It took this Texas school district 48 years to desegregate. Now, some fear a return to the past.

“It took this Texas school district 48 years to desegregate. Now, some fear a return to the past.” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

LONGVIEW — At the first Friday football game in the first school year since the school district in this East Texas town had been declared racially integrated — nearly 50 years after a federal court order — thousands of spectators dressed in forest-green Lobos gear filled the stadium anticipating a win.

Enduring the late-August heat, fans piled out of haphazardly parked cars and filed into creaky fold-down seats they’d reserved for years. Some who had attended segregated white or black schools in Longview decades ago now shared the same rows. When the marching band played the school’s fight song, most of the crowd formed an “L” with their fingers and rocked them back and forth in unison.

Opting for the bird’s eye view from the press box, Ted Beard, a longtime Longview Independent School District board member, watched the football players race across the field to the cheers of a rapt and raucous crowd and wondered how long the commitment to integration would last.

The district is at a pivotal moment now that a federal court has released it from decades-long supervision of its policies for educating students of color. It has made progress to topple the barriers still holding black and Hispanic students back from the same academic success as white students. It has poured millions of dollars into a new Montessori program for its pre-K and kindergarten students, launched advanced International Baccalaureate courses starting with first grade and constructed its own meat processing lab for kids who don’t plan to attend college.

But whether it continues a commitment to student equity now depends solely on the collective will of a school board that could change with a single election cycle. And that worries Beard, whose father was part of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and faced threats and violence along the way. Beard is black and had two kids go through Longview schools. He knows the progress he’s helped fight for in Longview is fragile.

“That attitude can turn at any moment,” Beard said gravely, against a sports announcer’s booming narration. “The board could change and then the direction could change, and those that are ultimately affected are going to be the students.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but Longview ISD — along with hundreds of Texas school districts — resisted until federal judges intervened and imposed detailed desegregation plans across large swaths of the state.

“The same factors which were found to exist in Brown v. Board of Education, and which led the Supreme Court to hold that separate education was ‘inherently unequal,’ exhibit themselves in” Texas’ segregated districts, Judge William Wayne Justice wrote in one order.

In 1970, an East Texas-based federal court mandated Longview ISD tackle a long list of tasks designed to make sure its black students were learning and playing in the same classrooms and playgrounds as their white peers — including closing four all-black schools and busing black students to formerly all-white schools throughout the district.

Forty-seven years later, Longview was one of only three Texas districts that remained under a federal court order, along with San Angelo and Garland.

A federal judge fully released the district from that order in June, and just weeks before the school year started, Beard and the rest of the board unanimously approved a voluntary plan to keep the district’s schools desegregated and ensure that students of color have equal opportunities to graduate and succeed beyond high school.

But Beard and others know the district has yet to overcome the deep disparities that have defined so much of its history. In Longview ISD, white students — who make up a fraction of the district’s enrollment — still outpace their black and Hispanic peers in many ways. They are roughly half of the students enrolled at Longview’s specialized elementary school, which has higher academic standards. And they are more likely to take classes and tests meant to prepare them for college.

And district leaders also have struggled with a new education challenge that federal judges couldn’t have foreseen in 1970 — adequately providing a burgeoning group of Hispanic students with crucial services they need to learn English.

Decades later, districts statewide are grappling with many of the same challenges: how to address major demographic changes as Texas public schools become majority Hispanic, while also working to make up for deep-rooted, historical inequities.

In Longview, people like Beard can look in the stands at the football game and see plenty of success stories — like high school senior Taleiah Fortner. Sitting with her friends in the student section, Fortner — whose grandfather was one of the first black students to desegregate Longview’s schools — has never known a world in which she was prohibited from learning with white students.

An accomplished student excited by the high school’s long list of student clubs and activities, Fortner looks forward to pursuing a career in education after she graduates in May, following in the footsteps of her mother, a middle-school coach in the district.

But Beard worried about the ramifications of exiting court supervision for students of color who are still being left behind. If the district had spent almost 50 years trying and failing to completely close the educational gap between white, black and Hispanic students with a mandate from a federal court, how would it succeed now without one?

“You can’t get over it”

Troy Simmons started his education in an all-black school in a small unincorporated community 75 miles southwest of Longview. It had no kindergarten program, and he started first grade in a classroom with no air conditioner to fight the late-summer Texas heat, poring over old, tattered textbooks.

