S10E12 – Local Stories of Desegregation: DENVER (Part 2)

S10E12 -Local Stories of Desegregation: Denver (Part 2)

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver,

Dr. Val: I am Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is Local Stories of Desegregation: Denver, (Part 2). Val, we are back for part two of our three part series, doing a deep dive on Denver's desegregation story.

Dr. Val: That's right. And for any listeners who are just joining us for the first time at this one, we wanna invite you to, to go back to listen to this first episode. But in this series, we get to dig deep into some work that Andrew was doing in his community around educational justice.

Andrew: Yeah, that's right. Little mini series that we're gonna do around, various stories of desegregation from around the country. We've got some others coming here in the future as well. Listeners, if you've got a great story of desegregation in your own local town, please let us know. Call on in, send us a voice memo. But yeah, today we're gonna continue the conversation about Denver. In the last episode, we heard from Christie Keyes Romero, who was the daughter of the named plaintiff in Denver's desegregation case known as The Keyes Case. And today we're gonna dig in a little more on the details of the case with another special guest, my mother.

Dr. Val: That's right. So this is still very much a family affair. What role did your mother play in this? Because is… are we, is this nepotism? Like what are we doing? What are we doing here?

Andrew: [laughs] That's, that's right. Yeah. No, my mom ran for school board, back in 1995. She, you know, like many parents got involved in my elementary school and then kept getting involved more and more, and kept complaining to the school board. And I think somebody said, well, if you want it fixed, why don't you run? And she said, yeah, it's a fair point. And so she did. And the Keyes case was not really part of the conversation at the time in 1995, but right after she was elected, the Keyes case was terminated. The judge who was in charge of managing the district's desegregation plan, said that the district had removed the last vestiges of discrimination to the extent practicable. And so her whole first year on the school board was figuring out what to do about that. And so, we're gonna listen to her story of the case, kind of starting at the end there and going back to the beginning of the case and giving us the details of the case.

And, you know, the court orders have been lifted all around the country at various different times. And, this is often the case, which was true in Denver as well. The cases were terminated, not really necessarily because we kind of achieved the goals of desegregation, but rather because the political will kind of ran out for it. And so certainly what happened in Denver, I think is what happened around the country as well.

Dr. Val: Yeah, absolutely. I had a chance to meet your mom and your dad when we came to visit and I am excited to know that this work that you are doing is partially inspired by your mom's efficacy and seeing the ways in which she stepped up and when the question was asked, like, “Hey, if you wanna do something about it then it might be you.” Right? And taking on that, that responsibility to do that, it just feels like an important thing to honor when anyone takes on that responsibility. So thank you to your mom, for doing that.

Andrew: Absolutely. Yeah, I'm excited to get to share her story as well because certainly it has had a big influence on my story. So let's take a listen to her and then, uh, then we'll come back and we'll set up the, the second half of the episode, which is, the first panel discussion we had at the event.

Dr. Val: Awesome.

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[audio cuts to Andrew speaking at Integration and Equity in DPS 50 Years After Keyes]

Andrew: I have mentioned the choices that my parents made a few times. They had a big impact on me obviously. I started at Stedman Elementary. My parents got involved. My dad was actually the PTA co-president and my mom got more and more engaged as people do, and eventually decided to run for school board.

She was elected in 1995 and served for four years. She actually handed me my diploma when I graduated from East in ‘96, which was, which was pretty awesome. And so it is my distinct honor to turn the program over to her. She's gonna give us some history and she's gonna introduce our first panel. She has specifically asked me not to call her mom, so I will hand the floor over to you, Mrs. Lefkowits. [audience laughs and claps]

Laura Lefkowits: Thank you, son. [audience laughs]

Well, I am here to tell the story of the Keyes case from my point of view. It's a story that, for me anyway, in some ways begins at the end. In May of ‘95, I was elected to the Denver School Board as an at-large member. As Andrew said, my journey towards service had to do with getting involved in my local school.

The Stedman boundaries had changed the year before Andrew started in school. Previously our house had been zoned for Park Hill Elementary, but it was… the boundaries were changed and Andrew went to Stedman where he was in a distinct minority of White kids. So we sent him. Later our daughter Erin went there and it was in part because of the opportunity it would provide him to go to school with kids who were not like him. And I'm happy to say that our children send their children to Stedman today.

So during the campaign, I was asked about my views on busing only once that I could recall. It was 1995. It was not a topic of discussion in the community at that time. According to a Denver Post article, I said, I believed in the principles of desegregation, and I expressed my concern that without a court order, we might return to the inequitable schools of the ‘60s. As I recall, no other candidate shared this view. They asserted that the school district had moved on from those dark days of the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. And it was simply important to provide a high quality education for everyone. This was the prevailing view of the public at the time.

So although I maintained my belief in the value of integration in all aspects of life, I didn't emphasize this on the campaign trail. So it was quite a shock when, on the morning of September 12th, 1995, four months after I had been sworn in, the DPS attorney, Michael Jackson, walked into a meeting and said “It’s over.”

