The New Yorker Radio Hour - Can We Finally End School Segregation?

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

By many accounts, American schools are as segregated today as they were in the nineteen-sixties, in the years after Brown v. Board of Education. WNYC’s podcast “The United States of Anxiety” chronicled the efforts of one small school district, Sausalito Marin City Schools, in California, to desegregate. Fifty years after parents and educators there first attempted integration, the state’s attorney general found that the district “knowingly and intentionally” maintained a segregated system, violating the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. The district’s older public school, which served mostly Black and Latino students, suffered neglect; meanwhile, a new charter school, though racially diverse, enrolled virtually all the white children in the district. The reporter Marianne McCune explored how one community overcame decades of distrust to finally integrate. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Here's a sobering fact. By many accounts, schools in America are as segregated now as they were in the 1960s in the years just after separate but equal was declared unconstitutional. Now, that's not true of every school, in every state, of course, but in cities and towns across the country, white students and black and Brown students are very commonly educated in entirely different worlds, with different resources and very different outcomes. Here in New York City, which exudes pride in its diversity and in its political liberalism, schools are among the most segregated in the nation. In fact, in a lot of places,

schools are more segregated now than 20 or 30 years ago. How did this happen? And what would it take finally to be together and equal. WNYC's program, the United States of Anxiety, has been taking a very close look at how those questions have played out in one small school district, the Sausalito Marin City Schools in California. Reporter Marianne McCune began visiting the district about two years ago. One of the schools is a charter, Willow Creek Academy. Just picture it. foggy slopes, trees, and instead of a big old school building, little bungalows around the field, classic Bay Area. The first time I visited the charter school, the board president showed me around. His name is Kurt Weinzheimer.

Do you want to look into a classroom? I'll see what... The place had a really idyllic feel. They had this French chef. With the marvelous chef feel, please come to the stage. Who gets on stage every morning to announce the day's lunch menu. And the kids say, Bonjour, Chef Guillaume. So today on the menu, seasonal fruit,

while we're watching Kurt leans over and tells me, he loves watching the kids react to the food options. It'll be like, and today we've got cauliflower. And everyone's like, woo-hoo! But I have to say what was most striking about my visit was the diversity in the classrooms. Less than half the kids here are white. So there's a mix of black, white, Latino, Asian,

many recent immigrants. It is integrated and inclusive. And that's their day-to-day life. And economically, too, there's a real mix of family income levels here. More than a third of the kids are very low income, which is saying something given where we are. Because Willow Creek is in Sausalito. This is a small town, and we're talking like around 7,000 people. It's overwhelmingly white, a little hippie, a lot of multimillion-dollar homes.

But almost half the school is from another neighborhood, Marin City. It's tiny, too. It's half the size of Sausalito. but there's a big public housing complex there. There are also more affordable apartments. It's not majority black anymore, but it's a real mix of people. And that neighborhood is the reason we're here, because over in that neighborhood is the one other school in the district.

It's about a mile away from Willow Creek. It's not a charter school. It's the regular public school. And it's called Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy. And these two schools, and the 500 kids who go to them are now at the center of a big controversy here in California. Over the last couple of decades,

the school here, Bayside MLK, has been shrinking while Willow Creek Academy, the charter school, has grown. So there are about 120 students at Bayside MLK now, and almost all of them are black and Latino. My graduating class was like 10 kids. This is Jeremiah Moultrie. He went to Bayside from the kindergarten through the 8th grade. He's a sophomore in high school now.

But he says back when he was at Bayside MLK, it was a real mess. We had two teachers basically doing everything for the entire middle school. We had a math teacher and an English teacher that taught all three classes. And they also had to be the history and science teacher. And I remember specifically at one point in time, like the seventh grade would be doing math while the eighth grade would be in the back doing science. When he was there, they did not have an art teacher. They did not have a music teacher. Jeremiah says the curriculum felt completely ad hoc.

