Seattle Schools and the Changing Face of American Racial Politics, 1960- 1980
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Learning Liberalism: Seattle Schools and the Changing Face of American Racial Politics, 1960- 1980 Kirsten Louise Martens Pochop A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Susan A. Glenn, Chair Margaret O’Mara Nancy Beadie Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History © Copyright 2014 Kirsten Louise Martens Pochop University of Washington Abstract Learning Liberalism: Seattle Schools and the Changing Face of American Racial Politics, 1960- 1980 Kirsten Louise Martens Pochop Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Susan A. Glenn, History This dissertation compares and contrasts the two major anti-busing movements in Seattle, Washington, the first in the early 1970s and the second in the late 1970s. Opposition to busing was fierce and unrelenting, excepting physical violence, opponents tried every available tool at their disposal from a vitriolic School Board recall campaign to lawsuits questioning the legal standing of the policy to ballot initiatives. The politics of mandatory desegregation also revealed complex, cross-racial opposition to and insecurities about class, changing gender and family norms, and perceived and real threats to neighborhood cohesiveness. Seattle’s stagnant, acerbic race relations coexisted with rapid shifts in liberal discourse. By 1978, when publicly addressing social issues such as education or low-income housing, conservatives and liberals gained political capital by appearing sensitive to race. I argue that busing was a formative policy, which influenced 1970s liberal ideologies and identities as much as it shaped conservatism in the period. Furthermore, Seattle’s cross-party endorsement of the 1978 busing program demonstrates that American politics in the period were not clearly rightward bound. When seen as politically expedient and economically beneficial, Republicans and Democrats alike publicly embraced racial liberalism. Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Bridging Old and New Seattle: Peninsula Neighborhoods, Downtown Elite, and Civil Rights ............................................................................................................................................ 16 Chapter 2: “This strangle hold over our future:” Black Resistance to Busing in Seattle ............. 55 Chapter 3: Citizens Against Mandatory Busing Reject the Extremists: “John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan, and Women’s Lib” ..................................................................................................... 99 Chapter 4: The Seattle Way: Selling the 1978 Seattle Plan ........................................................ 150 Chapter 5: Cracking the Liberal Veneer: Anti-busing in 1978 Seattle ....................................... 200 Epilogue: The Legacy of Desegregation..................................................................................... 240 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 247 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 251 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 257 Introduction Seattle is a fantastic city. Because it’s beautiful, it’s diverse, colorful, all kinds of people. All Kinds of People! So we’ve got to figure out a school system that’s best for a city with all kinds of people. If you lived in an all-white suburb you wouldn’t have to worry about this challenge. But then, you wouldn’t have Seattle! 1 Seattle Public Schools, Public Relations Material, undated Greetings from sunny Seattle, where women are ‘gals,’ people are ‘folks,’… you can’t sit Indian-style but you can sit ‘crisscross applesauce,’ when the sun comes out it’s never called ‘sun’ but always ‘sunshine,’ boyfriends and girlfriend are ‘partners,’… and any request, reasonable or unreasonable, is met with ‘no worries.’2 Maria Semple, Seattle Author, 2012 The Seattle School District’s mid-1970s public relations poem that painted an idealized picture of race relations in the city and the rant by Bernadette, the main character in Maria Semple’s best-selling 2012 satirical novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, capture the essence of Seattle’s contemporary national and international reputation for social and racial liberalism. Yet, as Semple mocks, Seattle’s liberalism, expressed in the non-confrontational, politically correct dialogue of its residents is often more style than substance. The city’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century progressive status correlates with the post-industrial rise of local giants 1 Seattle Public Schools, “Seattle,” Undated marketing poem from 1976 or 1977, before the development of the Seattle Plan, Seattle Public Schools Archive, Un-accessioned, William Maynard Files, Box 2. 2 Maria Semple, Where’d you Go, Bernadette, (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 122. 1 Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon.3 This combination of new wealth and young liberals is fertile ground for what pundits have described as Seattle’s “latte liberal” voting bloc. Despite Seattle’s current reputation, in the 1970s, the city’s veneer of liberal harmony was built on shaky ground, relying on a problematic myth of Northern and Pacific Northwest exceptionalism that does not withstand scrutiny.4 Seattle’s racism was longstanding and severe and its opposition to busing was fierce and unrelenting. To overturn busing, excepting physical violence, opponents tried every available tool at their disposal from a vitriolic School Board recall campaign to lawsuits questioning the legal standing of the policy to ballot initiatives. The politics of mandatory desegregation also revealed complex, cross-racial opposition to and insecurities about class, changing gender and family norms, and perceived and real threats to neighborhood cohesiveness. Seattle’s stagnant, acerbic race relations, as seen through the lens of the city’s anti-busing campaigns, coexisted with rapid shifts in liberal discourse. By 1978, when publicly addressing social issues such as education or low-income housing, conservatives and liberals gained political capital by appearing sensitive to race. Seattle’s liberal façade was born out of this contradiction between liberal language and racial upheaval. I argue that busing was a formative policy, which influenced 1970s liberal ideologies and identities as much as it shaped conservatism in the period.5 Furthermore, Seattle’s cross-party endorsement of the 1978 busing program 3As “liberal” became a pejorative term in American politics in the late 1970s, liberals increasingly labeled themselves as “progressive.” Unless referring to contemporary Seattle, I employ the “liberal” nomenclature because it was commonly used in the period. 4 For works that disprove Northern exceptionalism see: Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). 5 To varying degrees, all of these works cite opposition to busing as an explanatory factor in the rise of conservatism. Matthew Dallek, The Right Movement: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point 2 demonstrates that American politics in the period were not clearly rightward bound.6 When seen as politically expedient and economically beneficial, Republicans and Democrats alike publicly embraced racial liberalism. The timing of Seattle’s two busing movements that spanned most of the 1970s offers a new perspective upon the evolution of liberalism, racial discourse, and busing. Only through a close reading of conservative and liberal anti-busing rhetoric can this rapid shift towards racial liberalism be uncovered and in turn cross-party parallels be revealed. Furthermore, the liberalism of the President Carter era from 1976 to 1980 was different than that of the civil rights era or even of the early 1970s McGovern era. The evolution of the language used by busing supporters such as the Chamber of Commerce and the School Board and opponents such as Boeing machinists was indicative of a national shift in racial politics. Even busing opponents, who were often socially conservative, understood that by the late 1970s, the changes wrought by the 1960s civil rights movements were permanent and required, at least on the surface, a shift in how one spoke about race and race prejudice in public. I examine these shifts in politics expressed through discourse by comparing and contrasting the two major anti-busing movements in Seattle’s history, one in the early 1970s and the second in the late 1970s. While the vast majority of the busing historiography focuses exclusively on the early 1970s, by spreading my analysis across the 1970s this study provides a in American Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2000); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great