And with those two words, Jackson confirmed that the district court Judge Richard Matsch, had ended the 26 year saga federal court order desegregation of the Denver Public Schools, by declaring that DPS had “removed the past vestiges of discrimination to the extent practicable”. There was much hoopla in the administration building that day. Administrators breathed the sigh of relief to have the onerous burden of federal control off their backs. And although I couldn't know it at the time how truly significant this development was going to be for the district and for my term on the board, I knew that what I thought was ahead for me when I was elected was probably going to take a back seat to this. And how right I was.

So today I have the unenviable task of describing in 20 minutes, the history of this long and complex case. My part in it, as I said, came only at the end. And fortunately for us, there are others that was with us today who will be part of our panel discussion, who literally lived the case. But, for the sake of time I’m going to whip through the high points of this case.

Activism among African Americans in Denver began at the founding of the city of Denver and the state, long before this case. But for our purposes, we're gonna start in the 1950s and ‘60s with the famous Five Points neighborhood of Denver, home to most of Denver's Black population at the time. It began to burst at the seams, driving many homeowners there to areas like North City Park and eventually Park Hill. They were in search of more space, trees, yards, all the things that most Americans look for, in their lives. This migration had profound effects on the demographics of Park Hill. By 1966, changing the once all White neighborhood of Park Hill into one with over a third of its population being Black. And of course, the schools were affected as well.

So as this migration is happening, what does the DPS School board do? Well, it was fine. In ways, all of which had the effect of maintaining the racial isolation. White families were offered discretionary transfers from predominantly Black schools to predominantly White schools and mobile classrooms were added to some Black schools to address overcrowding. This was a reality that you could see with your own eyes that undermined the district's persistent assertion that they were not discriminating when it came to assigning children to schools.

So the, the community began to protest not only the racial isolation, but the obvious differences in facilities, materials, and teacher qualifications between Black and White schools. One overt act the district took was to build a new school to address overcrowding. This new school, Barrett Elementary, located on the west side of Colorado Boulevard at 29th, opened in 1960 to much fanfare about shiny new desks in an up-to-date facility. The school's boundaries though, guaranteed a student population that was 95% Black and the shiny new building couldn't disguise the features common to a so-called Black school, less experienced teachers, substandard curriculum and materials. The school also had the effect of eliminating transfers to Park Hill Elementary that had been made available to students north of City Park who were assigned to Black schools. As we'll talk about later, Buddy Noel was one of those students who had been transferred to Park Hill, as was his sister, Angela. But when Barrett opened, Angela was moved from Park Hill to Barrett, where her fourth grade curriculum was essentially the same as what she had learned in third grade at Park Hill. Many school administrators at the time justified this, that this kind of discrepancy, um, was necessary because they believed Black children were unlikely to attend college and so did not need the same curriculum as White children.

In 1965, spurred in part by her daughter's experience at Barrett, Buddy and Angela's mother, Rachel Bassett Noel ran for and was elected to the Denver School Board as its first African American member, and this launched a lifetime of public service by Mrs. Noel focused on equity and education.

In 1963, before Mrs. Noel joined the board, the board adopted a resolution talking about equality of opportunity. It was Resolution 5100, and it said, “DPS recognizes that the continuation of neighborhood schools has resulted in the concentration of some minority racial and ethnic groups in some schools. Reduction of such concentration and the establishment of more heterogeneous or diverse groups in school is desirable to achieve equality of educational opportunity.” The resolution was strong, but it did not require any action, and so no action ensued.

But in April of 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. Noel’s frustration at the lack of action on Resolution 5100 boiled over and she, along with her colleague, Ed Benton, wrote Resolution 1490, now known famously as the Noel Resolution, referring to the goal of equality of educational opportunities set forth in 5100, the Noel Resolution directed the superintendent to create a comprehensive plan for the integration of the district schools. The clause of the resolution that most captured the public's attention required the superintendent to address segregation through, quote, “the use of transportation and the extent to which transportation should be voluntary or mandatory.”

But the resolution is actually much more than that. Its four pages constitute, in my view, a powerful treatise on the social and political environment at the time, and an acknowledgement of the deep divisions within the community regarding racial integration. It refers to the assassination of Dr. King that has “focused the attention of concerned people of goodwill upon the deep and festering injustices of modern urban existence with its contradictions of opportunity and achievement in an America dedicated, at least in theory, to the equality of opportunity for all men.”

The resolution acknowledged the fears in the community about the possible busing for integration and asserts the board's desire to “act as a unifying agency for Denver, in these difficult times.” It is this last hope, perhaps more than anything that was least realized in the years to come. The Noel resolution was passed by the board five to two. And while welcomed by some was derided by many others. The 1969 board election focused almost exclusively on the busing issue, and with two at large seats up for election, the balance of power between the pro and anti integration sentiment was at stake.