And it was like the teachers were just playing catch up all the time. Everything was like, you guys don't know this. You guys don't know that. So like let's pick it back up and let's try to like learn as much of it as possible and try to move on with the curriculum we're supposed to be doing now. And then like all the kids that left Bayside to go to Willa Creek, they were like rapid fire like learning this, learning that, learning that. like they were on track. I was like unaware of the fact that we were really missing out on

all of the stuff until like me and all my non-classmates, we took a field trip to Willow Creek and they were doing this big performance. Like they had like 20 teachers there and all 10 of us were sending out of table and we were just watching them and they were doing like all these parts and everybody talking and the girl, she had like a really like cool dress and like they had like the lights and everything like the little stage lights and it was all really cool. right after the play, everyone was like, Baseline never has anything like that. Jeremiah wasn't the only person in Marin City

who noticed this stark difference between these two schools. There were a lot of people in the community who said, hey, we're failing these kids. I want to thank everyone for being with us here this morning. This is State Attorney General Javier Bacera, summer of 2019. He's speaking in front of a small nerve-wracked audience and he brings up a 65-year-old Supreme Court decision. Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

But more importantly, they said separate is not equal. The Attorney General's office had investigated this tiny school district for two years and concluded that it had intentionally maintained an exacerbated segregation here, that the district which encompasses just these two schools knowingly ran one school that was almost exclusively black and Latino and low income and deprived them of the teachers and the instruction and the funding they needed to succeed. And the complaint charges at the same time,

they were helping Willow Creek, that wonderfully integrated charter school, grow and flourish. The South Carolina-Burin City school district schools were separate. and they were not equal. He told the district to fix it. These decisions by the Board of Trustees violated both the equal protection guarantee of the California Constitution

and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. As superintendent of the Socelito Marin City School District, Itoko Garcia is the guy in charge. And that wouldn't be a huge job in this tiny district if he didn't also have to solve the intractable problem of segregation in the United States.

Is that what I'm being tasked with? He figured out fast that people in this community were anxious and angry and upset in all kinds of ways. So the first time he gets up with the mic to explain his new mandate to the public, he gives the audience a tip for how to remain calm, cool, and collected themselves. When you start to feel worked up, he tells them, breathe in for a count of eight. out for a count of four. He demonstrates what he means immediately when he reminds the crowd of what the Attorney General's judgment actually says. It said we knowingly and intentionally maintained

and exacerbated existing racial segregation in Sausalito and Marin City. Itoko's job was to make a school that would attract black families from local public housing and immigrant families who spoke Spanish or Tagalog or Arabic. And white families, too, from the funky little boat houses on the bay to the luxury houses on the hill. His strategy to bring the two existing schools together into one. Find a way to combine the charter school with the regular district school. And the problem was distrust. A decades deep distrust.

I don't doubt that many of you relish harming the institution. But what I cannot fathom is how you continue to push an agenda that actively harms the well-being of 380 students. Ito's first few months on the job involved many long nights sitting at one end of his school cafeteria, listening to charter school parents, damn the district. And to Willow Creek Academy being penalized. And to supporters of the regular public school, damn the charter. Because you guys brag about diversity. You have flyers out there with black faces on it. But black children aren't being taught at your school.

Why is equity kind of being thrown out the window? So I ask everyone to picture this. There is a burning house, one burning house. There is a second house, which is not burning. Why would anyone light the second house on fire? I'd like to ask that he please not characterize this school was on fire. As Itoko listened, one of the things he worried most about was how not to fall into the patterns of the past. This fight over segregation and integration and resources and inequity, it's been going on for decades.

You can find local newspaper clippings detailing the same debates over and over from World War II on. Back in 1970, a BBC documentary told the story of a sweeping, effort to fix things. Five years ago, a locally elected school board in Sorcelito, California, with foresight and idealism, created one of the first deliberately integrated school systems in the United States. It was a portrait of this same little district's first effort to desegregate. It's a racist, Sausalito School District.

What do any of the rest of you think about it? When he Tocco found and watched the BBC coverage, he says it actually made him cry. I had a brief moment when I thought, oh, boy, because it seemed like we were in the same place in 2019 that this community was in 1965. You know, there were accusations against school board members and actions against school boards and recalls and angry parent meetings, angry black parents talking about racism and segregation, angry white parents. talking about behavior and learning. I mean, there are things that have not changed much at all. Maybe the biggest, stickiest pattern the documentary points to is this, that desegregation alone does not equal success for black students.

