EJERCICIO DE APRENDIZAJE
OBJETIVOS PLANEACIÓN DE LA AUDITORÍA
On February 11, Atlanta mother Betsey Stone turned her car down Kingswood Lane in Buckhead. After parking, she made her way to the entrance of Northside High School and joined a small group of Buckhead parents who had gathered in the library. Like most of the other mothers attending the meeting,
Elementary, Garden Hills Elementary, and Sarah Smith Elementary sent their PTA presidents and other active par-
ent representatives to Jackson. At the time of the meeting, the Warren Jackson PTA president was Margaret Allen, whose husband, Ivan Allen III, was the son of Atlanta’s former mayor and the current president of the Chamber of Commerce. The following year, fearful that the pending metropolitan busing case would bus their children across town and away from their neighborhood public school, the Allens withdrew their two children and enrolled them at their alma mater, The Westminster Schools. “School Discussion Planned,” Northside Neighbor, February 5, 1975, page 5; Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family (New York: Pen- guin Books, 1996): 442.
she had moved to Atlanta in the sixties. Her husband had graduated from Duke Law School and been of- fered a position at an Atlanta law firm in 1964. At first, they had rented a house in Ansley Park, three miles north of the downtown. The Stones listened to the advice of other couples that they met through the law firm and purchased a home in Buckhead in order to be in the city’s best school districts. “On just that small street, Channing Drive, there were at least four lawyers: Neil Williams [at Alston & Bird’s prede- cessor], Bob Steed [at King & Spalding], and Gloria Carlton’s husband [at Troutman Sanders]. I think that is why we ended up there. I’m sure through someone at the law firm.”39 Stone quickly got to know other young mothers in the neighborhood. When her daughter Jennifer started at Morris Brandon Elemen- tary School, she volunteered with many of the women whom she had met. They read to their children’s classes, purchased art supplies, served as room mothers, provided transportation for field trips, and orga- nized fundraising events for the parent-teacher organization. The year before as Jennifer had approached middle school and their youngest child Brian eagerly waited for the day he could follow his sister to kin- dergarten at Morris Brandon, she saw first hand the hysteria and fear that gripped the Buckhead commu- nity. Many of her neighbors and husband’s co-workers had already fled to the city’s private schools. Of those neighborhood families who started at Morris Brandon, most withdrew their children at the end of fifth grade.
On that evening in February, Stone sat down across from fellow Sutton mother Margaret Miller in the Northside High School library.40 Born in Jacksonville and a 1957 graduate of Duke University, Mar- garet Miller and her husband Carl, whom she had met in college, had moved to Atlanta in 1962 after his insurance company transferred him. At first they rented an apartment. “We had an apartment at
Lakemore…a lot of young people lived in that apartment complex. Mostly people in our age range, in their mid to late twenties. We had a pretty good time there.” Soon after moving, the Millers purchased their first home in North Buckhead on Herrington Drive, because it was located less than a half-mile from
39 Interview with Betsey Beach, September 27, 2011.
40 Margaret Miller, founder and the first president of NAPPS, passed away on December 2, 2010. “Margaret Miller,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 8, 2010.
