Harris/Solberg vs. MMSD: 25 years later

Landmark Madison desegregation case revisited, by A. David Dahmer

Twenty five years ago this week, there was a landmark decision where the people of Madison stood up for themselves and fought against the creation and maintenance of segregation resulting directly from school boundary changes.

It was an attempt to abandon the central city and the south side in favor of newer, developing peripheral areas. The process would have done serious damage to Madison’s Black population.
But two people wouldn't let it happen.
Sandy Solberg, on behalf of two neighborhood centers in Central and South Madison, and Richard Harris, who then was an administrator at Madison Area Technical College and a member of the district's Lincoln-Franklin Task Force, were instrumental in fighting a fight that eventually found that the Madison School Board's 1979 decision to close schools and redraw attendance boundaries discriminated against minority students and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 Sandra Solberg in 1983
"It was a landmark case, and I shutter to think what would have happened without it," Harris says. "The more I think about it now, the more I think about what a horrendous mistake it would have been. This would have been a vast wasteland as far as educational institutions and if you don't have educational institutions, you won't have a neighborhood. They are the cornerstones."
After a long battle, the federal agency concluded the school district considered students' race, color, or national origin in deciding to close Longfellow Elementary School, and to convert Lincoln Middle School to an elementary school, and that it was racially discriminatory and violated civil right laws. 
 "We determined a factual conclusion could be made that the board knowingly created and perpetuated conditions of racial-ethnic isolation in Lincoln and Franklin elementary schools and that those conditions continue to exist," the official report stated.
Harris, who is now the president of the Genesis Development Corp. on Madison's south side, gives a great deal of credit to Solberg.
 "She really got the ball moving, she kept on it." Harris remembers. "It started when Sandy called me and said,"Are you aware of what's going on in the Madison public schools?"
Solberg told Harris of her realtor friend who received a note from her supervisor not to sell homes to people in the Brams Addition area, but instead direct them to the west side. "Because they were going to be closing the schools in the central and south area — Longfellow Elementary, Lincoln Middle School and Franklin Elementary," Harris said.
Solberg, who recently moved to Maine and chatted with The Madison Times over the phone, had moved into a place on the  corner of Vilas and Mills and noticed fairly quickly what bad shape Longfellow School was in. "At that time, Madison schools were really considered to be top-flight schools with top-flight education," she remembers. "The building was very rundown and crumbly and the library was poor and when I started asking questions, I was told that 'this is the way it is before they close us.' But nobody knew of this closure."
But Solberg started to investigate. And the more she asked questions, the more she found out what was really going on. In the '70s, there was a very rapid expansion in Madison and a lot of building and development out by the WestTowne area. "Developers wanted a neighborhood school because that sold family homes," Solberg says. "People who had built expensive houses out there were rather angry that a new school hadn't been built yet. So, there was a lot of pressure on the school administration to build these schools."
Unfortunately, schools can't just be added endlessly, and Madison, according to Solberg, was going through a declining enrollment. "What the district wanted to do was close the old neighborhood schools and take the money and build out away from the city," Solberg says. "Certain things were in motion where certain schools could never get building repairs and could never get anything in infrastructure."
"They had let Longfellow deteriorate so badly that the fire department cited it for very serious offenses," Solberg adds.
Harris notes that they didn't have the pupil enrollment numbers to justify it. "But they wanted to do it anyways and they just said, 'Well, we'll bus these Black children out to the far west side area.'"
After the closing of these schools South Madison residents no longer felt they had any neighborhood schools and there was a definite racial portion to this tale. And the people fought back.
"The Black community really came together in support," Harris says. "There were three major Black churches — Mount Zion Baptist, Second Baptist, and St. Paul A.M.E. — and the congregations from those three churches supported us. They would attend meetings.
“The community was resilient. They couldn't find one Black person to pooh-pooh our efforts at the time, whereas now they would.
"It gave us a chance to say, 'Look. We're not going to take this,'" Harris adds. "We were the first group to do this, because they used to close public schools in a heartbeat, but we stopped them dead in their tracks. It was one of the first times where a group of residents said ‘no,’ and it was extremely important because it really enhanced the confidence of the Black community advocating for themselves.
"We asked for the plans and we finally got them, and they were going to close these schools and have a referendum a year or two later to construct these new westside schools," Harris remembers. "They had indicated that they had talked to a large segment of the Black leaders and had gotten their approval."
Harris started to call Black community leaders and they knew nothing about this.
"Come to find out, they didn't talk to anybody…. Maybe one or two people," Harris says. "The Black community was small but much more vocal and active back then they are now."