Ed Benton running for reelection was joined by Monte Pasco, Pat's husband who is here today. In the fight to secure seats for the integrationists. Frank Southworth and James Peril emerged as the anti-integration candidates. Despite winning by three to one in the Park Hill neighborhood, Benton and Pasco lost two to one citywide, flipping the board majority from the pro to the anti integration status.

So at its first meeting in May of 1969, the new board immediately overturned the integration resolutions that had resulted from the Noel Resolution. By the way, the Noel Resolution and Resolution 5100 have never been overturned. They are still on the books today.

At this point, Dr. Wilford Keyes, who you heard of and seven other families, joined forces to sue the district for denial of equal educational opportunity for the children. They asked for the desegregation of students and teachers for the equalization of resources among the schools, for the elimination of tracking and for racial sensitivity training for teachers.

The next four years would see political and legal turmoil unlike anything the city had seen before. Gordon Griner, the plaintiff's dogged attorney, with support from the firm, Holland and Hart, our generous sponsor today, led the effort against the recalcitrant of the district. As various judges ruled for or against the plaintiffs, each side appealed to higher courts until ultimately an appeal was heard by the US Supreme Court in October of 1972. The case known as Keyes v School District Number 1, was decided in favor of the plaintiffs in May of 1973.

It's notable nationally for three main precedents. First, the court ruled that Black and Latino called at that time, Negro and Hispano, students “suffered the same educational inequities when compared with the treatment afforded Anglo White students. And therefore, schools with the combined predominance of Negroes and Hispanos can be assumed to be segregated.” This ruling made the Keyes case the first tri ethnic desegregation case in the nation.

The role of Latinos in desegregation was complicated by a number of factors, particularly the need for bilingual education, which was not provided in every school in DPS. Ultimately, a group of educators known as the Congress of Hispanic Educators intervened in the case to ensure equal opportunities for the growing Latino population. This part of the case was not resolved in 1995 and is still active, and we're very fortunate to have with us, Dr. Kathy Escamilla. You will tell us more about that.

The second significant ruling in Keyes was that proof that a school district has intentionally segregated a significant part of the district, such as Park Hill supports a finding that the district operates an unconstitutional dual system with one education for Whites and another for students of color. In this case, the entire school district is subject to remedy, not just the areas focused on in the case.

And finally, the precedent was that a school district that has never been operated under a constitutionalist statutory provision, permitting segregation can still act in a way that requires them to desegregate. This last precedent was important because the Denver case was the first case in a northern city. And segregation was not imposed by law as it was in the south, or de jure is the term, but functionally many schools were as segregated as those in the South as a result of school board policies. The district's defense was that desegregation in Denver was de facto, meaning it was simply a result of the demographics of the neighborhood, or it happened in fact, and that it had nothing to do with what they did.

But the Supreme Court rejected this argument citing numerous discriminatory acts of policy by the DPS board, including the construction and student assignment plan of Barrett Elementary. And so they said the district had in fact been segregated de jure, and thus was subject to the same remedies used in southern cases. And this determination paved the way for similar cases filed in other northern cities. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the district court to determine if in fact DPS was a dual system. The finding by judge, uh, Doyle, who was the judge at the time that this was the case, the district court ordered a citywide desegregation plan to go into place.

So what was the reaction in the city to these rulings? As we heard earlier, Dr. Keyes’ house was bombed, as was the DPS bus depot where 40% of the district's buses were burned and no longer usable. Anti-busing organizations emerged and were instrumental in passing an anti busing amendment to the Colorado constitution, which prohibited busing for the purpose of achieving a racial balance in a school. The amendment did not apply to Denver while the case was ongoing and while the district was under federal control. The court order, along with national trends towards suburbanization had a dramatic effect on enrollment in DPS. In the first decade, from ‘69 to ‘79, DPS lost over 30,000 students, reducing enrollment from about 96,000 to 65,000.

Demographics changed as well, in ‘69, about 65% of DPS students were White in. By ‘79, the proportion of White students had dropped to about 42%. And in ‘95, when the court order ended, only about 28% of students were White. By then, half of all students were Latino.

A turning point in the Denver case came in ‘93 when Wellington Webb, Denver's first African American mayor, filed an amicus brief in support of DPS’ request for the case to end and to be free from federal control. Mayor Webb asserted that busing hadn’t worked and that it was more important for children to be in their own neighborhood schools supporting their own communities. Webb himself represented a change in political leadership since the 1960s, as did the district superintendent at the time, Dr. Abby Dennis, who was also Black. Webb's brief asserted that it was absurd to believe that now powerful minorities would allow discrimination to take place as it had in the past.

