officials are con-
sidering more changes that will almost
certainly increase segregation.
The state’s Department of Education
proposed taking over the district last
year after finding myriad problems, in-
cluding financial mismanagement and
flaws in the desegregation program,
known as the student assignment plan.
State officials agreed to give district
leaders until next year to make changes.
“Right now, we’re doing our best to
fight back Jim Crow and Jane Crow Jr.,”
said Delquan Dorsey, Ms. Lewis’s son,
who works as the district’s community
engagement coordinator. “We know
separate but equal doesn’t work.”
There are dozens of school districtsacross the country like Louisville that
continue to follow desegregation plans,
whether court ordered or not, with sup-
porters often pointing to research that
suggests the black-white achievement
gap narrows where integration is fully
accepted. And yet opposition has never
been very far behind.
In the past two decades, dozens of af-
fluent, mostly white communities have
tried to secede from diverse school dis-
tricts to form their own. A conservativelaw firm filed a lawsuit last year to chal-
lenge a decades-old system that helped
desegregate public schools in Hartford.
A current lawsuit in Minnesota argues
that the state’s school system is uncon-
stitutionally segregated.
Louisville’s integration program has
existed since the 1975 court order
merged city schools with suburban
ones.
The year before, a similar plan in De-
troit was struck down by the UnitedStates Supreme Court. Both Louisville
and Detroit were about 20 percent black
and equally racially segregated at the
time, according to a report by Myron Or-
field Jr., the director of the Institute on
Metropolitan Opportunity at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota. But in the decades
that followed, Detroit’s schools became
overwhelmingly black and underper-
forming as white residents fled for sub-
urban enclaves.
Louisville is now part of a countywide
school system of roughly 100,000 stu-
dents that is 42 percent white, 37 per-
cent black and 12 percent Hispanic.
About half of its black students, and two-
thirds of all students, attend integrated
schools, according to Will Stancil, a re-
search fellow at the institute who de-
fined integrated as having a population
between 20 percent and 60 percent non-
white.
By 2011, black students in Louisville
were twice as likely to score “proficient”
on math and reading tests as those in
Detroit, Mr. Orfield found.
Janet Pinkston, who is white, was
bused to duPont Manual High School,
which performed better academically
than the school she otherwise would
have attended. It was her first meaning-
ful exposure to black people. “The peo-
ple who went through it, like I did, saw
that it has some value,” said Ms.
Pinkston, 57, a freelance writer. “They
saw that it has a halo effect. It does
change your life.”
Critics say an integrated learning en-vironment is not enough, especially
when black students continue to lag be-
hind their white peers and often shoul-
der a greater burden in desegregation,
with longer bus rides.
Ricky Owens was about 9 when bus-
ing started. He ended up at a high school
several miles from his home, where he
said he suffered academically because
he often felt isolated as the lone black
student in his honors classes.“In high school, I laid my head down
and didn’t do any work,” he said. “I
never felt comfortable. I never felt like I
wanted to be there.”
Decades later, his daughter, Jade, also
found herself as one of the few black stu-
dents in honors classes at her high
school in Jefferson County. While the ex-
perience presented challenges, she said
it taught her how to fight bigotry and to
empathize with black students from dif-
ferent socioeconomic backgrounds.
“I think Louisville, compared to a lot
of other places in Kentucky, is just more
open-minded,” said Ms. Owens, 20.
“Over all, we’re a diverse city, and we
are proud of that.”
Black residents in Louisville have
complained over the years that schoolsin their communities have received in-
adequate investment. In some cases,
black students are forced to go to far-
away schools because they fail to win
slots in coveted, nearby magnet schools.
In the late 1990s, several black fam-
ilies sued the district to allow their chil-
dren to go to a predominantly black high
school in their neighborhood. That led a
federal judge to lift the desegregation
order in 2000.
In 2007, the plan faced another major
setback after the United States Su-
preme Court officially struck it down in
response to a lawsuit by a white parent.
The court ruled that race could not be
the sole factor in assigning students to
schools. So district officials created a
new system that used a family’s eco-
nomic status, education and race to as-
sign students, and it maintained a varie-
ty of magnet school options.
District officials are now considering
additional changes that would allow
more black students to attend schools
closer to home — a move that many ar-
gue would further segregation.