And there were no shortage of funny theories used to justify the closures at the time.
"Some school officials said that Black children could learn best from osmosis — in other words just take them out of the area and put them by Whites and it will be a transformation from one brain to the next," Harris laughs.
Solberg said that a key part of the fight was getting help from people in Milwaukee who had gone through similar experiences.
"Several people in Milwaukee coached us — "This is what you need to look for; this is where the problems are at" because Milwaukee had similar situations," she says. "But Milwaukee's problems were much greater and really quite irreversible. But ours were reversible.
Harris and Solberg made sure of that. After the closing of these schools South Madison residents no longer felt they had any neighborhood schools. A complaint was filed in December 1979 by the Board of Directors of the South Madison Neighborhood Center and Neighborhood House with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the US Department of Education. The complaint requested an investigation into District policies and procedures relating to the status of the other Lincoln Cluster Schools. The new boundaries created after the two schools closed created a significant racial imbalance in the affected schools "further segregating schools by racial, social, cultural and economic factors."
 They went down to the city planning department to receive numbers about student enrollment and they worked with an OCR attorney Jim Frye in Chicago. "He told us that it would be a tough nut to crack and that he would need the Black community's support us," Harris says. "We sent a letter to the office of Civil Rights and they moved much faster than we thought."
Further research backed up what Solberg and Harris knew was happening. "Frye came and said, 'I think you have a case,'" Harris remembers.  "'This district gets an inordinate amount of federal dollars, and we can stop it right there.'”
In 1981, they received a report saying that this was indeed racial discrimination.  "And in January of 1983 we received a phone call from Chicago telling us that they were going to rule in our favor," Dr. Harris says, "and they're going to have to develop a plan that will keep the schools open permanently.
In June of 1983 the OCR issued its findings of its investigation to MMSD. Initially, the OCR determined the District violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by "creating and maintaining racially/ethnically identifiable and isolated elementary schools in south-central Madison through student assignment decisions made, in part on the basis of the race, color, or national origin of students."
"Some of the members of the board were just furious with us," Harris remembers. "The White community wasn't all that excited either. There were only two other cases like this in Wisconsin and they both were in Milwaukee. So it didn't make the people of Madison happy to be labeled as a racist community."
"Many White community leaders were extremely abusive… they said, 'You know, Dr. Harris, this really makes us look bad," Harris remembers. "But Sandy and I reminded them that we didn't initiate this action, the Board of Education did.
"We were actually surprised that it was mentioned in the press at all, but the next day it was on the front page of both papers." Harris adds." They did a very good story in both papers and they were very accurate in their coverage of it. I have to give them credit for that."
A plan agreed upon by the school board and OCR corrected the imbalances at Franklin and Lincoln elementary schools and brought the district into compliance with the law.
"To their credit, they acted quickly," Harris said "The Board of Education accepted the ruling and made the correct changes."
The impact of that decision can still be felt 25 years later.
"The impact was pronounced and even in the last couple of years I've enjoyed reading the paper because many of the concepts and the needs that we pointed out in our group have become commonplace in the talk of Madison by all of the papers — the idea that if you want to keep a healthy central city, you keep healthy schools in it." Solberg says.
"The idea that you want to keep all school strong so that no parent fears that their child will go to a school that has an abnormally large population of children who need extra educational facilities. The idea that if you are going to bus children, you should bus them equally — the poorest children shouldn't be doing all the bussing because going to school a distance away from the child's residence is a burden on the poor family.
"It's those concepts that we raised 25 years ago where we said 'This is inherently unfair,' that have been pretty much been absorbed by the community today," Solberg adds.
The OCR ruling eventually helped in securing a new middle school for the area — James C. Wright Middle School.
"We were very satisfied with the OCR ruling and the MMSD Board of Education response," Harris says. "Instead of losing two elementary schools [Franklin and Lincoln], we retained them and also received another middle school [Wright].
The whole ordeal was very tiresome and arduous for Harris and his family. "I am always asked, 'Dr. Harris: Would you do it again?' And I always say that I don't know. That was a tremendously stressful period for me and my family. I just don't know if I'd go through that again."
Still, the 25th anniversary of this landmark Madison case has caused Harris to reminisce about a time when the Madison Black community would strongly group together and rally against an obvious wrong.
"The Black community in Madison today is not as strong as it was then," Harris says. "We have become complacent and bourgeoisie. We've forgotten the hard civil rights battles against racism and discrimination that we've fought here in Madison."