Statement by Mr. Lonnie King

There's no way, that I, Lonnie King, can come out of this thing a winner. We have a problem here that has existed for 15 years.

I have been one of the very few persons who has tried to hammer out a settlement in this case so we could get out of court and move on to the more important issues of educating kids.

I guess you could say I became the man in the middle when I took the position that we ought to put more empasis on desegregating top-level staff people who are responsible for implementing from day to day whatever plan is finally adopted.

I recognize there's a strain in the black community that says if white folks don't want us around, we don't want to be around.

But we started these cases because the bulk of the tax dollar historically followed the white child. The white community escaped the 1954 Supreme Court decision by building what we call 'Supreme Court Schools, these big modern schools in the black community like Martin Luther King and Walden, built to perpetuate segregation.

So we are faced with a school system which has had 15 years to come up with the bricks and mortar with which to make it virtually impossible to desegregate schools.

The facts we began with have changed, but the public is now blaming the NAACP for upheaval when they should have been complaining about where these schools were being built over the last 20 years.

Atlanta has to desegregate its schools--period. I operated on the premise that the only way we could eliminate the racial identity of all the black and white schools would be to cut the white population up.

If you really sit down and look at this plan there have been strong concessions to the white community's feelings. There have also been some strong concessions to the black community's feelings.

But there are 80,000 blacks and 20,000 whites in the school system. The white schools are all smaller and the big schools are in the inner city. To split the whites up into groups of 10 and send them out to the black schools is just ridiculous. There just aren't enough white folks to go around.

Whites were opposed to the plan to bus 2,000 students. They were opposed to the 'Tom' plan (a nickname that jokingly had been given to the last compromise plan between the school board and the Atlanta NAACP) and they were opposed to the Stolee plan.

That could only lead me to the conclusion that any plan that meaningfully desegregates the Atlanta schools will find opposition from the white folks in this town. And they are the ones that have kept the Atlanta School Board from doing what they had to do for the last 15 years.

source: Atlanta Journal & Constitution January 28, 1973