their neighborhood elementary school and “considered at that time to be the best part of the city.”41 Then their world began to fall apart. In 1973, it was announced that D.F. McClatchey Elementary was to be closed. Their three daughters were rezoned to Sarah Smith Elementary and the newly created Sutton Mid- dle School. Carl Miller recalls why his wife got involved after the Compromise was announced:
That’s what got my wife into this. We have always been on what I guess you would say was the liberal side, and she wanted to see if we could make this work. Of course busing at that time was frightening to a lot of white, northside Atlantans…they didn’t know what to expect and thought it was disruptive and that the learning qualities would drop. All the usual things that people think when they are fearful and don’t understand. My wife de- termined that we could make this work if we got a lot of other white parents to stay and not move to Sandy Springs or go to private school. She tried to have lots of meetings to allay those fears of white residents in the Buckhead area concerning the busing in of black children…I was working fulltime and trying to build a business. I left it pretty much to my wife. It was mostly mothers. There were some good people, and they tried to calm everyone down by saying, “At least give it a try and see what happens. Then if you are dissatisfied you can make some alternative moves. But at least try it.”42
During the spring of 1973, Miller helped organize activities to bring the children from both elementary schools together, including an Easter Egg Hunt for the kindergarten classes. She told one reporter who came to take photographs for the neighborhood paper, “We may lose some who will move out of the city and some of these children have been accepted at private schools, but there are still many who will work hard to make the compromise work.”43 She also made the decision to support the new middle school that was being opened and agreed to chair the newly formed, biracial Sutton Community Council’s steering committee.44 Just a few weeks prior to the Easter egg hunt, the minister at Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta, Reverend Randy Taylor, had decided to gather a group of white and black parents together to discuss how they could encourage support for the 1973 Compromise. He invited Miller to join what came to be known as the Atlanta Ad Hoc Committee for Excellence in Education. Though they had little success with the press, which continued to print stories that furthered parents’ fears over integration,
41 Interview with Carl Miller, December 12, 2011. 42 Ibid.
43Northside Neighbor, April 25, 1973.
44Northside Neighbor, August 2, 1972; Northside Neighbor, April 25, 1973; Atlanta Journal, May 23, 1973; “Open house at Dykes School set for today,” Atlanta Daily World, July 3, 1973, page 3; Roger Turner, “New bi-racial councils pushed for desegregated schools,” Atlanta Daily World, September 13, 1973, page 1; Atlanta Daily World, November 29, 1973, page 13.
the ad hoc committee focused its energy on overseeing and recruiting students to the expanded Majority- to-Minority program.45 Miller brought to the February 1976 meeting at Northside High School her earlier committee work and an unwavering faith in public education.
When Margaret Miller arrived at Northside High School she was happy to see Edith Hammond, whom she had worked with on Randy Taylor’s committee. Hammond, a Birmingham native and a gradu- ate of Howard College,46 had moved to Atlanta in 1955 when her husband Joe was accepted to the Geor- gia Institute of Technology’s graduate program in electrical engineering. When he began teaching at Georgia Tech in 1962, she stayed at home with their three daughters. She started by volunteering as a room mother at Garden Hills Elementary School and eventually served as PTA president. Her early in- volvement in the voluntary transfer plan advisory committee led to an invitation by Reverend Taylor to join the ad hoc group he was organizing.47 The experience inspired her to run for the Atlanta Board of Education in 1973, and attorney Richard Raymer narrowly defeated her in the October run-off. On Febru- ary 11, Hammond came to the meeting as the representative for North Fulton High School.48
Sitting around the Northside High School library were other parents like Betsey Stone, Margaret Miller, and Edith Hammond. They had moved to the city in the sixties and were active in their children’s schools.49 A lively discussion began. For over an hour, the parents shared their concerns. A new, political
45School Talk, November 1979; “Notes” (compiled by Marcia Klenbort), APPLE Corps, Box 5, 2004.167, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center Archives. For more on Reverend Randy Taylor’s importance in the civil rights movement see “The Night MLK Was Shot: On the April Night Martin Luther King, Jr. was Assassinated, Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. Worked behind the Scenes with Atlantans from all Walks of Life to Keep Peace in the Aftermath,” Atlanta Magazine, April 2004; Rebecca Burns, Burial for a King: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Funeral and the Week that Transformed Atlanta and Rocked the Nation (New York, NY: Scribner, 2011). See also Interview with J. Randolph Taylor, May 23, 1985, Interview C-0021, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). 46 Howard College was renamed Samford University in 1965.
47 Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 387.
