Desegregation

They aren't the kind of heroes usually honored during Black History Month. They didn't challenge Jim Crow laws or invent more ways to use peanuts. But they were pioneers 40 years ago in this city's first school integration campaign. Rudy Pittman, now a teacher, was 14 when he took that first bus ride from Watts, one of seven kids, escorted by police, headed over the hill to Van Nuys' Birmingham High. It was 1972 and the Los Angeles Unified School District had been found guilty of intentionally segregating city schools.

Arthur F. Gardner Former L.A. school board president Arthur F. Gardner, 93, a former Los Angeles school board member who twice served as its president, died Friday at an assisted living center in Costa Mesa. He had been in hospice care since suffering a stroke in mid-December, a relative said. Gardner, who worked as a pilot for Western Airlines and was also a practicing attorney, served on the Board of Education from 1951 to 1955 and again from 1959 to 1971. A moderate Republican, he was chosen as board president for two one-year terms, in 1960-61 and in 1969-70.

Barefoot Sanders, 83, a U.S. district judge who presided over more than two decades of litigation to desegregate Dallas schools, died Sunday of natural causes at his home, said Karen Mitchell, clerk for the Northern District of Texas. Sanders, who served as a deputy attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, was the district's senior judge. He was appointed by President Carter in 1979. He took over the school desegregation case in 1981, presiding over it until its closure in 2003.

When Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled on an attempt to convert Desert Trails Elementary School into a charter school, he made it very clear what he wanted done. He ordered the Adelanto school board to accept petitions from parents of the failing school and, as he put it, to allow those parents "to immediately begin the process of soliciting and selecting charter school proposals. " He gave the school board 30 days to act. That was on July 18. The board chose to wait. Not until the 30th day did it meet to consider its response to Malone's order.

Peter W. James (legal counsel for the Los Angeles Board of Education in the NAACP suit before United States District Judge A. Wallace Tashima, to be heard on Aug. 22) distorts Los Angeles history of desegregation in his letter (July 8). He claims "most of the desegregation that could theoretically be achieved . . . has in fact resulted from the district's voluntary plan," when in fact whatever development or progress has taken place has come after constant resistance by the board to court orders for the past 25 years since the filing of the original complaint!

Saying it still wants to avoid the time and expense of another desegregation trial, the Los Angeles school board voted Thursday to appeal a federal court decision that would allow NAACP attorneys to go back to 1969 to find evidence of racial discrimination in the district. And if the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to reconsider its Dec. 21 ruling, the board said it will take its case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mary Lou Forbes, 83, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 at the Washington Star for her coverage of school desegregation in Virginia and became founding editor of the Washington Times' Commentary opinion page, died June 27 of breast cancer at Inova Alexandria (Va.) Hospital. Forbes began her career at the Star as a 17-year-old copy messenger. Rapidly promoted to reporter, she made her greatest impact during the 1950s reporting on "massive resistance" in Virginia to desegregation in public schools.

Chief Justice-designate William H. Rehnquist, while a top attorney in the Nixon Administration, drafted a proposed constitutional amendment that would have halted the desegregation of the nation's public schools. Rehnquist's plan, evidently prepared at the request of the White House in 1970 but never publicly proposed, sought to overturn Supreme Court rulings in the late 1960s that brought about desegregation in the South.

The Pasadena Unified School District will receive $1.4 million from the state as repayment for the cost of maintaining a voluntary desegregation program during the 1983-84 school year. The money is included in legislation authored by state Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) and signed by the governor July 9. The bill reimburses several school districts for desegregation costs.

The school board in Topeka, Kan., has failed to carry out fully the mandate of the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education desegregation ruling, a federal appeals court ruled in keeping the case open. In an opinion published Friday but not made available until Monday, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an October, 1986, ruling that could have closed the case that paved the way for nationwide school desegregation. "We are convinced that Topeka has not sufficiently countered the effects of both the momentum of its pre-Brown segregation and its subsequent segregative acts in the 1960s," the appeals court said.

