George Bush strides confidently in the background, looking strong and presidential. As the images taken from his campaign ads referring to the September 11 attacks scroll across the screen, a voiceover intones, “George Bush shamelessly exploited 9/11 in his campaign commercials.” Soon after, we hear the voice of Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke: “Frankly I find it outrageous that a president is running for reelection on the grounds he’d done such great things on terrorism. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.”
This advertisement, which aired on CNN and Fox between March 30 and April 3, is part of a new campaign put together by MoveOnPAC.org. It is part of a coalition of 28 groups that aim to help fill the $100 million-plus fundraising gap between presumed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry and his rival, George Bush.
Since its founding in 1998, MoveOn.org has grown from an upstart cyber-activism group to an organization with a membership 2 million strong known for its immense grassroots clout. The affiliated MoveOnPAC.org was founded in 2000 specifically to support candidates in
key races. During the 2002 elections, MoveOnPAC.org raised about $4 million for various races. Last fall it targeted Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California gubernatorial recall election with edgy ads highlighting his attitudes toward women.
This time around, preventing Bush’s reelection is MoveOn.org’s main goal—a goal supported by more than 23,000 donors who responded to a March 24 appeal for donations with about $1 million in just three days.
Campaign observers say that the MoveOn Voter Fund, which runs ads exposing President Bush’s failed policies in key battleground states, and similar groups like the Media Fund (run by former Bill Clinton adviser Harold Ickes), will play a significant role in the election, but it is still unclear whether they will have an impact on the outcome.
“It’s sort of undefined,” says Evan Tracey, the COO of TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan political and media affairs tracking firm. “There’s no real precedent for this in America politics. What they can accomplish is keeping the heat up on Bush and driving his negatives up.”
And that’s exactly what MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser hopes the ads will do. “With millions of jobs lost and rising healthcare costs, the only thing this administration has left to run on is its supposed leadership in countering terrorism,” he says. “Now we know that there, too, the administration dropped the ball. This ad strikes at the core of Bush’s case for reelection.”
This unabashed targeting of Bush explains why “527 groups” (named for the section of the tax code they operate under) such as MoveOn Voter Fund and others are raising GOP hackles. Republicans claim that efforts by such groups represent illegal campaign donations.
In a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee called 527s part of “an unprecedented criminal enterprise designed to impermissibly affect a presidential election.” According to the complaint, “this illegal conspiracy of donors and shadowy groups” is spending “soft money” of the type off-limits to political parties under McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform laws. Moreover, the Republicans accuse these groups of illegally coordinating their activities with the Kerry campaign, noting that Kerry’s former campaign manager, Jim Jordan, is currently advising some of the media groups.
Some analysts equate the status of the MoveOn Voter Fund to groups such as the National Rifle Association, and are skeptical that the FEC will censure them. “The Republicans are just whining now because the progressives are doing what their allies have been doing for years,” says Steven Hill, senior analyst with the Center for Voting and Democracy. “The NRA and the Christian Coalition have been doing this for years. It’s about time the progressive side caught up.”
The 527s are in a legal gray area, says Tracey. “It’s a case of it being easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” he adds.
While there is no doubt that Kerry will be glad to have MoveOn’s anti-Bush ads on air, MoveOn and other activists don’t necessarily see the battle as solely between Bush and Kerry, and the ads reflect that perspective.
Pariser says that MoveOn ads are designed to spark discussion and media coverage, exponentially increasing their effect. “We hope that if we’re really nimble and strategic, we can amplify the truth. Just by getting these ads out to a small group of people they will continue to circulate to the greater public,” says Pariser.
Dan Johnson-Weinberger, director of the Midwest Democracy Center, agrees: “I think it’s a problem if we define people against Bush only as Kerry supporters. This is about raising issues that need to be talked about regardless of the Democrat/ Republican debate.”
While the high-profile national TV ads will be combined with local grassroots campaigns, Hill and others say that the key to the campaign’s impact lies in its ability to target swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri and Ohio.
“Sometimes national ads aren’t as effective, because the message that resonates with a national audience may not resonate as well in those crucial 15 states,” notes Hill. “If MoveOn is doing national ads on TV, maybe they have something to learn from the NRA. The NRA doesn’t do national TV ads, they target each state with tailored messages.”
Coming during the height of the 9/11 commission hearings and amid growing public skepticism and despair about progress in Iraq, MoveOn is betting that its national message will have resonance at the local level. “The MoveOn ads are essentially saying out loud what people have been saying to themselves: that the Bush Administration lies,” says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Others believe that in order to affect the outcome in November, MoveOn will have to go further than just attacking Bush’s record. “The problem they have is that they don’t really stand for anything, they don’t have a strong answer. Attacking Bush is an easier sell from a message standpoint when you’re a political party or an individual candidate,” says Tracey.