“I believe the goal of wanting to
achieve diversity and have rich, diverse
experiences for kids is a great goal,” said
Wayne D. Lewis Jr., the Kentucky com-
missioner of education who recom-
mended the state takeover. “I think
there needs to be much greater atten-
tion to ensuring that low-income kids
and kids of color have access to great ed-
ucational experience.”
Dr. Lewis’s opponents say that the
achievement gap would be much larger
had Louisville area schools not fought to
maintain an integrated system.
In the recent survey, only half of the
parents said that they believed enroll-
ment guidelines should ensure that stu-
dents learn with classmates of different
races and backgrounds, down from 89
percent in a different 2011 survey that
posed a similar question.
Still, integration remains a priority for
district officials and parents who have
been willing to alter the program over
the years but have refused to scrap it. In
2012, a slate of school board candidates
ran on ending the plan and going to a
system of neighborhood schools. They
all lost to candidates who vowed to keep
the student assignment plan in place.
Mr. Dorsey, the district’s community
engagement coordinator, said he did not
realize he was poor until he started tak-
ing a bus to Atherton High School in- His mother, Ms. Lewis, was scared
for his safety, being bused to a predomi-
nantly white area in the East End.
There, Mr. Dorsey said, someone
called him a racial slur for the first time.
There were also racially charged scuf-
fles at the school, about 20 minutes from
Mr. Dorsey’s public housing complex in
Smoketown.
When his son, D.J. Dorsey, started in
the district more than a decade ago, Mr.
Dorsey worried not about safety, but
whether his son would be treated fairly
in the classroom.
D.J. is now entering his senior year at
duPont Manual, one of the state’s top-
performing schools. Mr. Dorsey, who
said he had no white friends growing up,
has marveled at his son’s relationships
across racial lines.
“When people of various back-
grounds are culturally aware of others
and have a willingness to learn, then we
can make education work,” Mr. Dorsey
said. “That is education.”
Busing worked. But segregation is re-emerging.
LOUISVILLE, KY.Survey in a Kentucky city
shows a reversal as parents
lose interest in diversityBY JOHN ELIGONLouisville Male High School, part of the Jefferson County Public Schools system. Officials are considering allowing more black students to attend schools closer to home.MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESDemonstrators in Louisville, Ky., in 1975 against a court-ordered effort to integrate its
public schools by busing students out of their racially segregated communities.MARIETTE PATHY ALLEN/GETTY IMAGES“Right now, we’re doing our
best to fight back Jim Crow
and Jane Crow Jr. We know
separate but equal doesn’t work.”To the strains of the hymn “If We Just
Talk of Thoughts and Prayers,” the
largest Presbyterian denomination in
the United States ordained the Rev.
Deanna Hollas as its first minister of
gun violence prevention last month.
Ms. Hollas is believed to be the first
person in the country to be given a
national ecclesiastical role of this kind.
And the choice of the hymn was a
deliberate underlining of what she sees
as a desperate need: to do more than
react to the latest mass shooting with
an offer of benedictions. That, she said,
isn’t sufficient in a nation where 40,
people are killed by guns each year.
“The saying ‘thoughts and prayers’
has been co-opted by the gun lobby to
keep the church from taking action so
they can increase their profits,” Ms.
Hollas, who was installed in her new
role by the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.) last month, said in a recent
interview. “While all that we do as
Christians should be rooted in worship
and prayer, it should not stay there. It
is like breathing — worship and prayer
is the in-breath, and action is the out-
breath.”
A Texas native who describes herself
as no stranger to guns Ms. Hollas, 52,
said she was committed to ensuring
that Americans from all sides of the
gun debate stop talking past one an-
other.
From her place of ministry, Retreat
House Spirituality Center in Rich-
ardson, Tex., Ms. Hollas will oversee
about 800 supporters of gun violence
prevention in all 50 states.
We asked her about her role, and
what she hoped to accomplish. The
conversation has been edited and
condensed.What is your background? And what
makes you ready for this role?
I grew up in Plainview, Tex., where
guns and hunting are part of the cul-ture. My father owns multiple guns
and property specifically for family
hunting trips. My in-laws live on a
farm in South Texas where shooting
guns would often happen on a weekend
trip. This background is what enables
me to connect to gun owners.
