Word: suburbanized
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...usefulness. Clinton Adams Jr., a black attorney who is sufficiently abrasive to qualify as a militant in Kansas City--a town so even-tempered that car horns are blown only to warn of impending collisions--takes an even harder line. "The most egregious injustice is the situation where suburban white kids get priority over resident African-American kids, who are the adjudicated victims of segregation," he says. "That's atrocious. Just to try to achieve some kind of mythical benefit that black kids will receive by sitting next to a white...
...dearth of whites led a federal court to order the city of Detroit to integrate its schools with those of 53 surrounding districts. In 1974 the Supreme Court struck down that order, holding in Milliken v. Bradley that suburban districts could not be ordered to help desegregate a city's schools unless those suburbs had been involved in illegally segregating them in the first place. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned in dissent that the court had set a course that would allow "our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities--one white, the other black...
This was the state of affairs when, in 1976, the Federal Government threatened to cut off funds to the KCMSD because it had maintained a dual system of segregated schools. Pro-integration kitchen-table activists who had won control of the KCMSD school board responded by suing suburban school districts and the State of Missouri, arguing that they had worked to confine blacks to the inner city...
Until the Brown decision, schools were segregated by law in Missouri; after it, the state allowed desegregation at the discretion of local school boards. Many of the suburban districts (parts of which extended into the city) had not allowed blacks to attend high school, forcing black families to move into central Kansas City in search of education. As the city's minority population grew, the KCMSD redrew school-attendance zones hundreds of times and bused some black children far from their neighborhoods in order to keep the races apart...
...Judge Russell G. Clark, a conservative Democrat, ruled that the state and KCMSD had violated the Constitution, but he dropped the outer districts from the case, finding insufficient proof that they they had acted illegally--a decision he would have cause to regret. "The very minute I let those suburban school districts out, I created a very severe problem for the court and for myself, really, in trying to come up with a remedial plan to integrate the Kansas City, Missouri, School District," the judge reflected years later. "The more salt you have, the more white you can turn...