When it comes to message, however, Pariser is confident that MoveOn has the White House beat. “You can spend millions and millions on an ad campaign that says nothing, that’s what Bush did with these really nice-looking ads with no substance,” he says.
But substance alone will not suffice. To affect the outcome in November, folks at MoveOn will have to learn to apply their considerable power with laser-like precision. All politics is local—so indeed is this race for the presidency.
Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for The Washington Post and is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago.
The way they move
National group MoveOn.org plants grassroots seeds locally
Because MoveOn.org makes its home in that nebulous space known as the World Wide Web, anyone looking to get involved locally won’t find a storefront on Water Street or a listing in the Charlottesville phonebook. In local ‘hoods, individuals tuned into the MoveOn.org e-mail network make the difference.
Ostensibly, MoveOn.org is an information organization. It
e-mails notices for upcoming marches, sends out petitions, organizes phone and fundraising campaigns, and sponsors national events that individuals stage on a local level. Luckily for MoveOn, with around 2 million “online activists” (and counting) on its national e-mail list, news travels fast.
Josef Beery, a local MoveOn activist since October 2002, answered the call in January 2003 by signing an e-mail petition opposing the invasion of Iraq. “Then, [MoveOn] asked people to deliver the petition to every congressional office in the United States on a particular day,” Beery recalls. “I agreed [via e-mail] to lead a delegation to deliver the petition to [Virginia Congressman] Virgil Goode. And what was really neat about the petition was…that all these people were part of this instant community created over the Web.”
More recently, MoveOn.org called on its netizens across the nation to participate in a “Bake Back the White House” bake sale Saturday, April 17. Locals Sue Chase of the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and Beryl Solla had both attended the April 8 discussion and signing of MoveOn’s book 50 Ways to Love Your Country at Barnes & Noble. When an audience member, hip to MoveOn.org, asked if anyone was putting together a local “Bake Back,” nobody responded to the affirmative. Chase and Solla, who had previously expressed an interest in helping out through the MoveOn website, decided to make it happen.
It’s in ways like this that MoveOn acts locally while thinking globally, affecting millions of average Joes along the way. Solla, for one, is excited by her new sense of initiative. “It’s because of MoveOn that I am communicating with so many people and that’s really heartening,” she says. “I don’t think it’s about defeating anybody as it is about involving everybody.”—Nell Boeschenstein
Lesson learned?
Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, segregation looms as a side effect
of Bush’s No Child Left Behind programLane High School was packed on the night of July 23, 1956. The 1,200 people who converged on Charlottesville’s all-white public high school filled the auditorium, halls and lobby, even spilling out onto the steps and parking lot, where loudspeakers broadcast the speeches from inside. The event is said to be the largest gathering ever at the school, which is now the Albemarle County Office Building.
The Charlottesville and Albemarle residents at the mass meeting voiced their unanimous support for a plan to “just plain ignore any demand” to allow black and white students to go to the same schools. It had been more than two years since the U.S. Supreme Court, in deciding the Brown v. Board of Education case on May 17, 1954, ruled that legally enforced segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Yet no black children sat next to white children in any of Charlottesville’s public schools. And the vocal members of the community who turned out on that summer night were determined to keep it that way.
During the meeting, John Segar Gravatt, a member of UVA’s Board of Visitors, called the Brown decision “judicial tyranny.” Flanked by all three local representatives to the General Assembly, Gravatt received more than two dozen rounds of applause during his 50-minute speech, according to The Daily Progress.
In the hierarchy of the American court system, the U.S. Supreme Court lives up to its name. The Court’s rulings have the power to alter the nation’s social fabric. Yet the court of public opinion, exemplified by that mass meeting in 1956, can hold its own against Washington’s hallowed gavel.
After the Brown ruling, now celebrated as perhaps the most influential Court decision of the last century, more than five years passed before the first dozen black students crossed the threshold at Lane and Venable Elementary School, both previously all-white schools. Integration continued at a trickle for the next few years, and Charlottesville’s public schools would not fully integrate until 1965, more than a decade after Brown.
U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Sr., the iconic former Virginia Governor, used the warlike phrase “massive resistance” as the rallying cry in Virginia’s struggle against the Brown decision. With many Southerners following the lead of the former seat of the Confederacy, Virginia’s massive resistance was a formidable obstacle in the nation’s long journey toward integration in the schools, and Charlottesville, one of three Virginia cities that closed schools rather than admit black students, was a primary flashpoint in the struggle.