48 At North Fulton, Edith Hammond had created an advisory council modeled after the Sutton Community Council and served as PTSA president. While concurrently serving on the superintendent’s Commission on Discipline from 1975 to 1976, she took on the role of being the NAPPS observer at Board of Education briefing sessions and meet- ings. She continued to attend the meetings until May 1980, when she stepped down in order to take over as chair for NPU-B. After Joe Hammond accepted a job at Clemson University, she became president of the League of Women Voters of Clemson in 2003. Atlanta Daily World, October 18, 1973, page 1; “Commission on discipline in Atlanta schools sets meetings,” Atlanta Daily World, December 1, 1974, page 9; School Talk, November 1980; The Mustard Seed, Newsletter for the Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church, June 2008.
49 Of the original Warren T. Jackson PTA members that organized the first informal meeting in 1975, only commu- nity relations chair Betty Whittier and room mother coordinator Marilyn Holmes, whose children were bused to
dimension to their volunteerism began to emerge as they voiced different ideas about how to halt white flight and alter the community’s perception of Sutton Middle School. What if each school in their group hosted a neighborhood coffee to talk to families? What if they designed a brochure for people thinking about moving to Atlanta? What if they got on the agendas at the realtors’ meetings and explained the facts?50 Lynn Westergaard, who was originally from Tennessee and had moved to Atlanta fifteen years earlier with his wife Cynthia after being hired by the newly formed regionally busing and rail system, or Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), as a Community Relations director, led the meeting. He voiced his frustration and hope to the other parents in the library.
For a long time now we've been hearing only the negative about desegregation and public schools: white flight, lowering of academic standards, discipline problems, and a general malaise in the public education system. Yes, the past few years have been difficult, for whites and especially for blacks whose children more often than whites have been trans- ported out of their neighborhoods to schools in predominantly white sections of town. But what about the positive side, which I believe, far outweighs the negative? I am able, with three children in Atlanta's public schools, to say desegregation has been a blessing.51 At the end of the meeting, the small group of parents voted to found a new coalition, the Northside At- lanta Parents for Public Schools (NAPPS).52 With children at Morris Brandon, Sutton, and Northside High School, Westergaard volunteered to be the group’s first chairman.53
Jackson Elementary School, remained involved. Betty Whittier had married her husband Philip C. Whittier, a gradu-
ate of Davidson College and Emory Law School, in 1950. She was active in both Warren T. Jackson and North Ful- ton High School’s PTAs, while their four children were in school. The Whittiers were also members at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, which was established in 1964 by St. Anne’s as a family-oriented parish committed to local out- reach, and helped found FISH, a volunteer group assisting elderly and disabled Atlantans. Marilyn Holmes was the wife of the head of orthopedic surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, Dr. Hamilton Holmes, who had desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961. She went on to serve as PTA president at Warren T. Jackson and Sutton Middle School. After her children graduated from high school, she returned to teaching second grade at Sarah Smith Ele- mentary School in 1989 and was recognized as Atlanta’s Teacher of the Year in 1992.
50 Miller, Stone and Carlton, “Parental involvement versus flight to the suburbs”; Stone, “Salisbury speech.” 51 “50 Northsiders Boost City's Public Schools,” Atlanta Daily World, January 23, 1977, page 3.
52 The Northside Atlanta Parents for Public Schools was officially incorporated on October 6, 1978. Dierdre E. Francis, “Citizen Networks in Education: Studies in Los Angeles and Atlanta,” Final Report (Washington, DC: George Washington University, Institute for Education Leadership, 1980).
53 An elder at North Avenue Presbyterian Church, Lynn Westergaard founded the Resource Service Ministries in 1984, which assisted low-income families with utilities. He passed away on June 27, 2008. Gladys Mitchell, “At the podium: NAPPS-Facts and Forum,” League of Women Voters of Atlanta-Fulton County Newsletter (April 1977); “Obituaries,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 20, 2008; Jack Neely, “The Quiet Man in the Studio: An apprecia- tion for Lynn Westergaard, 1936-2008,” Metro Pulse, July 9, 2008.