I first went to seminary because I
felt called to the ministry of spiritual
direction, which is a ministry of listen-
ing. I feel this is what is needed most
right now. We have lost our ability to
listen to one another, to our bodies and,
therefore, to God. Violence is the re-
sult. Spiritual practices can heal, repair
and restore us to right relationship and
thus lead us away from violence and
toward peace and love.What exactly will you do in your new
role?
My role is to encourage the church at
every level to become informed and
active in preventing gun violence, to
provide pastoral care for victims and
survivors, and to seek a spiritual re-sponse to resist violence and seek
Christ.
I serve as a resource and an encour-
ager and connector for pastors, elders
and others in the church so they are
empowered to prevent gun violence. I
have the best role, as I spend my days
talking to so many different people all
across the country who are committed
to ending gun violenceDo you expect to face resistance?
I expect resistance because when you
talk about guns, you are tapping into
the part of the brain that protects one’s
identity. Guns and identity are linked
for many people; that is why I have
developed a spiritual practice that
helps us shift our bodies from fight-or-
flight mode and teaches us to welcome
and hold with compassion all the sen-
sations that arise in our bodies. When
we connect with one another on the
level of personal experience, it leads to
empathy. Establishing empathy is key
in peacemaking.Do you feel daunted at all?
The church has always been political
— Jesus was executed by the govern-
ment for speaking against its violence
and against the religious authorities
that aligned themselves with this
unjust system. That is still the role of
the church today: to speak a word of
peace into a world of violence.
I live in Texas, and I became in-
volved in this movement because of
the passing of a law that allowed guns
on college campuses. My daughter was
a student at Texas Tech at the time and
I saw how her friends and roommates
viewed the law as an invitation to
become armed.
Being familiar with guns, I knew
from what they were saying that they
did not have a realistic understanding
of how a gun worked. They basically
assumed that having a gun would turn
them into Jason Bourne, ready to
defeat any bad guy that came their
way, but the reality is having a gun
increases one’s chance of being shot.And while legislation is an important
part of the work, it is not what gets me
up in the morning. I am more inter-
ested in creating the cultural change
that is needed along with legislation.What can other church congregations
do?
There are so many churches that are
doing great things that it is hard to
pick just one. The one that is most on
my heart today is one I am working
with in Texas, St. Barnabas Presbyteri-
an Church in Richardson. It is a con-
gregation that has both far-left liberals
and gun-loving Trump supporters
worshiping together on Sunday morn-
ings.
Starting in September, this congre-
gation will engage in a five-week study.
Each week’s lesson will be led by a
different member of the congregation
so that a variety of folks will feel com-
fortable participating, and to ensure
that no one person’s individual agenda
dominates the discussion.When we can move beyond the
rhetoric, we find that no Christian is a
proponent of gun violence. Churches
have been afraid to talk about gun
violence because they are worried it
will cause people to leave, but we are
called to shine light into darkness.
Mainline denominations are in a
unique position to be leaders in bring-
ing conversations about gun violence
out of the shadows, as our congrega-
tions are one of the few places where
people of different political persuasions
still gather together voluntarily.
And I know of no congregation that
is not touched by gun violence. Often,
these folks feel they must grieve in
silence. When people think gun vio-
lence prevention, they think about
legislation, criminal activity, and mass
shootings, but most gun deaths are
suicides.
I also think there is lots to learn
about white Americans’ obsession with
guns and how that is impacting the
violence in communities of color. It is
our responsibility, as a mostly white
church, to be actively engaged in dis-
mantling white supremacy and creat-
ing racial equity.Why do you remain hopeful?
I entered seminary thinking I would
just take two classes and get my diplo-
ma in the art of spiritual direction and
that would be it. But God kept leading
me toward ordained ministry, which
didn’t make much sense as I didn’t feel
called to lead a congregation.
In fact, I was thinking about with-
drawing my candidacy for ordination
when the N.R.A. came to Dallas last
year for their annual convention. I was
blessed to be part of a prayer vigil
hosted by a group of interfaith leaders,
which ran from the beginning of the
convention to the end. It was during
this vigil, on the steps of Dallas City
Hall, that I gained clarity on my call to
speak the word of God into the vio-
lence of the world.Minister to lead a church drive against gun violence
BY ADEEL HASSANLeft, the Rev. Deanna Hollas, the minister of gun violence prevention by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Right, a scene from the N.R.A.’s national convention in 2018.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESРЕЕI grew up in Plainview, Tex., whereI grew up in Plainview, Tex., where
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