Two years later in 1995, judge Richard Matsch, who had taken over the case by then, seemed to agree. I see Matsch’s ruling as a white flag of surrender in the long fight for integration. In explaining that it was only necessary for the district to remedy past discrimination caused by segregation, not to integrate the schools, and emphasizing that all those segregation was outlawed, integration was not the required remedy, the judge said the district had eliminated the vestiges of discrimination to the extent practicable. The judge also expressed his view on the post-racial nature of Denver, of the nineties compared to the sixties. Perhaps he had been influenced by Mayor Webb when he wrote, “the Denver now before this court is very different from what it was when this lawsuit began. People of color are not bystanders. They are active players in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the community. There is little danger that they will permit the public schools to deny them full participation.”

Of course, people of color had never been bystanders as evidenced by the case itself. Nevertheless, the ideal espoused by Justice Thurgood Marshall that children need to learn together in order to live together and understand one another was not the major focus of public discourse at the time. So after only four months of service on the board, I and my colleagues were faced with reconstructing the district after over 20 years of federal control. The main issue we struggled with was the anti busing amendment, which now applied to Denver. Although Judge Matsch asserted that the amendment would not require us to change our student assignment plan, the Attorney General at the time, Gail Norton, said publicly that she intended to enforce the amendment fully. But that because the school year was already underway, we, we would have a year to relocate schools. And so we move forward with the student assignment plan that is still in place today. We re-drew neighborhood school boundaries in order to give every child a guaranteed seat in a neighborhood school while attempting to preserve as much integration as possible in a city with segregated housing.

Many schools did not have sufficient capacity to accommodate all its neighborhood children. In some cases, magnet schools were taking up space and they needed to be moved. We struggled with all these decisions. Ultimately, in every case, creating capacity for neighborhood schools won out. Magnets were moved, and capital funds were spent on expansions and remodels to bring kids back to a nearby school. By the way, these neighborhood school boundaries, redrawn in 1995-1996 are for the most part still in place today. The district has not addressed boundaries for the city as a whole since 1995.

The next part of our plan was for the first time we allowed children to attend any school in the district they wished, as long as there was sufficient space after neighborhood children had been enrolled, and importantly, as long as they could provide their own transportation. This was the beginning of the choice process you're all familiar with today.

Next, we created what were called special transportation zones. An attempt to preserve the integration that already existed in some schools by allowing children to continue attending their current school with transportation, provided an option many families chose, but only for a few years.

And finally, in recognition of the fact that this new student assignment plan would undoubtedly result in many more schools with high concentrations of students in greater need, we revised the formula by which funds were allocated to individual schools from the district's overall budget in order to provide greater, though I would argue, inadequate equity. This equity-based allocation formula is still in place today, although with some modifications and is still inadequate today.

And so with newer, remodeled facilities, extra funds targeted to the different needs of children in each school, a neighborhood school for everyone, and the freedom to choose other options, we felt that we had done the best job we could to ensure equality of opportunity in the post court order “New normal”. It's only in retrospect that I have come to question some of these policies.

So this story from 30,000 feet leaves so much out. For example, research and personal anecdotes have shown that there were many positive effects of the integration that occurred in the ‘70s and ‘80s with higher student achievement among students of color and a reduction of prejudice in all students who participated.

This is a book I would recommend by Rucker Johnson called Children of the Dream, making that case. But as Andrew and Mike both mentioned earlier, we also know that students of color were often faced with an unwelcoming environment in the schools to which they were bused. And Black teachers lost jobs when the district chose to eliminate them from the so-called White schools.

Today, as we will hear later, our district is more segregated than ever. We will discuss how that ongoing segregation impacts students today. But for now, I hope this brief overview provides us with a common understanding of what happened from 1969 to 1995 and why. And with that, we're going to turn to our esteemed panel. Thank you very much.

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Andrew: So that was the history of the case as told through my mom's eyes.

Dr. Val: What your mom reminds me of is the fact that everyone has been impacted by desegregation efforts in the United States. Right. And while some stories may feel central, I would argue that all stories are important for us to continue to uncover and think about and understanding the impact, um, I'm trying to get my parents to come on the podcast. You can't be the only one with parents on the podcast.

Andrew: No, that's not fair. [laughing]

Dr. Val: So I'm trying, I'm trying. And, and so, I hope listeners are inspired, to just go talk to your own families about what happened and what they were feeling and if they notice anything at all or if, if they were sheltered from, from these experiences.

Andrew: Even, even no story is a story, right? If you, if you, if you went through life without being aware of any sort of court ordered desegregation, attempts going on, that in of itself is a story too.

Dr. Val: Absolutely. Absolutely. So we have three more people who are joining to talk, um, to share some things in the second half. Who do we have?