The whole idea of school desegregation was to improve education for black kids who had been forced to attend overcrowded and underfunded schools. But desegregation, just putting black and white students together, was that enough? We're going to keep on pushing until... In the BBC documentary,

a black Marin City resident named Royce McLemore with a gorgeous crochet sweater vest and the 1970 afro tells the interviewer, me and myself, I don't care about integration. All I care is equal education. What's your saying, basically? Roy still lives in Marin City.

She's been an activist and an educator and a foster mom out of the local public housing complex for decades. Everyone here knows her. And at 77, she still questions desegregation. She's told Etocco, so what if the public school in Marin City has almost all black and brown kids? Why do we have to cater to white families now? If they're going to leave, let them leave.

They left back in the day. I'd say that on the BBC. I still feel the same. I don't care about integration. It's about the best education that one can receive. Equal education. Itoko has thought about this plenty. On one hand, research shows desegregating schools

has done more to improve educational outcomes for black students than any other reform. On the other hand, it hasn't done nearly enough. Itoko doesn't really have a choice of the matter. The Attorney General has ordered desegregation, so he can't just focus on educating the black and brown students who already attend his school. To desegregate, the district has to attract some white families too. And does trying to please wealthy white families force compromises that are not in line with serving the families that you're talking about? Historically, yes.

Is that in your mind? I mean, do you feel you have to find ways to resist that historic trend? I think that feeling infuses my entire educational journey as a student, as a teacher, as a principal, and as a superintendent. Etocco pledges not to fail black families in order to serve white ones. And I believe that we are very well positioned to do just that. which is exactly what the superintendent of this district was hoping 50 years ago, before things fell apart. Reporter Marianne McCune. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and our story will continue in a moment. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We're telling a story today about segregation. Not in the 50s or the 60s, but right now. And it's the story of one small school district, a microcosm of a problem that we find all across the country, in my city of New York and probably in your town or city as well. Our story focuses on two schools in a small district in Marin County, in California. One, a charter school on a hill called Willow Creek. It's ethnically diverse, but includes nearly all of the district's white students, and a smaller traditional public school called Bayside MLK, with almost all black and brown students. The California Attorney General found that the district was in violation of Brown versus Board of Education.

Now, that was in 2019, but really, this fight has been going on for a very long time. The story comes from WNYC's program, The United States of Anxiety. Here's reporter Marianne McCune. I went to visit a woman who lives way up on the hill in Sausalito, great 1960s modern house, the same house that she was sitting in 50 years ago when she and her husband were also interviewed. by that BBC reporter. What experiences have you had that have made you come to the realizations that you have come to?

Well, the prevalent... They talked for a while, and when the interview was over, Jackie Cuddler remembers telling the reporter... Be kind. I know we're going to come out to be these naive, bleeding heart liberals, and we were. When they moved to Socellito in 1962, Jackie was a teacher. from Brooklyn. Her husband was a dentist. John Kennedy was president. They had a baby. They're a Jewish family. I think two weeks after we came to Sausalito, I got a call asking if we'd like to come for coffee. And we began to meet a whole bunch of people talking about, you know, we have a segregated school

district here. The black kids went to school in Marin City. And the white kids went to school in Sausalito. It was like, you know what? This is wrong. And the crowd, the crowd you're talking about, were they mostly white families from Sausalito? All white. I mean, we were Sausalito people at that point. And it's just that it was wrong. And we were going to make it right. So Jackie and her group of like-minded parents ran for seats on the school board and managed to get a majority. Their campaign was all about the need for desegregate. They kept saying all we have to do is get black and white kids together and it's going to be fine.

There was a kind of naivt about how easy it would be. But they went ahead. It was 1965, and this was one of the first voluntary desegregation efforts in the country. They hired a new reform-minded superintendent, someone with the same ambition Itoko Garcia has now. They hired school buses, and in each school in the district, there were a few back then. They mixed up the black and white students. But it was pretty immediately clear that just putting kids together wasn't enough. Around that time, Royce McClmore was a very young mom, sending her oldest daughter to elementary school.

I decided to go see what was going on at her school. Royce is the black Marin City woman who said back then, and again more recently, that integration alone does not add up to equal education for black students. And it was like blackboard jungle in the classroom. Royce and Jackie got to know each other early on in this desegregation project. They were both mothers in the district, and they talked about the problems they were seeing. There were white teachers there that we were trying to get rid of who the black community said were terrible. I mean, they suffered through those teachers who just didn't have a clue. And by terrible, do you mean bad teachers, or they tried?

treated the black children badly. Black children badly. And what they had to teach, ignored the black children. Fine for my kid. My kid was just as happy as could be. I decided to go to one of their board meetings and saw, you know, these white people up there, and there they are talking about, you know, what's best. And that just did something to me.

