INGLEWOOD

I arrived in Inglewood in April 1966. This was at a time when the city and school district were undergoing a racial change. The city of Los Angeles was across the street from Inglewood's east boundary and that part of Los Angeles was almost totally black. Naturally the black people wanted to improve their living standard so they began to buy homes and move into Inglewood all along the eastern boundary. At the same time a few financially successful black people began to buy homes in La Dera Heights, a prime residential sub-division in north west Inglewood. One of the first black families was that of Frank Robinson who was then Manager of the Cleveland Indians baseball team and they were soon joined by doctors, lawyers and other professionals. As a result of these changes, we had black students in the west part and the east part of the district but the middle was all white.

The older residents of Inglewood were quite confused and uncertain about what they should do. Many of them simply sold to black families and moved away. Others made an honest attempt to welcome the blacks into their neighborhoods. A few people were very hostile toward the blacks refusing to talk with them and hoping they would go away.

The school district was a key player in this drama. The Board of Education appointed a Citizens Committee to deal with the problems of integration in the schools and hired a "Human Relations Coordinator." This Coordinator was a big black guy who was a kind of referee in all disputes between blacks and whites. He was also expected to teach the whites how to get along with the blacks. As I recall it, this man never gained entry to the inner circle of leadership at the district level. He operated independent of the top level administration and was gone a great deal of the time telling other school districts how to integrate peacefully.

Then a lawsuit was filed claiming that Inglewood was in violation of certain Federal Statutes requiring school enrollments to be racially balanced. We spent a lot of time in court trying to get a decision that we could finance and that would satisfy the Federal guidelines. The Court refused to consider the element of cost in any plans for racial integration. We tried to make the point that dollars for education were in limited supply and that anything that cut into that supply would leave less money for the basic job of educating children. The Court was deaf to that argument and ordered Inglewood to achieve racial balance in its schools by a certain date.

Now the only way to mix students who live in segregated neighborhoods is to transport a certain number out of one neighborhood and into another neighborhood and to take some out to make room for those being brought in. This means "bussing" which is a trigger word any place in the country but bussing is the most obvious and the most used technique for achieving racial balance in school districts. Bussing school children out of their home neighborhoods gives an accurate head count of black vs white and