Andrew: Yeah, that's right. . So, after my mom gave her, um, Mrs. Lefkowitz gave her history, we turned to the first panel and, we're gonna listen to that now, but the panel had Buddy Noel who was the son of Rachel B. Noel, the first Black school board member, Pat Pasco, who was heavily involved in desegregation efforts in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. And wrote the only full length book telling the history of the case. There’s a link to the book in the show notes, and interestingly Buddy Noel and his sister Angela wrote the preface to that book, and you’ll hear Buddy quote from that preface in the panel section we are about to play. And then Kathy Escamilla, who's part of the Congress of Hispanic educators or CHE, who were interveners in the case. So they joined onto the case in the mid ‘80s, out of a recognition that English language learners had different needs than Black students when it came to desegregation. So, um, she joined us to kind of lay out that history as well.

Dr. Val: I’m ready, let's do it.

Andrew: All right, let's take a listen.

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[audio cuts back to panel discussion]

Laura Lefkowits: We are so fortunate to have three great panelists who know the history of the case.

Um, Buddy, let's start with you. Buddy Noel, is the son of Rachel B. Noel who was instrumental in the case. [audience claps] He tells us he's a surrogate for his mother, But you've been practicing law for over 50 years and you have your own first to lay claim to. You were the first Black partner at Holme Roberts and Owens in 1977. And even though you weren't a lawyer on the Keyes case, you have a lot to share about the Keyes case. For example, both your sister Angela and you were impacted by the manipulation of school boundaries that I talked about earlier. You and Angela attended Park Hill, but Angela was moved from there to Barrett when that school opened, and this event sort of radicalized your mother and motivated her to get involved. So just tell us, what was it about this experience that was so profound for her and for your family?

Buddy Noel: That's not an easy response to make if you realize that I was a small child. I was a fifth, sixth grader. I wasn't a lawyer. I wasn't, uh, uh, studied history. I hadn’t talked to many people with interviews and academicians. I was a kid. Sometimes we forget when we look back how much we asked children to do. Michael has forced us to think again about that today.

So why would I be here other than to just be mom's surrogate? I was a personal part of the early days of starting the Keyes case. We grew up, uh, on 22nd and Vine, and I went to Wyman, kindergarten through fifth grade. Then my father built a house at 26th Avenue and Adams for my sixth grade year. That was one block inside of a special optional district, 99% White parents and children who didn't wanna go to Columbine, but preferred Park Hill Elementary through this special optional busing plan.

So I ended up as one or two Black kids on a bus that was set up for White kids to escape the Park Hill. I saw, my mother saw, what that dramatic difference was. Uh, for me it was that, uh, Janice Metcalf wore a different dress every day, and I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. Uh, but in addition to that, my teacher, Ms. Elsa Lessner was fabulous. And I, to this day, she's made whatever difference in my educational performance from sixth grade forward. In any case, what I saw was a difference in how children were treated when the bus was all White, the bus schedule got us there early enough in the morning that we could intermingle with the other kids. In fact, they'd hardly know we were bus kids 'cause we're all getting there at the same time. After school, the bus left late enough that some of my sixth grade friends are still my friends today. We could get in trouble after school together.

Three or four years later, my sister, four years younger, by the time she's there in her third grade year, the bus arrives right before school. The students file to the auditorium where they stay at the auditorium until the bell rings. There's no intermingling with the other students after school, they go straight to the auditorium. They don't leave the auditorium until they're all there to file straight to the bus to go home.

Just that slight level of difference in social contact, uh, kids having a chance to be kids is one indication of the design, the architecture of the busing planning itself, did to create the, the system that we had to, we had to change. You know, we got beer and cigarettes to the soldiers in Vietnam, and we couldn't move a few students around, so they could just be students.

My sister then, when she, one of the first students at Barrett, she was repeating the same work that she had done as a third grader. And, my mother and father could not believe that the school administrators would do something like that. Of course, these are the same people that are put in charge of making a court order busing plan work. Small wonder. That was a problem. Anyway…

Laura Lefkowits: Thank you. [audience applauds] Pat, not only did you live through the case, you wrote the book, you also served as a state senator in the Colorado General Assembly, many, many accomplishments in your life. But at this time you had children in the Denver Public Schools and your husband Monte, as we said, ran for the school board in 1969. My husband can probably relate to how much not fun it is to have a spouse running for the, your children and your children, my children.

[Laughter]

But you also voluntarily sent your kids from Dora Moore Elementary to Hallett, a predominantly Black school at the time, to help integrate Hallett and you even prepared for personal threats to your safety at home to fight for this cause. Tell us about your motivation. Why were you willing to put yourself and your family through all of that?

Pat Pascoe: Thank you, Laura, for asking me to speak. Monty and I both believed that every child should have an equal educational opportunity. Monty was a Park Hill Boy Scout. He went to Park Hill, Smiley, then East.

I would like to just make a few points. First of all, the law, the decision Plessy v Ferguson was the standard for having separate but equal facilities. You can have separate facilities, but they had to be equal to facilities for White people.

And that was the law until 1954 in the Brown decision, Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Equal facilities were not enough because segregation is a violation of the 14th Amendment. Even if there's very little public support for desegregation. The law requires it. The Constitution requires it.

