The Long Walk Home

The public had no access to these meetings, in which the lawyers and "experts" compiled a long list of academic themes they imagined might be attractive to suburban whites as well as urban blacks -- foreign languages, fine arts, business, science, law enforcement and agriculture. After whittling the list to a manageable size, the group held three public meetings and hired two more consultants to write the final plan. While these two consultants wrote in one room, Benson and the other hired guns examined the printed drafts, fine-tuning the plan.

At the end of it all, Central High School emerged as the proposed site for two magnet themes: Computers Unlimited and Classical Greek.

Many people have wondered why the planners chose to reconfigure a predominantly black high school around such a blatantly Eurocentric theme as Classical Greek. Benson says it was to appeal to kids' affinity for sports. (He and his fellow planners included a brief essay by Sir Richard Livingstone in the school's plan, presumably to offer poetic insight. "And what is a complete human being?" Livingstone asked in the 1940s. "I shall take the Greek answer to this question. Human beings have bodies, minds and characters.... This trinity of body, mind and character is man; man's aim, besides earning his living, is to make the most of all three.")

They didn't choose Central because of its long tradition of athletic dominance, Benson says. "I don't think we even knew that," he says. "I think we might have known they had a good basketball team, but that didn't really factor into our decision." Instead, their logic was based on the need of both the school and the Classical Greek program for a new building to house facilities for the breadth of athletics it would offer -- swimming, diving, gymnastics and fencing, in addition to traditional sports.

At first, the prospect of a new building and supercharged academic programs thrilled the Central community. "I thought it was a fantastic idea," says coach Bush. "I felt that by getting facilities that were equal or comparable to other schools', maybe now we could finally get some things cooking."

"We felt for once like our community was getting something that would really make difference," says Sandra Beasley, who was then an assistant principal. Beasley joined other educators and people from the community on a task force to plan the new school. But the group was hamstrung. Members had to work within the parameters of the desegregation plan, and that left basically one goal: Bring whites to the school.

Beasley says it was a mistake not to try to tap the forces that had previously rallied around Central. Looking back, she says, "One of the mistakes we have made in this district is not capitalizing on some of the talent that was already here. The people with the true commitment. We brought in people who didn't have any urban experience and we let them out-talk us."

Art Rainwater, who was Central's principal then, concedes this might have been a mistake. "Of course, the times were different then," he explains. "You didn't have the same emphasis on parental involvement that you do today." But Rainwater says his ultimate goal was to build a community of support among the parents whose kids attended the school. The members of that community might not have lived next door to one another, but Rainwater believes they could have affected students' lives if the magnet plan had been allowed to continue.

The common perception among longtime Kansas Citians, however, is that the plan was inherently flawed because it bused students to scattered sites around the city, helping to erode community bonds already frayed by middle-class flight and the crack epidemic, which hit urban neighborhoods at the same time as the magnet plan.

The neighborhood-as-extended-family experience Ray Wilson had enjoyed as a youth disappeared. "[The desegregation plan] separated our community into individual families," says Dorothy Fauntleroy, a longtime resident of the neighborhood. "Now families don't talk to one another. They don't tell other families' kids to behave."

Benson still defends the plan. "I think they're wrong," he says. "The sentiment is real, and the nostalgia behind the sentiment is real, but the facts on the ground indicate otherwise. That community disappeared between 1968 and 1985." He says that much of the black middle class left the inner-city neighborhood around Central in search of better services in suburban communities. They left behind a highly mobile lower class. The district, he says, has struggled to educate children who are sometimes forced to switch schools several times a year. "The magnet plans, if anything, actually brought stability to the lives of children," he says, because it offered to pick up students wherever they lived and take them to the same school every day.

In late October 1988, a group of protesters gathered on the front steps of the old Central High School carrying signs reading "Flunk the school board!" and "End educational and economic apartheid!"

"We're fired up!" they shouted. "We want our share!"

"This is the beginning of a movement," said Ajamu Webster, president of the local chapter of the National Black United Front.

The movement, which came to be known as the Coalition for Educational and Economic Justice, was sparked in part by the bidding process to supply equipment for Central's computer magnet theme.