And I told them, you can't tell me what. What's best for me and my? In Sausalito, that white progressive superintendent and Jackie Cuddler's group of liberal parents, they were trying to listen to the black power movement and do desegregation better. We understood that it was important to hire black teachers, and that's what we did. The superintendent brought in black student teachers and some staff, and he also orchestrated what were called encounter groups at the time, to raise consciousness about the black experience.

but here's something that might sound familiar to black listeners. There were so few black staff that each of them had to go to multiple encounter groups a week to represent. At the middle school, the Black Panthers started their signature breakfast program. Panthers in black berets serving up eggs and bacon to the kids in the cafeteria. One teacher told me that she remembers this little old white lady, the school hired to cook, and when the Panthers saw her frying up breakfast in butter, instead of bacon grease, she says they jumped in the kitchen with her to make things right. When the Black Panther movement began, and that just stirred me up even more.

But the Panthers were gun-toting people, and for a lot of white people, it was like, they're scary people, you know? The superintendent's next move was arguably his boldest and most controversial. But before we get there, let me just remind you. of what these final few years of the 1960s were like. Direct from our newsroom in Washington. Black unemployment was rising, as were tensions over police abuse. Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

There were continued protests over Vietnam, over civil rights. In San Francisco, black students and their allies boycotted classes for a full five months, demanding more black professors and a black studies department. So that was the context in which, in 1969, our white progressive superintendent hired as principal of the middle school, a black educator from Oakland named Sid Walton, brother Sid, he liked students to call him, and Sid had some very different ideas about what middle school kids should learn. At some time another, children have to be exposed to the hypocrisy, in the society. Here he is in that BBC documentary. And, you know, we can't get into this garbage

about, you know, George Washington was the father of our country. George Washington is a damn slave owner, you see. There are a lot of rights who would not want it known that George Washington was a slave owner, you see. Those are the kinds of things that we're talking about. We're teaching the truth. All righty. Testing. It's worth taking a moment to get to know Sid Walton. It took a while to find him all these years later. And when I did, he was a lot of always so busy for an 86-year-old doing something with his boat or with his car. But eventually he made time for me. Do you want me to leave this on?

So to keep him safe from the pandemic, I parked in his driveway, just south of San Francisco, strung a disinfected microphone into his car. Like so? And we talked for hours on the phone. All right, so I'll roll this up then. We could see each other through our rolled-up windows. There's a nice restroom, a woman-friendly restroom at Walgreens. I'll just try to hold it in, but if I need it.

Well, no, no, no, we don't want any squirming. Sid Walton's year as principal in Sausalito Marin City looms large in the history of that seaside town. But it was just one year of his life. and to understand what his project was in that middle school, it helps to go back to where he started. What's the story of you becoming an activist? Tell me that story. I was born black, you know, and they were fucking with black people.

By the way, get ready for a lot of bleeps. We had to let them know. Sid has a story about what turned him into a teacher. He comes from a family of firefighters. He was a fire chief in the Army for a couple of years. and when he came back, he took the test to become a firefighter in a suburb of California. Do you know those bastards told me? They said that I could not live in the station with the other firefighters because they weren't integrated.

I said, you, I said, you take this job and you sick it up your ass. I said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the school. I'm going to get my credentials. And every kid I come in contact with, I am going to tell them how racist you were. You know, that's my little story about why I became a teacher. Sid was the first black teacher in one Bay Area school district. Then he was the first black counselor at a junior college in Oakland. And he says the guys who told him about that job were none other than the founders of the Black Panther Party.

His friends, Qie P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The Black Panther Party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California legislature. This was around the time the Panthers traveled to the California State Capitol Building to make a point about their right to bear arms. And Sid was there too. He says he wasn't a member, just an ally. Racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality,

murder, and repression of black people. I joined with them and we carried our guns up to Sacramento. And we stood down the police. that were supposed to be protecting the state capital. Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest? We kept our guns and they're alive and we're alive. The California Penal Code Section 120 through 12-027

and also the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the citizens of a right to bear arms on public property. Basically, that is my message to racist. It's like if you are willing to die to do what you want to do, then I'm willing to die to stop you from doing it. Oops. Nice punctuation there. Sidd's main focus was on the power of words, not guns.