People, in discussing the history say, “Well, we tried desegregation, it didn't work.” That's wrong. It did work. It established and validated constitutional equality under the law and validated equal educational opportunity that existed in the schools. If the board had put its full faith and credit into it, it would've had a much greater effect. Rachel Noel thought desegregation was poorly implemented by the school board.

Local and national studies show the benefits of integration. One important citation is the NAEP test. National Assessment of Educational Progress has been given since the ‘70s and they found that 17-year-old Black children reduced the learning gap between Blacks and Whites, by about 50%. The mathematics gap was reduced by 25% and the science gap by 15%. This was at the period of 20 years when there was the most desegregation in the whole country.

Laura Lefkowits: Thank you, Pat. [audience applauds] So, so far we've been talking about the case from the perspective of the African American cause, but Kathy, you are a Professor Emerita of Education in the division of Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy at the University of Colorado, and you're an expert on the development of bilingualism and biliteracy for Spanish speaking children.

You came on the scene a bit later than Buddy and Pat and were an advisor to the CHE intervention in the case. Can you tell us what were the objectives of the intervention? How did they relate to the initial Keyes case? And why were you invested in the case?

Kathy Escamilla: Thank you. So good morning everyone, and I, I would like to thank you for inviting me to be here. And you might be wondering, what the heck are you doing here? So, I am not from Denver. I've never worked in Denver. I grew up in rural Colorado. I remember, uh, watching on television, black and white television, the violent and at that time, scary history of desegregation in the Denver Public Schools. And I was a nerd. I was a kid who loved school. And in my rural school district, we only had one school bus. And so when I heard about the school buses being blown up, I was like, oh my God, that’d mean I couldn't go to school. Where my brother was like, “Hey, wouldn't that be great?” So different perspectives on the same event.

So how did I, how did I get involved? And what am I doing here? Um, people who know me, I'm an old time metiche, which is a word in Spanish for a But-inski [audience laughs] kind of person. So in 1984, I was actually, um, hired to come to Denver. Because that was the first round of teacher education programs after the consent decree that protected the rights of bilingual kids.

I do wanna say a word about CHE and a word about their involvement in the Keyes case and say that I talked to a few people, in preparation for today. So the Congress for Hispanic Educators became an official Chicano Advocacy Group and Civil Rights Organization in 1974 at a conference in Vail. So if I use the words Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, interchangeably it is because that's the way they are in the history of these cases. CHE became a plaintiff intervener in the Keyes case and I just admire so much the people who were willing and courageous enough to risk their own personal safety, uh, their own professional livelihood in service to this cause. And I don't think that we could forget that. It's easy for people of my age to read the history and go by, that's too bad or that's wonderful. But it's a whole nother thing to put yourself in what it must have felt like to meet Christie and all of a sudden go to your back door and see that it's a smoke bomb. What?

So I wanna say a bit about CHE because they were composed of, and this is a quote from the actual case. “They were composed largely of Chicano teachers, counselors, and staff employed by DPS.” These were people who challenged their own employers, their own livelihood. These were people who were first generation college graduates who needed the job. They weren't trust fund babies. And they were teachers. And we all know that teachers don't earn enough money. So I just want to shout that out.

They were the plaintiff interveners in the case, because they realized that their cause was a little bit different. Because in the course of events, it became clear that in busing, kids who were in schools with bilingual programs were being bused from those schools to schools with no bilingual programs. So the community had fought so hard to have the few bilingual programs that were in the district, and all of a sudden their kids were no longer the beneficiaries of them.

But I do want to say though, that it was not an acrimonious history. Everyone I've talked to has said, we owe so much to the Keyes plaintiffs. And so the cause for CHE was pro Chicano, not anti Keyes. And they followed by saying that they, they no way intended to impede or delay relief in the Keyes case, but intended only to ensure effective relief for their community. And so, at the time that the Keyes case was first handed down, basically the judge said there are two aspects to this, and acknowledged the complexity of the tri-ethnic nature of the consent decree. That it was much more complicated than a simple binary, uh, that was Black, White, that it was complex. And, the position of CHE was never specifically pro-busing, but it was always pro-integration and it was pro having the needs met of children at, at that time, sadly, in the Denver Public Schools, there were people who were adamantly opposed to any form of bilingual education. This is America. We speak English here. Kids who come to school must learn English. At times they got punished for speaking Spanish. That was a form of discrimination that the interveners were actively trying to do something about in all kinds of ways.

[Applause]

Laura Lefkowits: Thanks to each of you. You each told the story you wanted to tell, and I appreciate that. I'm just gonna open it up for a few more comments. Kathy, do you wanna go, go right ahead first.

Kathy Escamilla: Okay, so I, I, yeah. Stuff I didn't get to say first. I'm going to say, um, I think that a lot has been written and said about White flight, but not enough has been written and said about, at the same time the exponential growth of the Latino population in the Denver Public Schools.

