So Near, and So Far

Finally -- it seemed like it had taken forever -- we were at Nelson Road. Might that car coming toward us be Mr. Simpson, one of the truant officers? Duck. Duck! Now. Duck! Maybe. Maybe not. But: whew.

At last we crossed, and dipped into and beyond a grove of trees.

We were on the other side, inside a lovely expanse called Wolfe Park, where blacks rarely ventured.

I don't think I had ever seen anything so lovely, so green, so cool in the shade. There was a basketball court. And nets on the rims! We proceeded to play and laugh, feeling like adventurers, explorers. Like spies even: We were not supposed to be here. And when we stopped, from exhaustion, we explored some more, walking and gazing around the area. There stood St. Charles High, a prep school on beautifully manicured grounds; there sat houses with tall windows and circular driveways; there sat tennis courts. It was a Columbus we didn't know. We had slipped through an Ozlike curtain, into the neighborhood of Bexley -- fancy, well tended and, to us, somewhat intimidating.

You'd wonder: How do you get to this side of town?

Then came the legal decision that stunned the town fathers: In 1977, U.S. District Judge Robert Duncan, who was appointed to the bench by Richard Nixon, ruled that the Columbus schools had "intentionally aggravated, rather than alleviated" racial segregation. (His decision cited both schools I had attended: Monroe and East.) Ordering the school system to adopt a busing plan, he wrote, "Firm action is needed when the horse won't drink the water." There were appeals, which were lost, and Duncan's ruling went into effect in 1979.

By then I had graduated from college.

It was a momentous decision, and acquaintances of mine were constantly talking about it. In the years to come, the decision would scoop up a boatload of my nieces and nephews.

"It was a great decision," says Carol Tyler, now retired from nonprofit work in the city and whose family operated a popular drugstore on Mount Vernon Avenue.

But Tyler, like others, lamented one visceral reaction to the decision: "There was white flight like you wouldn't believe," she remembers.

As for Judge Duncan, he is now off the bench. He lectures, does some writing. The U.S. Supreme Court's recent 5 to 4 ruling disheartened him. "I was disappointed in the decision but not surprised by it," he says, citing other rulings that have seemed to thwart efforts to redress past inequalities. "Education, at least to me, is best done in a diverse setting."

One of the most pernicious practices in Columbus, he says, was that education officials continued to assign black teachers to black schools, but precious few black teachers to white schools. "In the '60s and '70s, when Columbus experienced meteoric growth, the schools became even more segregated," he says.