He pushed the idea of black power in a space it hadn't been before. Education. Sid was instrumental in starting the first Black Studies Department on an American campus. He chronicled the effort in an un-eurore. book called The Black Curriculum. And I say unusual because it's not just a narrative. It's more like documentation. He includes the transcript of a counseling session in which a student talks about racism in

her classroom, and he encourages her to speak up. He reprints his speech to administrators in defense of the word mother, et cetera, in a play by Amiri Baraka he brought to the college. Yes, we were going to be using the magic word, you know, and that was it. He told them, hey, this is how enslaved people described the white men who raped their mothers. Sit also included in the book a whole series of these bureaucratic letters back and forth with administrators, telling him he doesn't have the right to do what he's planning, he has to jump through this and that hoop, he's got to go through such and such a channel.

Tell me about trichnology. Tricknology? Oh, trick-n-n-oh. I forgot. Technology was some of the things that white folks would do to black folks, you know, in terms of, you know, shifting shit around, you know. Like, we'll do that, but it's going to take a long time. Yeah, exactly.

That kind of shit, you know. They always would come up with some provisals that they put in, you know. Like things that would prevent a black person from getting a job or getting a promotion or that kind of thing. Oh, yeah. And we just refer to it as technology, you know. Sid's book, The Black Curriculum, is kind of like a manual for how to get around technology. Cid was known among black educators and radical students, but it's not like the black curriculum was selling out in bookstores the way anti-racism books have this past year. Sid self-published, which explains why when he was hired as principal across the bay in Sausalito, most parents had never seen it.

until the San Francisco Examiner reprinted the only photograph in the book. There was Sid, their newly hired Middle School principal, bearded black glasses kneeling next to a foot-high stack of books holding a rifle. There's a round of ammo and another gun leaning against the books

and a knife strapped to Sid's thigh. Because we need books and knowledge and the guns. to get our freedom. We're book-based, but we're also gun-backed up. In Roy Smaqlmore's memory, when brothers Sid took over his principal, he turned things around in a way she had never seen before. For generations, the Soslid School District had miseducated black children. There are very few that would graduate from the eighth grade

that would be able to actually be on the same level with the white students from other parts of the county. What were they doing differently in the school that instilled that? Well, that they had an opportunity to speak, how they feel, any injustice that they saw, that they were able to address it. I mean, not disrespectfully, but as, you know, young black people to be able to express how they felt about various situations. And see, he opened that door up for them to be able to do that.

The teachers had to do a lot of in-service training, and they had to do some reading, and in terms of what contributions black people made in history. So even white teachers that were there, they were getting pumped too in terms of, yes, people have been done wrong. And this was an opportunity to make it right through that next generation of children.

He was helping us, guiding us as parents, you know, what to advocate for for your children. And we did. Like what would you say? That you have a right, you have a right. And don't let them take that right away from you. He was able to ignite that feeling that, you know, that you were proud to be black. And you, you know, gone are the days of shuffling and bowing.

That was over. We weren't having that. So that's the way Royce remembers it. But there are a whole other set of stories about Sid and how he ran the middle school that year. The kind of stuff that people who did not want things to change this much wrote in letters to the editor and official reports. They saw it as the radicalization of the middle school. Kids were pulled out of math to learn Swahili.

The new books appearing in the library were Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. and Mao's Little Red Book. Posters on the walls said Free Huey Newton. One teacher from that time remembers Sid loading up his sailboat with supplies for the Native Americans who occupied Alcatraz that year, and then he'd sail across the bay with a student to deliver the goods. That teacher described Sid as a nutcase, but she said the principal before him was brain dead.

By spring semester, everyone was feeling threatened. Royce joined a group called the Black Liberation, Army and was doing target practice in the hills. Jackie Cuddler and her husband were starting to feel afraid of the black militants with intimidating dogs showing up at school board meetings, but also of all the angry white parents. I got a postcard. You don't keep your big mouth shut. Your husband is going to lose lots of patience. Oh, how would you like if your kid married one of those black bastard? You know, because I was defending the school. Oh, and Jewish ended with Hitler had the right idea.