So, yes, White people left, but Latinos stayed and Latinos stayed and had kids and sent kids to the Denver Public Schools, and they grew. And when Judge Matsch, in 1995 set aside the desegregation order, he kept the language order, he kept the order. That is still in effect today and continues to govern, and protect the language rights of kids in the Denver Public Schools, who are, as we know, growing, where they were 8,000 kids in 1984 they are now over 30,000 kids in 2024. I'm talking about 30,000 kids who carry the label English learner. I just wanna be clear, not all Latinos are English learners. Not all English learners are Latinos. There are 209 languages spoken somewhere in Denver, but the consent decree, thankfully, protects them all. We owe that debt of gratitude to the Keyes case and to the Keyes family being welcoming to plaintiff interveners.

Laura Lefkowits: Thank you. Pat, what would you like to say?

Pat Pascoe: Well, I would say if it isn't clear that the current board has an obligation to desegregate the schools. And there are a lot of ways to do that, whatever method they use to assess poverty as a basis for setting up your attendance. For setting a floor and the ceiling and the percentage of such students in each school, including charter and magnet schools.

Transportation needs to be provided. It's not a choice if you can't get there. [audience claps]

And it was Blacks, Whites, and Brown Hispanics trusting each other and working together who successfully brought the Keyes case. We don't need another lawsuit, but some leadership in the board and the public to desegregate the schools again.

[audience claps]

Laura Lefkowits: Buddy. Wrap it up for us.

Buddy Noel: Alright, I concluded that my 50 years of thinking about this in the preface that Pat was so kind to let my sister and I write.

We talked about how consensus, working together, um, integration in its best use of the term which brought us here today, is what brought us together, to make the Keyes case a reality to try to make our city a better place.

So Angie and I tried to cover that idea, but we also tried to cover the idea from Martin Luther King. In his letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16th, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

It remains to be seen who will step up more. Maybe it's not the fault of the people in this room, but it is the fault of the people that we know who are apathetic, who are not paying attention to their collective responsibility. And maybe it's time that we once again marshal the resources that we did back in the day.

Keyes illustrated the inadequacy of the US Supreme Court's appetite for enforcement since 1954, but it was also a harbinger of the immense White backlash to integration in schools. That statement addresses two things: that continued White backlash that we experienced today, and it continues to question or at least put in perspective our reliance on the legal system to solve our problems. It probably won't be this Supreme court either.

America saw the Ku Klux Klan march in Washington in the 1920s. Will we see that again? You know, this faction of American hatred is not the least bit hesitant. We haven't slid as far back as we're gonna slide, and our need for resistance is even more necessary. Will a still too silent unknown percentage of White people rise up and join their Black, Brown and other allies to help save the soul of the country as happened with the Civil War in the mid 1800’s or the civil right movement of the mid 1900’s. I know in a majority society, if the majority doesn't recognize the responsibility, it's damn hard for the responsibility to be met.

So I say finally, the great generation won a World War and passed the civil rights legislation of the mid 1900’s, but it will take an even greater generation to turn back Trump and his followers, save our democracy and fulfill America's true promise. For today's children and tomorrows the stakes could not be higher. For today's children and tomorrow's, the battle must be won. [audience claps]

Laura Lefkowits: Thank you Buddy. Thank you Pat. Thank you Kathy.

-------------------

Andrew: So Val, what did you think?

Dr. Val: Uh, so I'm all goose-bumpy from that last charge. Right. I'm super inspired by Buddy and I, I spend a lot of time trying to be honest and reflective about change, what it takes and what we need to do to get there. And I, I do really try to think about, having enough stamina to do the work when it doesn't feel rewarding, when it feels like you're just going uphill when it's a drudge. And so I am accepting Buddy Noel’s words, that I am part of the generation that will help continue this fight. And I do that not naively, I do that, in a way that feels like a very serious responsibility, but not so weighty that I don't feel like I can act, or that there's nothing that I can do.

You hear those words about the greatest generation. And if we're honest, everybody didn't participate equally in that first grade generation. Like

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: That's not what happened. Some people were like, this is not my business. I'm staying out of it. And so I don't want people to wait for the rest of the generation to be inspired to act. Right. So you, you might look around to your left and right and you're the only one standing there right now. Right. That's okay because when it comes down to it, I'm sure everyone wasn't acting in the past. Right.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you know, that it, it reminds me of, you know, Courtney's final episode, which was All I want for Christmas is 3.5%, where she talked about this idea that, you know, the Civil Rights movement was -like it was 3.5% of people who are actively involved and actively engaged, that really changed the world.

And so yeah, it's easy to look around and be like, wow, look at all these people who are not on board, who are not ready to step up, who are not willing to kind of try to make this change. That, that feels like we could, we could probably gather 3.5% of people, you know, if there's a hundred people and I've only gotta get three or maybe four of them, that feels a little more achievable, you know?

