The Long Walk Home

The game was excruciatingly close. It ended with a goal-tending call in favor of Raytown. Central fans cried "bad call!" while Raytown fans unfurled the Stars and Bars and shouted racist epithets. Central fans stormed the floor, throwing chairs and swinging fists. Though coach Bush and his players tried to stop the fight, the state activities association suspended Central for a year. The stiff penalty brought national attention, and state officials lifted the ban after the NAACP threatened to sue.

"Central had a reputation," Smith admits. "We had some rough crowds that did go to Central."

"That was the thing about this school," Wilson says. "We had an image of sheer terror. There were incidents where we had badasses, no doubt about it. But they were in the minority."

The press, however, tended to reinforce Central's negative image. A 1971 Star article headlined "Chicken as Morale Builder," for example, began by asking, "Will fried chicken in the cafeteria prevent student uprisings at Central high school?" It closed with an obviously out-of-context quote from a black board member: "Is there an expert here who can tell us whether fried chicken is soul food?" Days later, black leaders picketed the Star's office to protest the article.

When Central grad William McClendon returned as a student teacher in 1969, he noticed that "a lot of the expectations [students had been held to] in the early '60s had gone.... The neighborhood had changed."

Statistics back him up. From 1965 to 1968, Central's tenth graders scored lower on standardized tests than the school district's average.

During this period, Kansas City saw the first serious pushes for a comprehensive desegregation plan. These initially arose from the black community's response to overcrowding at Central. The district bused about a hundred kids from Central to other schools, though that was hardly enough to ease the problem. Meanwhile, the all-white populations at Northeast, Van Horn and Southwest remained at their same levels.

In 1968, Superintendent Hazlett released a long-awaited master plan for integrating the district. It proposed busing kids out of overcrowded schools, clustering several segregated elementary schools so their racially diverse student bodies could mix and establishing "magnet" high schools. The magnets would offer specialized curricula (vocational education, fine arts, science) to attract students from all areas of the city. The report also recommended offering multicultural and African-American history courses districtwide. After the riots, Mayor Ilus Davis' Commission on Civil Disorders urged compliance with this plan. But the school board issued a statement that read, "We do not advocate 'bussing' for the sole purpose of integration." In 1971, another city task force pushed for African-themed classes, among other things, but the school board again declined.

In 1973, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed a lawsuit to desegregate the high schools. Federal officials applied pressure, threatening to sever funds. The school board responded by adopting an integration plan that affected only 17 of the district's 98 schools. It involved busing about 700 of the district's 65,000 students. Most of the bused kids were black. Unsatisfied, federal officials launched an investigation, found the district guilty of discrimination and withheld millions of dollars.

So the school board came up with "Plan 6C." It emerged after two years of contentious board meetings at which parents and residents -- most of them from the areas around Van Horn and Northeast -- brandished signs saying "No Busing!" and "Integration should be a choice!" In 1976, a white group known as the Southwest Area Educational Council, led by William Buckner and school board president James Lyddon, wrote a letter to the school board asking that it limit minority enrollment at Southwest and several other schools in the area to 30 percent.

When Plan 6C was finally launched at the start of the school year in 1977, it eliminated the district's all-white high schools by busing black kids to all-white Northeast and Van Horn. But it left a swath of all-black schools running through the heart of the city. For the most part, black students were the only ones who had to board buses bound for integrated schools.

The plan enraged blacks and whites alike. "This is probably the weakest desegregation effort in the country," the Reverend Emanuel Cleaver, then president of the SCLC, complained to reporters.

"6C has divided our community when support is needed," said Alice Ellison, the black president of the Central High School Alumni Association. "Our community identity is slowly slipping away."

Whites expressed their outrage by leaving the district in greater numbers than before.

The media were ready for a fight on the first day of school in 1977. Amid threats of a Ku Klux Klan rally, black students arrived at Van Horn wearing their Central letter jackets. "The tension was very thick," principal David Griffin told the Star. "That first year there were a lot of rumors, uncertainties and fights."

But there was also more money. The federal government increased funding for schools such as Van Horn and Northeast, which, despite their vicious protestations, became more mixed than schools such as Central. So Central continued to deteriorate. Students there continued studying with outdated, hand-me-down books. Classes remained overcrowded, sometimes meeting in utility closets.