Sid said he was also getting periodic death threats. I was in the office working late and phone rang. And it said, you're in our crosshairs. White folks are always afraid of an outspoken man of color. You know, what can I say? that's the reason why so many of us are killed, you know. I'm surprised that I'm alive to this day. I'm really surprised, but, you know, I guess I'm just lucky.

It wasn't gunshots that defeated Sid Walton 50-plus years ago with the end of his first year as a middle school principal approaching. It was backlash. In May, at a chaotic meeting before an angry crowd of parents, white and black, the school board voted to five. said Walthon. Instead of going forward thinking, the school district wanted to go back and went back in their thinking. Royce McLemore watched as the school board also got rid of the black student teachers, fired another black teacher for being insubordinate, and hired a new principal, also black,

but with the same traditional approach to education the school had to begin with. Been there and done that. I saw what it was and not interested. and going backwards. What was backwards about it? Backwards going back to, you know, if you're white, you're right. I've been trying to work within the system or whatever it is for quite some time. Towards the end of that BBC documentary, you see all those black parents who had been so inspired by Sid Walton, voicing their outrage. How can we continue?

You're dismissing the man without any charges. You know good and damn well you mean to let him go, don't you? just like you did Sid Walter. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we're hearing a story about a school district in California and the decades-long effort to desegregate it. We'll continue in a moment. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Today we're hearing the story of a single school district in the Bay Area of California. The district in Marin County has long been segregated, not by law in the Jim Crow sense, of course, but in fact. And the allocation of resources to the two schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution in the opinion of the Attorney General of the State of California. There was an effort to desegregate the schools in the 1960s,

but over time, they became more segregated again. In 2001, a charter school was founded, and it was diverse, but it enrolled in the end virtually all the white students. The older public school became almost entirely black and Latino. So in order to truly desegregate, white families would have to send their children to that school as well. Here's reporter Marianne McKeon. The first time I visited that regular public school, I went to see the library. And they told me they had just overhauled their selection of books.

The big change was the kids needed to see themselves in the books. If you don't see yourself, you're like, well, all I see on books are white kids that become doctors or, white kids that can build robots. I was so surprised that a full 50 years after Sid Walton put a copy of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice in the library. At the same school, these librarians were still working on stalking books about people who look like their students. There's some stuff on, say, like Caesar Chavez or there's Black Panther. We even have board books with Black Panther. And you really see that big of a difference?

We do. From two years ago, we see over half of the school now. They now come in on their recess time to check out books. You have to wonder, what would the shelves of this library be lined with now if Sid Walton had been allowed to stay? That is the kind of question that bounces around in the back of Utoko-Garcia's mind all the time, now that he's leading this district's second go at desegregate. 50 years later. I go back and I study it a lot.

And what do you see? Tell me what that story of Sid Walton's year in this district means to you now. I think we all got to be Sid Walton for this to work. He did something incredibly courageous. Very few people would have had the courage to come and do what he did here. Like what? What? We all have to lean into the idea.

that black and brown people are excellent and are as smart and have as valuable contributions as white folks. And that black and brown culture is excellent and has as valuable contributions as white culture. Just even show up with the educational philosophy and the curriculum that he was espousing. It was groundbreaking. It's taken educational research 45, 50 years to catch up to what Sidney Walton was talking about. And so that's really what I mean when I say we all have to be Sid Walton. And you think Marin City,

Salito is ready for Sid Walton or many Sid Walton's? Well, I was just going to say the mistake that was made by this community was believing that one man could hold that charge. I know. I am one frail human being. This is not work that can be accomplished by one person. This has to be a movement.

It has to be a movement. Before we get to the movement, I need to do one last bit of explaining. That year that Sid Walton was fired and everything seemed to blow up in the Sassolito School District, the integration of those schools. That did not completely blow up. At first, there was white flight. From 1965 to 1970, the year Sid was fired, more than half of the white families left.

Local real estate agents started telling wealthy white home buyers, there are no public schools in Sausalito. But there was one group of white students who didn't really have the option to leave, army brats. There were a few nearby military bases and their kids stayed all the way through the 70s. and a lot of people remember those integrated schools as not bad. So I've told you about the desegregation. The re-segregation of Sausalito Marin City schools started in the 1980s, with the military bases closing down, and the number of white students dwindling to near nothing.

