Two Women Come Together to Oppose Busing

June 28, 2007 — -- White, single mom Crystal Meredith and African-American matriarch Mattie Jones come from different worlds and opposite sides of Louisville, Ky., but both hailed today's 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Meredith v. Jefferson County Public Schools, which threw out the city's school assignment plan because it was based, in part, on a child's race.

Meredith is 34 years old, juggling graduate school, trying to launch a career as a "success coach" for corporate executives and manage child care for her 10-year-old son, Josh.

Mattie Jones, widowed after half a century of marriage, has raised nine children on the city's predominantly black West Side, and now watches over 31 grandchildren. A lifelong civil rights activist during the volatile decades of the '50s, '60s and '70s, she was arrested 28 times at marches, sit-ins and protests.

Today she serves as president of the city's Justice Resource Center, a storefront office run by her pastor that advocates for the poor and dispossessed.

Both women believe in the same thing: Their children should be able to get a good education at a neighborhood school and not have to ride buses crisscrossing the city to find equality in educational opportunity.

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Meredith's lawsuit sparked the case, and Jones took her side because she concluded the plan didn't work.

Civil rights leaders, including NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Ted Shaw, said the decision would undo decades of painful progress they've made toward ensuring equality in education and will mark a return to segregated schools.

Shaw has said a decision striking down the programs "will be a reversal of historic proportions" that could "send this country backward."

"It is very, very difficult for anyone to honestly imagine how we could address the issue of racial segregation of public schools without thinking consciously about race," Shaw said last December.

But Jones said her decades of experience with Louisville's school integration efforts have convinced her the solution is better schools in the neighborhoods.

"We don't have to sit next to a white person -- our kids don't -- to be educated," said Jones.

The case came about four years ago, when Meredith sued the school system after her son Josh, then a kindergartner, was denied a transfer to a school near her home.

Josh had been assigned to a school in Mattie Jones' neighborhood across town, and a transfer would have tilted the school's enrollment too heavily African-American, against the district's guidelines.

Meredith said she believed the racially and ethnically diverse Bloom Elementary School nearby was the best educational fit for Josh.