A half-century later, Charlottesville and Virginia again figure prominently in the most intense debate over America’s schools since integration. Vouchers for private schools, called “tuition grants” at the start of integration, are back in the spotlight, as is school choice, which was a central demand of segregationists.
The focus of today’s controversy is No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education initiative enacted by the Bush Administration in 2002. The policy, which is facing mounting criticism around the country, hinges on the belief that schools and teachers need more accountability through standards and testing.
Though the standards-and-testing movement traces back to a Reagan Administration report, Charlottesville may be the true birthplace of No Child Left Behind. In 1989, then President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors came to Charlottesville for an education summit. Here, they set performance goals for schools, the roots of which were refined over the years and eventually shaped into No Child Left Behind.
Virginia also created its own school accountability program and testing regime with the Standards of Learning (SOL) policy, which has been in place since 1998.
No Child Left Behind, which requires annual testing of students, came on the scene four years later. The policy imposes a range of punishments on lagging schools, but is widely viewed as being severely underfunded. Among dozens of official rebukes from state legislatures, perhaps none has stung No Child Left Behind and its White House champions more than a resolution passed 98-1 in January by the Republican-dominated Virginia House of Delegates, which requested an exemption from the law.
Charlottesville may be forced to wrestle with the punitive side of No Child Left Behind this summer, when the national policy’s school-choice provision kicks in. Unless Clark Elementary School meets the program’s criteria for yearly progress, parents of students at the school will have the option of sending their children to other schools.
“We will strive to minimize the disruption of the educational process to all of the children currently served by the Charlottesville City Schools,” wrote Linda Bowen, chair of the City School Board, in a recent letter addressing the challenges posed by No Child Left Behind.
Supporters of No Child Left Behind stress that the policy’s central tenet of accountability is intended to elevate the performance of all students, in essence eliminating the current “achievement gap” between white and minority students.
School choice and inequality for minority students are central to the brewing controversy, much as they were 50 years ago. In the case of school choice, segregationists believed parents should have the option of sending their children to all-white schools, and stressed that school choice could be a “solution” to the predicted turmoil caused by integration.
The Daily Progress argued in an editorial on September 10, 1958, that public schools must be preserved, but that “no one must be compelled to send his children to integrated schools.” The answer to the dilemma of Brown, according to the Progress, was “making available for each child of school age an educational grant equivalent to the per pupil cost of operating the public schools.”
The General Assembly later passed a “freedom of choice in education” law, which helped fund two all-white private schools in Charlottesville. The schools, Rock Hill Academy high school and Robert E. Lee Elementary, opened in 1959, as a direct result of the fact that black children were entering white public schools.
D.B. Marshall, a local lawyer and future judge, helped found the two private segregated schools. In a 2000 interview with George Gilliam, a historian at The Miller Center of Public Affairs, Marshall said the schools were created to avoid “any inflammable disorders that might take place when the black children entered the school.” But Marshall said he and other parents also wanted to create some competition for the public schools.
“Of course, this same thing is still going on with the school vouchers that some of our presidential candidates are fighting over today,” Marshall told Gilliam.
George W. Bush did indeed push tuition vouchers during the 2000 election, and originally included them in No Child Left Behind. Congress later removed the provision. However, many education observers see vouchers and a greater privatization of schooling as the end goals of the Bush Administration.
John Baldino, the local representative of the Virginia Education Association, does not mince words in drawing parallels between the two great education clashes.
“By forcing, possibly, some form of voucher plans,” Baldino says, “No Child Left Behind could lead to the resegregation of the schools.”
Baldino and other critics aren’t charging that the plan seeks to create all-white private schools, as did Virginia’s “freedom of choice” policy, but instead that school choice and vouchers could drain resources from public schools and leave increasingly concentrated groups of lower-income and minority students holding the bag in failing schools.
The media has widely heralded the upcoming 50th anniversary of Brown, rightly recognizing the judges, lawyers, parents and children who knocked down the barriers of legal segregation in schools. But often lost in the blitz has been the link between the philosophical rifts over education in the ’50s and today. An obvious example is the racially charged plight of failing, often neglected urban schools, which felt the sting of the “white flight” that followed integration. But a direct line from 1954 to today can also be traced on school choice and the privatization of the public school system—divisive arguments intertwined with issues of race.
