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Nebraska goes back to dividing schools on racial lines

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday April 15, 2006
The Guardian

Fifty years after America abolished segregated schools, the state of Nebraska was yesterday accused of seeking to carve up its largest school district along broadly racial lines: white, African-American and Hispanic.
Under a new measure signed into law by the governor, Dave Heineman, on Thursday night, Omaha's highly regarded public school system would be divided into three racially distinct entities.


North-eastern Omaha would have a mainly African-American school district, south-eastern Omaha would be largely Hispanic, and the relatively wealthy sections in the west of the city would be packaged into a largely white school district. The changes take effect from July 2008.


The division, which was proposed by the only African-American member of the state legislature last week, was adopted at breakneck speed.
Its provisions represent one of the most sweeping challenges to the desegregation of American state schools mandated by the supreme court in 1954. Nebraska's attorney general, Joe Bruning, warned that it could be in violation of the constitution, and would be challenged in the courts.


The measure has been opposed by a powerful coalition of business leaders - including Warren Buffett, the billionaire Omaha-based financier who is the world's second richest man after Bill Gates - as well as civil rights organisations.


"Basically, it is state-sanctioned segregation," said state senator Patrick Bourne who voted against the bill. "This sets race relations back a long way, and we are going to be spending a lot of money on lawyers' fees that we should be spending on our kids."


However, Ernie Chambers, who proposed the division, argued that local schools have been effectively segregated for years and that the stated aim of integration - to give black and white children an equal education in government schools - had been discredited.


"There has always been segregation. There is now, and always will be so rather than go through all this worthless talk that has gone on now for generations about integration, let's talk about getting better schools," he told the Guardian.


He said the system in Omaha discriminated against children in poor, largely African-American neighbourhoods, by denying those schools adequate resources. He said the new law would improve the quality of public schools.


But others are sceptical, noting that state schools are financed by property taxes, which would put schools in poor neighbourhoods at a disadvantage.


"They have opened a Pandora's Box. I don't think they are going to be able to solve this without having a lot of blood on the floor," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. "It's segregation just trimmed around the edges."