Читать реферат по английскому: "To Fight The Good Fight The Battle" Страница 2

(Назад) (Cкачать работу)

Northwest section fought against fundamentalists. Leaders backed by the NAACP and local black churches regularly protested school board policies in the newspapers and at school board meetings.7At the opposite end of the spectrum and on the opposite side of the district rested solidly conservative to extremely conservative communities: East Altadena, Sierra Madre and Hastings Ranch. All three of these neighborhoods were entirely made up of white middle-class residents. Since Pasadena had no significant white working-class population, the residents of these areas represented those who had most recently climbed out of the lower middle-class and the working-class. Compared to the older sections of Pasadena, where upper- and upper- middle class families had resided since the early twentieth century, these sections were made up of relative newcomers to the area. Because many of these residents had the most to lose they vehemently opposed busing and school desegregation. The fears of these Pasadenans probably stemmed from the fact that they did not have the option of sending their children to private schools or becoming part of the “white flight” 8 that surrounded them. Many of the white people in these neighborhoods had struggled hard to purchase their homes and they worried that their property values would drop if Pasadena became integrated, and so they felt trapped. As the newly arrived middle-class perhaps they also supported racially discriminatory policies simply because part of their sense of status rested upon a feeling of racial superiority. 9 The racism running throughout these neighborhoods allowed them to be manipulated by school board candidates using “anti-busing” and other racially charged campaign slogans.Because these racially segregated communities were the most predictable in their voting patterns, it was the other areas of Pasadena that school board elections and news analysts tended to target: Linda Vista, San Rafael, and southern portions of the city. These neighborhoods provided the swing votes in local elections. During the 1970s these neighborhoods in Pasadena became susceptible to the racist propaganda of the fundamentalists. In the 1971, 1973 and 1975 elections, the majority of white precincts supported fundamentalist candidates. 10 And it is these voters who moved the ideological make-up of the board solidly to the right.Moderates fell prey to the rallying cry of “stop forced busing” trumpeted in Pasadena in the 1960s and 1970s. Busing, they believed, would remove their children from the neighborhoods and put them at risk by sending them into dangerous neighborhoods in the predominantly African American sections of the city. Desegregating the schools would destroy the quality of their children’s education. So, maintaining the quality of Pasadena’s public education for their children was one of their primary concerns. However, they also demanded that rising taxes be stopped. This group consistently voted against local bond measures for the schools out of a fear that it would cause a tax increase. Often times these two goals conflicted. By stopping forced busing they claimed that the district would save millions of dollars a year, thus fulfilling both of their concerns by insuring the quality of the schools and avoiding a tax hike.A diverse group of Pasadenans made up this moderate camp. Many of them were parents of school age children, lots of whom would be part of the white flight when integration became the goal of the school board. These families, if they could afford to, left Pasadena for the surrounding communities of La Canada and San Marino or they sent their children to one of the areas many private institutions. A large number of Pasadenans fell into this group and therefore they were the people who both progressives and fundamentalists tried to bring into their camps throughout the post-Brown v. Board of Education era.Fundamentalists and progressives were not new to the Pasadena school district. For decades public school politics in Pasadena had been suffering from a “yo-yo” effect. Each time progressives gained control they would throw out fundamentalist programs and policies. And each time fundamentalists gained control they would do the same to progressive policies.11 However, as the threat of forced integration grew over the decade preceding the 1970s so did the power of fundamentalists.The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had very little direct impact upon Pasadena because the African American population was relatively small. However, the population began to increase steadily in the 1960s and 1970s and the implications of Brown took on new proportions for Pasadenans. By the early 1960s, major desegregation decisions began placing the burden of integration upon local school boards. Nonetheless, the board in Pasadena continued to ignore the issue of desegregation.12In lieu of making substantial progress towards desegregation, the school district poured millions of dollars in aid into compensatory education programs in predominantly black schools. Through these programs they hoped to appease state and federal agencies. Continually throughout the 1960s educationally conservative board members attempted to skirt visible integration within the schools. Aside from compensatory educational programs, in 1964 the school board announced “Plan IV” which allowed a small number of children from the seven “most segregated” schools to transfer to certain “receiving schools,” provided that they could find their own transportation. Rather than desegregating the schools, “Plan IV” increased segregation in the district. Only 13.1% of students from the “most segregated” schools were white, but 31.1% of the students transferred to the “receiving schools” were white. Also, studies found that those with higher income levels were the ones who left the predominantly black schools.13 We seem to have a typical story of racist