George Gilliam of the Miller Center, a former Democratic Charlottesville City Councilor, has long studied the Brown decision and the integration of Charlottesville’s schools. Gilliam says “the arguments of using public funds for the costs of education for a few” apply to both the tuition grants of segregationist Virginia and to today’s voucher proposals. “The issues are essentially the same,” Gilliam says.
“Even as a youngster, I was aware of the Brown v. Board decision,” says Don Martin, a 57-year-old Charlottesville resident.
As a 13-year-old, Martin helped make the ruling a reality. On September 8, 1959, the first day of the school year, Martin, his brother John and French Jackson left behind their friends at the two local all-black schools—Jackson P. Burley High and Jefferson Elementary—and became the first African-Americans ever to enroll at Lane High School.
The three black teens joined 722 white students at the school—a substantial dip from the 869 whites who attended Lane the previous semester. Many of the missing students had left Lane to attend the new all-white, State-subsidized private school.
Asked if he was frightened to walk through the doors at Lane, Martin replies, “Yeah, there was quite a bit of nervousness and trepidation.”
Martin put on a brave face that first day, however. When a reporter asked him if he was nervous when he arrived at Lane, he said, “just a little bit,” according to the Progress.
Martin did his full high school stint at Lane, which at the time included eighth grade, and graduated in 1965. He says only three other black students were in his class during his senior year—testimony to the glacial creep of integration in Charlottesville.
Now a Charlottesville-based field operations manager for the Virginia Employment Commission, Martin says some students and teachers were kind to him during his years at Lane. But he says he didn’t count any of the white students as friends. Martin isn’t outwardly bitter about this fact, noting that he wasn’t looking to make friends during high school.
“I was more focused on getting done what I needed to,” Martin says. In addition to getting an education, Martin says his goal in attending Lane was to “make a contribution to a better society.” Looking back, he says the experience “was worth doing.”
For their part, some of the most vocal segregationists of the time expressed concern for the well being of Martin and other black children in Charlottesville, at least in public.
The late E.J. Oglesby was an Albemarle County School Board member and mathematics professor at UVA. A professorship at the University still bears his name. On the day the Brown decision was announced, Oglesby told the Progress that the ruling would likely be the end of public schooling in Virginia.
“I think the effect will be much worse for the Negroes than for the whites,” Oglesby told the Progress. “They had a better chance to develop as citizens under the seperate [sic] school system. They’ve come a long way in the past 100 years.”
Oglesby, who became a leader of the anti-integration movement in Charlottesville and was one of the featured speakers at the mass meeting in 1958, struck a less genial tone in a 1956 interview with Dan Wakefield, a reporter from the liberal magazine The Nation.
“We’ve got enough money here in this country to operate private schools for the whites. What the niggers are gonna do, I don’t know. If we have to close the schools, of course, the nigger’ll have to suffer from it—everybody knows that,” Oglesby said to Wakefield. “Then, if the federal government says we have to operate the schools, and operate integrated schools, we’ll be ready to get out the bayonets. There were more Yankees killed in the last one than Southerners, and if they want to try it again, let ’em come on down.”
State Sen. E.O. McCue, who represented Charlottesville, was an important ally of Oglesby and other segregationists. After the Brown ruling was announced, McCue soberly declared that the decision required study. By the time he spoke to Wakefield, integration was looming large.
“Of course we know this whole thing [integration] is being aided and abetted by the Communists and the Jews. The Communists want to mongrelize the race—weaken and conquer; and the Jews, they’re so clannish, they want it so they’ll end up being the only pure white race left, and have it all over everybody.”
Perhaps McCue and Oglesby’s quotes in The Nation story, “Charlottesville Battle: Symbol of the Divided South,” are more representative of local segregationist leaders’ true feelings than the relatively mild official public statements of the time. Or maybe Wakefield baited the two respected members of Charlottesville’s establishment. Either way, it’s clear that integration faced motivated opposition from a large group of local residents.
But black Charlottesville was also developing its voice in the mid-’50s. Eugene Williams, along with Raymond Bell and George Ferguson, headed the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at that time. Asked if the racism driving Charlottesville’s opposition to integration was understated in the Progress and other accounts from the time, Williams quickly replies “Oh, by all means.”
Williams brought Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who successfully handled the Brown case and later became a Supreme Court Justice, to town for a speech at Burley in March 1954. About 1,000 people, all members of the local NAACP branch, came to hear Marshall speak that night.
In 1955, Williams, who now runs Dogwood Housing, a Charlottesville realty company, and other leaders helped organize a petition seeking admission for a group of black children to Lane and Venable elementary. The City School Board ignored the petition. In 1956, Judge John Paul of the U.S. District Court for the Fourth Circuit, which was then located in Harrisonburg, ordered the School Board to admit the students. After two more years of foot-dragging by City and State officials and a subsequent court ruling, Charlottesville’s white schools were again ordered to admit black students for the school year beginning in September, 1958.
