Lloyd Barbee: Mentor, Role Model and Facilitator
by Leon Todd
As a role model, Attorney Lloyd Barbee made a lasting impression on me personally, and strongly influenced my philosophy of life shortly after I was elected to the MPS School Board 1975. I knew of Barbee and what was known in the community as the Barbee Suit against the school board to bring justice to African American children who had been deliberately subjected to extreme forms of racial isolation and a perverse and deliberate segregationist policy.
Lloyd's job was to convince a federal judge that the MPS Board of School Directors had knowingly constructed a systemic scheme of segregation and racial isolation by a series of constitutionally offensive actions and votes over a number of decades. In matters of segregation Southern style, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, had moved away from only looking at segregationist Jim Crow state laws as the only instrument of de Jure [by law] segregation, and had begin to vet the policies and practices of direct agents of the state like school boards.
In 1963 Barbee, 12 years before I was elected to the MPS Board of School Directors, and the NAACP launched an attack upon deliberate segregation in Milwaukee. When Barbee and the NAACP voluntarily offered concrete desegregation measures backed up by a history of clear and convincing school system acts which enforced racial isolation, a majority of the MPS board reaffirmed its commitment to an intentionally segregated school system. Under Barbee leadership, the NAACP and coalition of ethnically diverse groups responded to the board's stubborn segregationist policies by sponsoring demonstrations, a school boycott and a rational plan of alternative schools in 1964. When the MPS board remained stubbornly committed to its racist orientation, the NAACP asked Barbee to prepare a desegregation suit, Amos v. Board of School Directors, which began in July 1965, now 10 years before I was elected in 1975.
Over the next 10 years Barbee continued with his legal case to end the racist policies in Milwaukee and prepared a massive study which demonstrated how the MPS school board had voted for Jim Crow policies and implemented a deliberate construct of segregation and racial isolation in MPS. Three of those MPS school board votes and actions Federal Judge Reynolds found constitutionally offensive: 1) In-tact busing, a system of transferring Black children to all white schools because of over crowding and keeping the children racially isolated at the white school throughout the school day; 2) school attendance boundary gerrymandering for the purpose of constructing and maintaining segregated schools; and, 3) a systematic construction program of building additions. Each of these rulings was deployed to reinforce and guarantee Milwaukee's own quiet and unique style of American Apartheid: Jim Crow segregation up North. Further, Lloyd Barbee's research found that the school board had negotiated employee contracts that had led to inner city children having teachers with the least amount of experience and confined central city Black children to the oldest school buildings which were too often temporary barracks like the row upon row of stopgap barracks at Auer Avenue School. Parents of Black children complained to Barbee that their children who attended schools in the inner city had to use used second hand throw-away text books, reading and mathematics materials from the newer schools in the white neighborhood. The institutional racism these votes set up further guaranteed the making of a permanent racially identifiable underclass in Milwaukee.
Shortly after my school board election in 1975, Judge John Reynolds accepted Barbee's petition on the behalf of Black children and ruled in Amos that MPS must desegregate and end its deliberate policy of racially isolation children of color. Much to my shock and surprise, in that the board was a continuing body, I was named a defendant, one of fifteen board members. I was peeved and offended because I as a Black man had never deliberately voted to racially segregate anyone, particularly my own race.
Barbee argued successfully that the whole system should be ordered to desegregate, root and branch. Barbee told me that he did not want just a paper victory. He wanted a substantive end to the horrific racial isolation in the city. We worked together along with a committee of 100 to establish a system of magnet schools that became a key element in our diversity plan in 1976, which the court accepted. We worked together again in 1978 along with the new and successful Superintendent, Lee McMurrin, after Judge Reynolds issued a second opinion in Amos on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court to keep this city from going the nasty and invective way Boston, Louisville, and Denver had played out over school segregation issues. Milwaukee became a model city for desegregation, and HEW often sent other school districts that said it couldn't be done to Milwaukee to learn about how to make positive progress at dismantling and eliminating the barriers to public school diversity. Barbee, along with State Assemblyman Dennis Conta and a new MPS board, played an active role in setting up the successful Chapter 220 urban suburban racial integration program which also became a model program for HEW After I had left the school board in 1981, Barbee continued to play an active part in a 1984 spin-off lawsuit between MPS and suburban school districts.
Even when the American Nazi Movement came to a school board meeting to tell the school board that a Black brain weight less than the average white brain, in other words they were speaking about my brain, Lloyd was there to council and mentor a measured response.
The leadership legacy of Lloyd Barbee to a diverse school system and an integrated society will always endure despite the recent attempts of Neo-Racist to once again racially isolate various neighborhoods of our city. We would have truly been a lot worst off with him.
As my mentor, coach and role model, I was truly sorry to hear that Lloyd had passed away.
For further anecdotes and additions for Barbee's contributions contact:
Leon Todd
Phone: 414-444-9490
E-mail: leontodd@execpc.com
P.S. Please, I would like to take out an ad: Leon Todd for Mayor
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