At the same time, crack hit the streets of Marin City, kids whose parents struggled with addiction, a lot of them had to take care of themselves. The school's classrooms were chaotic. New superintendents would show up every year from maybe Texas or North Carolina, then take off for good as soon as summer arrived. It was 2001 when a group of white parents from Sosolito started their own school, a public charter called Willow Creek Academy.

That is the charter school that grew and grew while the regular public school shrank and shrank. Eventually, the Attorney General showed up to say, these two schools are separate and unequal. For 20 years, the two schools have competed for space in school buildings, for the sympathies of members of the school board, and most importantly, for the money and resources that board doles out. And for 20 years, these two communities have told two completely different stories about how they came to be separate and unequal.

So you can imagine my surprise when I spoke, to leaders of each of these communities late last year, and they told me, for the first time, the same story about what was going on. These are the only people who actually have the power to make decisions, the dozen or so people who make up the boards of each of these two schools. They said they were finally finding ways to agree with each other and move forward. And they both told me, the thing that was helping them the most... Okay, it sounds so boring and bureaucratic, These two boards started holding joint study sessions. I would say 20 joint study sessions from June until now.

This is Kurt Weinheimer. He's the president of the charter school's board. And he says they would just sit together in a Zoom room for hours and hours, week after week, hashing out the details of what kind of school they want to make. We are going to call this joint study session. You might wonder why they didn't do this from the start. Just get in a room together and talk. My answer, after many months of observation, they couldn't.

The fear and the anger that had built up between these two communities ran too deep. There was so much that needed airing. So many people, parents or grandparents, people who just care about Marin City or Sausalito, teachers, principals, coaches, school, secretaries, so many people need. needed to get up in front of a mic in a school cafeteria and speak. And to sit together in small groups and hear each other out. That's not a black and white story. I don't think our school sees our children. You know, fights, arguments, raised voices, you know, tears, etc.

And that's what needed to happen. There's a type of couples therapy where each side has a chance to list everything they're upset about. And until they're done, their partner has to keep asking, is there anything more? There was one other thing that both Kurt and Etocco say made a huge difference, something totally outside of their control. The police killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, including thousands of white Socellito residents backing up their black Marin City neighbors. Kurt says he saw Sausalito listening to Marin City in a new way.

People could really understand, wow, this is really real here. These things that were happening in the 60s, 70s, and were happening even up to current day, that I think was, you know, was really eye-opening for everyone. Not for everyone. It was eye-opening for many people that were kind of like, oh, come on, you know, move forward, get over it. And you realize, like, these pains are deep and these pains are real. And you don't just get over it. And we have a job as people trying to set up education to make education a part of that healing process.

In March, a year and a half after the Attorney General laid out his desegregation order, these two schools announced officially that they will become one, open to all students this fall. Kurt and Etocco both told me that one of the watershed moments in their meetings, was when their two boards finally finished a collective statement of purpose. Can I read it to you? It says, we are a district of choice that serves all pre-K to eighth grade students and families, especially those with the greatest need for the opportunity to learn and lead. It goes on, but I think you've heard the most important part, the word especially.

Some of the people in the room were high-powered white socellito parents perceived by others in the room to have created a school for themselves. Now they were all together writing a purpose statement for their new school, and they all agreed it has to serve everybody, but especially the students, our schools have historically failed. There are still some sticky details to work out. Most importantly, accountability. how to make sure promises are kept and that people from all four corners of this district stay. I know a lot of families that are looking at private school, and that's their hedge.

Most of the families from each community have said they will return to the new unified school. 20% of those students are black, 26% Latino, 12% Asian, and 39% are white. Now comes the hard part, to make sure all of them flourish. On July 1st, the schools will officially unify.

Elementary students will attend in Saucilito at the former Willow Creek Academy site. Middle schoolers will go to the former Bayside MLK building, and classes will begin in person in the fall. Marianne McCune reported that story for WNYC's program, The United States of Anxiety. And this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Thank you so much for listening. Hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avey Corrieu, Riannon, Cala, David Krasnau, Gofen and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses,

Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. Our show this week was engineered by Harrison Keithline, and special thanks to the late Steve Ayala, who was a key player in the Marin County desegregation effort. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.