Charlottesville prepared itself for chaos. Football games and other high school events were relocated or cancelled in anticipation of integration, and the Progress reported that 130 state troopers were “standing by.” However, segregation was upheld when Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr., who was born in Charlottesville, chose to enforce the “massive resistance” laws. As a result, schools in Charlottesville and two other Virginia cities locked their doors to avoid admitting black students. Lane and Venable remained closed for five months, reopening as all-white schools in February. During this time, two groups of white parents organized classrooms for their children in churches, basements and the Elks Club.
On January 19, 1959, which, as historian Gilliam notes, is the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s birthday, both Federal and State courts struck-down the “massive resistance” laws. The Martin brothers and 10 other black students would finally enter Charlottesville’s white schools nine months later.
During the early years of Charlottesville’s integration, the vast majority of black children continued to attend Jefferson and Burley, which were then all-black. Not until 1965 would the schools fully integrate with the closing of Jefferson and the decision to send all of the City’s sixth graders to Burley, while sending black high school students to Lane.
George Tramontin, who came to Charlottesville as an assistant superintendent of schools in 1960 and served as superintendent from 1963-1966, spearheaded that final phase of integration. Tramontin, who still lives in Charlottesville, says he resented the existence of the City’s all-white private schools. In retrospect, he thinks those schools played a valuable role by “siphoning off” students who, along with their parents, may have been most opposed to integration.
“I think it gave us the chance to succeed,” Tramontin says.
Charlottesville’s school integration was achieved with no reports of violence. And the most openly hostile incident of the era, a cross burning, was allegedly the work of outside agitators.
Florence Bryant, a retired African-American teacher, began her long tenure in Charlottesville schools at Burley in 1951 and retired from Walker Elementary in 1984. Bryant praises not only the black students who braved the maelstrom and walked through the doors of Lane and Venable, but also the City’s residents—black and white—for their eventual quiet acceptance of integration.
“I always felt very proud about the attitude of the people of Charlottesville,” Bryant says.
The integration of U.S. schools peaked in 1988. Since then, black children have increasingly attended minority-heavy schools. In 1988, according to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 57 percent of black students in the South went to schools attended by mostly minority students. That number grew to 70 percent by 2001.
In contrast to this trend, the Charlottesville public schools are remarkably integrated. Approximately the same number of black and white students attends the school system. Asian and Hispanic students account for about 5 percent of the student population. Though some of the six elementary schools have more diverse student bodies than others, the high school and upper and lower middle schools serve all of the public school system’s students in those age groups.
“I do believe that kids today embrace that diversity more than we did when I was growing up,” says Bowen of the School Board, who adds that she sees “a lot of interaction” between children of different races in the City schools.
Bekah Saxon, a teacher at Buford Middle School and president of the Charlottesville Education Association, says that although “our buildings are integrated,” challenges remain for providing equal opportunities to minority students.
“The question now becomes, Do we have full access to programs? And are all of our programs integrated?” Saxon asks, citing the mostly white participation in Advanced Placement classes, gifted programs and extra curricular programs such as band and orchestra.
Saxon says schools with large populations of minority students, such as Clark Elementary, could lose good teachers because of the accountability testing of the SOLs and No Child Left Behind. Minority students generally score lower on the tests.
“Teachers are beginning to fear that they are going to be viewed as bad teachers,” Saxon says.
Though Bowen admits that No Child Left Behind presents challenges for Charlottesville’s schools, particularly if school choice becomes a reality this summer, she says the school system has no choice but to comply with the law.
“We get between $4 [million] and $5 million a year in Federal funds. If you elect to pull out of [No Child Left Behind], the localities would have to make up the difference,” Bowen says.
Bowen says she thinks some parents would take advantage of the school choice option if it goes into effect this year. In addition to complications this would create for school administrators, Bowen says she thinks school choice could be disruptive and traumatic for students.
“Just because you move a child to a different school doesn’t mean he’s going to have better performance,” Bowen says.
George Tramontin was at the helm when the City’s school system last navigated major challenges brought on by sweeping Federal decree. Tramontin, no fan of private schools or resource drains on public schools, doesn’t pull his punches in making a prediction about the impact of No Child Left Behind, which he calls a “political scheme” imposing “arbitrary” requirements.
“It is going to prove to be the biggest disaster in education this country has ever had,” he says.
—Paul Fain