WASHINGTON — Nicholas Katzenbach, the Kennedy administration lawyer who faced down Gov. George Wallace to enroll the first black students at the University of Alabama and who helped write the landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s, has died. He was 90. Katzenbach died Tuesday night of natural causes at his home in Princeton, N.J., according to his daughter, Anne Katzenbach of New York City. Katzenbach was one of the "best and brightest" who were drawn to Washington when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961.

They aren't the kind of heroes usually honored during Black History Month. They didn't challenge Jim Crow laws or invent more ways to use peanuts. But they were pioneers 40 years ago in this city's first school integration campaign. Rudy Pittman, now a teacher, was 14 when he took that first bus ride from Watts, one of seven kids, escorted by police, headed over the hill to Van Nuys' Birmingham High. It was 1972 and the Los Angeles Unified School District had been found guilty of intentionally segregating city schools.

Robert L. Carter, who as an NAACP civil rights attorney was an architect of the legal strategy used in the cases that led to Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional, has died. He was 94. Carter, a former U.S. district judge for the southern district of New York, died Tuesday in a hospital in Manhattan after suffering a stroke last week, said his son David. With law degrees from Howard University School of Law and Columbia Law School, where he wrote his master's thesis on the 1st Amendment, Carter initially considered an academic career.

The familiar scene of the president addressing a joint session of Congress may look a bit different this year after a proposal that lawmakers take seats irrespective of political affiliation. Usually, Democrats and Republicans sit on opposite sides of the aisle in the House chamber. Several dozen lawmakers have signed on, but just how many take part won't be known until Tuesday night. It raises a host of questions: How is seating usually determined in the House? According to the Congressional Research Service, members of Congress initially drew lots to determine seating in the House.

William L. Taylor didn't necessarily look the part of a leading civil rights advocate, a matter he addressed in his memoir under the heading "A White Guy Like Me," as in: "What leads a white guy like me to spend his life working on behalf of black people?" Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn while the Holocaust raged in Europe helped shape his future, he wrote. Another early lesson in civil rights came from following the "career and courage" of Jackie Robinson as he broke major league baseball's color line in 1947.

Gerald Heaney Judge's opinions helped desegregate schools Gerald Heaney, 92, a retired federal judge who wrote or helped write opinions that led to the desegregation of schools in St. Louis, Omaha and Little Rock, Ark., died Tuesday in Duluth, Minn. The cause was not given. As a labor lawyer and political figure, Heaney helped form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota with the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. In 1966, then-Sen. McCarthy recommended to President Johnson that he name Heaney a federal judge.

A federal judge has ruled that the Galveston public school system is desegregated, ending a civil rights lawsuit that was initiated in 1959. U.S. District Judge Sim Lake of Houston issued the ruling Friday, saying the district's history of compliance with a 1969 desegregation plan showed that the schools had fully integrated. In 2007, the League of United Latin American Citizens filed a complaint over the closure of a school with a heavily Latino student body. Lake, who approved that school's closure, wrote in Friday's ruling that he found no segregation in faculty and staff assignments, pupil transportation, achievement or special programs.

Schools are in danger of becoming segregated again as a result of rising Latino isolation in the West and outmoded integration plans in the South, the National School Boards Assn. said. Even now, "The data for segregation of Hispanic students within metropolitan America is grim," an association report said. Heading the list of segregated areas were New York, El Paso, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Chicago. For blacks, the most segregated states were Illinois and New York.

Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested Thursday against a Supreme Court decision to jail parents who have refused to comply with its order to desegregate a religious girls school. Dressed in black hats and carrying posters denouncing the court as "fascists," the mostly peaceful demonstrators continued their afternoon protest until about 40 parents turned themselves in to police to begin serving two-week sentences for contempt of court, a police spokesman said. The protests, which organizers vowed would continue, marked the latest fissure in relations between Israel's religious and secular communities.

Bayard F. Berman, a lead attorney on the Los Angeles school desegregation lawsuit that led to three years of busing and an exodus of whites from the city's public schools, died Jan. 20 at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles. He was 88. The cause was a gallbladder infection, said his daughter, Abigail. An entertainment lawyer known for his prowess as a litigator, Berman was approached by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in the late 1960s to handle the biggest lawsuit it had ever taken on. Known as the Crawford case, it was filed as a class action in 1963 by the ACLU and the National Assn.