When his school integrated in the mid-1960s, a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, he watched his father, a teacher and coach, lose his coaching job to a white administrator. When he visited Longview schools for a high school basketball game, he remembers being cursed and spat at by the all-white crowd.

Simmons, now 67 and a dentist in Longview, has carried memories of those misdeeds, which he likens to bad relationships, throughout the decades he’s spent trying to make things better for the students who came after him.

“You don’t walk away from those relationships without some bitterness in you because you see the injustice in it,” Simmons said from a chair in the waiting room of his dentistry practice. “And when people say you ought to get over it, you can’t get over it. That is in your core.”

Simmons had already started his freshman year of college when the federal government sued the state of Texas for refusing to integrate most of its schools, 16 years after the Brown ruling. Ruling for the federal government in 1970, a federal judge almost 40 miles from Longview placed nearly the entire state under court order and threatened sanctions against defiant school districts — resulting in one of the largest series of desegregation orders in the nation’s history.

The same court ordered Longview to integrate both its faculty and students, requiring that each campus have a roughly 70-to-30 ratio between white and black students, administrators, teachers and even teacher’s aides. That meant busing more than 600 black students to white schools and the consolidation or closure of several all-black schools, including Mary C. Womack High School. If white students tried to transfer, the court order mandated that they could only be reassigned to schools in which they would be in the minority.

Tucked behind the state’s pine curtain, Longview ISD was unlikely to have integrated without a court order. Like in much of the state, white people in Longview saw the federal push for integration as a threat to their autonomy and the racist status quo — and some reacted with violence.

The details are laid out in federal court findings: Fearing a “revolution” and “uprising” of the black community, a group of white residents conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” black students in Longview, collecting lethal weapons including mortars, hand grenades, dynamite and Molotov cocktails.

In the summer before the first integrated classes began at Longview ISD, a local man named Fred Loyd Hayes set off dynamite at the house of a black woman in a white neighborhood and then joined forces with Kenneth Ray McMaster to blow up dozens of school buses that were meant to transport black students to white schools. They were later convicted and each drew 11 years in prison.

The violence didn’t stop integration. Fifteen years after the first buses transported black kids to previously all-white schools, Simmons was appointed to the school board to fill a vacancy, making him just the second black school board member in Longview. He was spurred to run for a full term after recognizing that Longview ISD, in some ways, still resembled the segregated school system he grew up in.

The district had closed the all-black schools and bused students across its long L shape, but Simmons said he found a district in 1985 that had failed black families for generations and still refused to truly extinguish long-standing disparities between the southern end of the district, where mostly black families lived, and the north side, which was still largely white.

“You had black kids scattered all over the district and all of the schools, but the quality of education was vastly different,” Simmons said. “The quality of facilities and services were vastly different.”

Schools in south Longview were saddled with lower-end, slow computers, while schools in north Longview were stocked with the newest models — with no district-wide effort to equalize resources.

Board members began pushing to renovate some of the old school buildings in the late 90s, though they were not able to get the community to agree to extensive changes. Since the integration order, white families — who still made up the majority of Longview’s population — had left the school district in droves for private schools, and white voters actively resisted paying to renovate the district’s schools.

“If you’re an Anglo family and you’re taking your kid out of school, why would you vote yes to float a bond?” said Chris Mack, a white board member first elected in 1993 who was a middle school student in Longview ISD when it was forced to integrate. In his opinion, it would have been impossible to convince them to pay to repair all the district’s schools at the time: “I don’t think it would have had an ice cube’s chance in hell.”

When Beard was elected to the seven-member board in 1998, 13 years after Simmons, not much had changed. Beard describes a dysfunctional board whose meetings were stymied by personal politics and disagreements over district leadership, leaving little room for attention to their court-ordered requirements.

Meanwhile, the same federal courts that had slapped schools around the country with desegregation orders weren’t aggressively enforcing those orders as national political will plummeted for mandated busing and transfers of teachers.

By many accounts, the turning point came when James Wilcox — a hard-charging leader with high ambitions for the district — was hired as superintendent in 2007.

“Wilcox, in my opinion, is the most valuable player ever in the school district,” Mack said. “It’s his leadership, the programs he brought in, the things he implemented since we got here, that’s what started winning people back to Longview ISD.”

