What was U.S. District Judge Bernice Donald thinking two years ago
when she tried to put the Shelby County schools under a “special
master” to oversee reassignment of students and staff?

Rarely has a federal judge’s decision been as thoroughly trashed by
the appellate court, plaintiffs, defendants, and the families that
would have been affected by it.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling against Donald’s
2007 decision, said her court “abused its discretion” in rejecting “a
reasonable and good faith joint motion” by the county board of
education, the Justice Department, and the NAACP’s Legal Defense
Fund.

Richard Fields, who has been involved in the case since 1982 as
attorney for the Legal Defense Fund, said he never understood the
thinking of Donald, the only black federal judge in Memphis.

“I was very surprised at her ruling, and I don’t know why she did
it,” he said.

In legal terms, the Shelby County school system has been granted
“unitary status” and is out from under a 46-year-old desegregation
order stemming from a lawsuit filed by a county schools student and
supported by the federal government and the NAACP.

The appeals court smackdown means county schools won’t have to
reassign students in racially unbalanced schools. The county system is
53 percent white, 37 percent black, 4 percent Asian, and 4 percent
Hispanic. Ten county schools are at least 80 percent white. Southwind
High School, which opened two years ago, is 1.2 percent white.

If Memphis annexes Southwind and other schools in its reserve area,
the county system’s black enrollment will fall to 7.68 percent,
according to Maura Black Sullivan of the Memphis and Shelby County
Division of Planning and Development.

To which the appeals court said, so be it.

The judges said the school district has no duty to remedy imbalance
caused by demographic factors, annexation, and “voluntary housing
choices made by the public.” Southwind’s student body reflects the
demographics of the neighborhoods in its attendance boundary, just as
75-percent white Arlington High School — Southwind’s
architectural twin in northeast Shelby County — reflects its
residential areas.

Donald would have had each county school be more reflective of the
overall county demographic mix, which would have meant busing students
or drawing new attendance zones.

In effect, she overruled herself in her 2007 order because she had
signed off, in “rubber stamp” fashion, on the county school system’s
plans several times before she apparently had second thoughts over the
outcome.

We can only guess at her motivations and reaction to last week’s
overrule. Federal judges speak only from the bench and in their
rulings. Fields, however, has quite a lot to say.

“Shelby County schools has some smart people, and they did what the
court required them to do,” he said. “Every time we had a boundary
dispute, we resolved it because they had good people on the staff,
school board, and in the superintendent’s office. The students have had
straight A’s on the state report card for years. It was a situation
where we had no choice but to grant unitary status.”

The city of Memphis, he opined, would be “insane” to annex any more
schools and territory because “without the help of the federal
government, both the city and county would be bankrupt today.”

Once a champion of then-superintendent Willie Herenton and the
court-ordered desegregation of the Memphis City Schools, Fields has had
a bitter falling out with the mayor during his last two terms. But he
gives Herenton credit for trying to keep white students in the system
and for closing underused schools during his years as
superintendent.

“None of the MCS superintendents since Herenton have been interested
in desegregation,” he said. “The Legal Defense Fund basically laid off
the school system to give them an opportunity to work on it, and they
failed miserably. There could be more white kids if they tried to
stabilize neighborhoods. Look at Idlewild, Grahamwood, and Richland.
You have to provide a quality education, and Memphis, with some
exceptions, has failed to do that. That’s why I support charter schools
and programs like Teach For America.”