After the meeting ended, Betsey Stone went home and called up her friend Brenda Griffin. She and Brenda had first met in 1960, when their husbands had started at Duke Law School together. Griffin listened as Stone told her about the group and asked her to come to the next meeting in March.
The Carltons, Betsey’s neighbor Gloria Carlton and her sister Gail Bell, and Betsey and I, we were talking at PTA meetings all the time. Betsey called me after the first meeting and asked me to come be a founder of this new group. It’s crucial to understand that the spark for this went out from the middle school on because all the white parents were fly- ing away after fifth grade.54
Just a month earlier in January 1976, they had organized a presentation to area real estate firms at Morris Brandon Elementary. “We decided that we needed show-and-tell…to influence the realtors, to try and educate them.” 55 As PTO president Stone provided the realtors with an impressive list of why parents believed their school was a selling point that enhanced the neighborhood’s value and appeal. She high- lighted the strong parental involvement in the school, which ranged from fundraising for new equipment to coffees for new mothers.56
On the phone Betsey Stone excitedly told Brenda Griffin about the group of parents she had met. Like them, they “were the parents who were involved in the PTA and tutoring and field trips.”57 As fami- lies had fled the public schools, they were the parents who stayed. They had organized presentations and open houses, which tried to make families aware of all the positive things going on in their own school while also working to counter the rampant rumors and misinformation being circulated by area realtors. Now they wanted to band together and reach out to the entire community. It was a small group from the neighborhood, but they were all philosophically and politically committed to the public schools. For each of them, there had been a moment in their lives that introduced them to the civil rights movement and changed their political consciousness as white, middle-class women.
Betsey Stone had grown up in Oklahoma and met her husband, who was from New York, while attending Marietta College. Neither of them had ever been to the South before arriving in Durham, North
54 Interview with Brenda Griffin, September 27, 2011. 55 Ibid.
56 Barbara Smith, “Area School Not Letting Problems Stop Progress,” Northside Neighbor, January 7, 1976, page 1. 57Atlanta Journal, February 13, 1980, 1B.
Carolina in 1960. As Brian Stone started his first year of law school, Betsey worked as a secretary at Duke, the only job available to a woman on campus with a college degree. Their lives were busy but peaceful. Then during Brian’s last year in law school, Duke University integrated. Stone recalls the im- pact the event had in awakening their political consciousness:
The entire university was white, and the entire law school was white, all the professors and all the students. Brian’s last year in law school, they desegregated the university through the law school. Two African-American men were admitted. On Sunday nights one of the white students had to go get food for them because they weren’t serving dinner on campus. It wasn’t safe for them to eat at a restaurant…we lived a white life in a white world…what happened at the law school when they desegregated, that for Brian and I was it. I came from a very apolitical family. I was clueless about politics…civil rights, and later women’s rights, was what made me political. No question about it. It defined where our passion was. It’s why Brian got into the Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, and I wonder if I ever would have gotten on this path if it not for that experience.58
The Stone’s emerging political commitment was reinforced by their faith. They had joined Trinity Pres- byterian Church after moving to Atlanta and listened as Reverend Allison Williams encouraged the con- gregation to become active in progressive causes.59 “It was a totally white church, but Allison Williams was the minister and he was very intellectual. He was the one that motivated me in those sermons.”60
It was hard enough moving here. But my kids grew up as seeing integration as normal and that was the blessing for me as a parent living in the South. If there’s anything I cele- brate today, that’s it. That was the gift that was given to them by the kids whose families voluntarily and willing put them on buses to come to the northside neighborhoods.61 For the Stones the integration of the public schools became the line they were going to hold.
Originally from Minnesota, Brenda Griffin met her husband Harry “Buck” Griffin while attend- ing Smith College. After graduating from Duke Law School, they moved to Atlanta in 1964 when Buck