Dr. Val: Yeah, I don't want people to, to wait until it, until they feel like they have all of the people with them, because you do have people with you. You do have people who are inspired by your action. And you are not alone, right? And so I think I'm accepting of the responsibility or the charge that Buddy lays out for us, but in no way do I think I'm doing this alone. In no way do I think I'm gonna finish the job by myself or in my lifetime. But there are things that I can do now that will absolutely help in that, right?

I think if you, if you take on the full weight of saving democracy.

Andrew: It's debilitating.

Dr. Val: You might lay down, you'll be like, you know what…

Andrew: You know what, I'm, I'm actually gonna take a nap. [laughing]

Dr. Val: I'm just gonna lay down.

Andrew: That's too much.

Dr. Val: Somebody else can do this. And so I, I, I want folks to know that they do have a role to play. Right.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I think about the end of the court order in 1995, which, you know, my mom referred to as sort of a white flag of surrender from the judge. And again, like we said in the intro, it wasn't that we really achieved all the goals. Certainly the goals of the Keyes case were not achieved, but we kind of gave up on it and we gave up on it because there wasn't the political will to keep fighting and that political will is not the responsibility of politicians. That political will is the responsibility of all of us, right?

We have to put pressure on people to say, we care about this. You need to keep working on this. This is something we still value. Because, because yeah, it's easy to say like, oh, right, we had Brown v Board that ended school segregation and now we've moved on and we can worry about other things. And yet, as soon as we stop actively trying to make the world a better place, we regress. And so, that constant work, that constant energy is required even to just maintain, not to mention the additional energy to make progress.

Dr. Val: Yeah, absolutely. We trick ourselves by having like a finish line that we can cross and say we're done. And it's good to get re-centered. It's good to speak across generations what this work looks like, what it feels like, and to actually be able to, to see progress through their eyes.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: I'm sure some of the panelists and some of the community members that were there who were the students who desegregated, probably did not see this place where we are now today. And, their purview does give us a real appreciation for progress and work and how long it takes. And…

Andrew: Yeah,

Dr. Val: …yeah, I'm inspired by that.

Andrew: Yeah, the other thing that stands out to me is the, you know, going back to my mom's first year on the school board. So many of the policies that we live with right now in Denver came out of decisions that they made at that time. But the way that we think about them right now is that they are immovable. That they have always been this way, that they will always be this way, that they must be this way. And so I think I take some, also some kind of inspiration that the systems and the structures and the way things are were created by people who were doing the best they could at the time they did. And we can come up with new systems and new structures and new policies and new plans because they were just created by people. We can just create them. And I think there's a way in which the, “oh, it's been this way forever. We couldn't possibly change this,” can be self-defeating.

Dr. Val: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so don't try to fix democracy all by yourself, right? And know that regular people have changed the world. So it's a good thing you're a regular person.

Andrew: [laughs] That's right.

Dr. Val: Because you can do this, right? You can do this.

Dr. Val: Okay. So what happens in part three? What do our listeners, what can our listeners look forward to?

Andrew: Next week, part three, we have covered the history from the late ‘60s up through 1995 when the court case ended, and now part three, we're gonna go 1995 to today. So, I give a real brief overview of the evolution of the district and the way that we've thought about things like school choice and some of those policies that the school board in 95 put into place. And then we hear from a researcher who just put out a report about the current degree of segregation in Denver Public Schools, which spoiler alert is massive. Something like 80% of schools in Denver Public Schools currently are segregated by some measure.

We know that our schools started segregating back in the late ‘80s and are now as segregated or more segregated than they were during the civil rights era. So, we hear some research backing that up.

And then, probably my favorite part of the whole event, we have a student panel, so we had four students join us to talk about what the implication of that segregation is on their current lives, which was also very powerful. So lots to look forward to.

Dr. Val: So keep listening, keep sharing, keep uncovering your own local stories. Talk to your friends and family about their own experiences. And then call us and spill the tea. We'd love to hear, we'd love to hear from you, and we love that you keep the conversation going.

Andrew: Absolutely. Go to integratedschools.org. Click on that leave us a voicemail button on the side of the page, or just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us. podcast@integratedschools.org. Very curious about the ways that desegregation cases have shown up in your own local communities, your thoughts about them.

Definitely if you've got, if you've got family, if you've got parents, if you've got caregivers from a, a generation above who have some stories to tell, we're gonna keep working on getting Val’s parents on, but would love to hear from, from you and your parents as well. And of course, we'd be grateful for your ongoing support. Patreon.com/integratedschools. Throw us a few bucks to help keep this podcast alive. We'd be grateful for it.

Dr. Val: Awesome. I'm definitely looking forward to part three. You know, I love it when we have student guests. So I'm looking forward to hearing what the students have to say.

Andrew: Absolutely hit that follow button wherever you're listening to this so you don't miss an episode. And we will be back next week with the final part three of this little mini deep dive into Denver. Val, it is a pleasure as always to be in this with you as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time. ​