With Wilcox at the helm, Simmons, Beard, Mack and other board members asked the community to approve a $266.9 million bond to finance a massive overhaul of the district’s schools. They aggressively courted community support at town halls across the district, pitching the bond as a way to curb the excessive price tag of maintaining old buildings, ensure that all schools were in the best shape, and curtail the use of busing.

The measure passed in 2008 by fewer than 20 votes.

Longview ISD built eight schools, renovated three others, razed several school buildings and upgraded technology across the district.

By then, the makeup of the town had changed significantly since the court order forced Longview to start busing. Hispanic families, primarily Mexican immigrants, moved to Longview and filled the void left by white families who had fled the public schools. A district that was about 65 percent white, 0.2 percent Hispanic and 35 percent black in 1973 had become about 48 percent black, 28 percent Hispanic and 24 percent white by 2008.

The massive overhaul appears to have worked. Longview ISD made more progress integrating black students after 2008 than it had in the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of school segregation data by Meredith Richards, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University.

While overhauling schools, the district went back to the federal court to argue that it no longer needed an extensive busing system, which district leaders argued had become tedious, with students living on the same street sometimes shuttled to different schools miles apart.

“We did what was best for our students while meeting the requirements of the desegregation order,” Wilcox said from his office earlier this year. “But it was a dinosaur, a pyramid, or whatever you want to say — something that in our mind has lost its function because it’s a totally different district.”

In 2014, the courts agreed to release the district from some of the restrictions of the original 1970 court order. In exchange, the district’s leaders promised to spend the next three years working to improve in areas where Longview still needed to make progress after more than four decades: monitoring racial disparities in student discipline, preventing students from transferring to schools where their race was the majority, hiring a more diverse staff and ensuring students of color had equal opportunity to take advanced classes.

A strategy with a Montessori in mind

Wilcox and the school board had transformed the district with the aim of giving every student the same building blocks for a quality education from the second they stepped inside a school.

Since 2017, most pre-K and kindergarten students in Longview have begun their education at East Texas Montessori Prep, a $31 million, 150,000-square-foot building located right in the middle of the district.

“We have the same exact expectations for every student,” Wilcox said.

Widely considered an exclusive educational program more common in private schools, Montessori prioritizes self-directed, hands-on student learning. Longview ISD’s leaders first incorporated Montessori instruction at different elementary schools before deciding to consolidate the programs at one massive campus.

Simmons saw the school as a way to give students of color a competitive advantage early in their lives, which he had been preaching for decades — but like the bond issue, that too was met with resistance. Community members often responded to the district’s pitch to create the Montessori school by complaining about how much it would cost, Simmons said.

“People don’t believe in educating all children. They believe in educating their kids, not your kid,” Simmons said.

Among the strongest objections to a district-wide Montessori school came from parents at Johnston-McQueen Elementary School, located in the whitest part of the school district, where parents successfully advocated to keep a traditional pre-K and kindergarten program for students zoned there. Scott Fisher, last year’s principal, said parents wanted a school with more structure than the Montessori model, in which teachers present a lesson and give students freedom to continue learning the concept on their own.

Wilcox and board members agreed, in part to appease white parents and keep them from leaving the district, which would make its schools even less diverse, according to Mack. “If parents want their kids to go, then fine. We want to keep them in our district,” he said.

To Simmons, the separate program is a figurative foot in the door, impeding the district’s plan for a cohesive education system. “Now you make it make sense to me, when Montessori is the most well-known preparatory program worldwide,” Simmons said with a laugh. “Why would you not take advantage of that? So I think you can read into it what it says.”

If the decision had been left up to Beard, Longview ISD would not have given up court supervision at all. He made that clear to his colleagues before they gathered in the district’s boardroom in November 2017 to take a final vote on the district’s request to be completely released from federal oversight now that they had complied with the 2014 order.

His opposition is recorded in a few lines in the board minutes: “Knowing that at a drop of a dime the board could change and take…its sight off what is best for ALL students, he will not support this motion.”

Beard voted no, joined by Shan Bauer, who is also black.

Cattleya Covarrubias (left) helps Aryana Huerta with a lesson at East Texas Montessori Prep Academy.
Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune