EDUCATION Has Peace Broken Out In the Race War?

MOVE ACROSS DALLAS THESE DAYS AND pick up on one of those truly ode moments in time. Suddenly, a deafening end has come to the Thursday night fights pitting tough dude Lee Alcorn and his boys against anyone on the city’s schoo board with skin color other than black Overnight, other stories have filled the ah and the pages of the newspapers.

Why? Attribute it to the shocking defeal of long-time school board member Kathlyn Gilliam by the young upstart Ron Price. In electing the inexperienced Price over the perennial race-baiter, Dallas voters-black, white, brown-sent a loud message: This bickering must end.

Now Price is on TV going to church with white trustee John Dodd. And Alcorn has been suspended by the national NAACP.

Is it possible the race war has petered out?

What’s Alcorn to do? Fold the NAACF flag, say he will fight no more? What’s to become of the oft-whipped Dallas school board? Will it now have to work on an educational agenda away from the glaring lights of television cameras? Can these socio-politicians live without the media? Geez, when’s the last time they did that? Isn’t this the city where everybody knows racial wrestling is as much a part of the crazy geography as the killing of Kennedy?

Something wild happens to a city when it is treated to a lengthy dose of racial drama. Sometimes, neighborhoods are burned to the ground (Los Angeles). Sometimes the cops get tired of it (Detroit). Sometimes people just move away (Boston). The simplistic thing to say about the year’s angst in local public schools is that blacks have seen their biggest fear come to life: A massive shifting of power is underway and they are now the third-place player in a game that allows little standing for those at the bottom of a three-headed totem pole.

After years of clearing the runway for others, Hispanics have gained flight. Blacks, at least the noisy radical fringe, are in a freefall. Few things are absolutes in Dallas, but maybe it is as the portly Mexican-American tells me one afternoon at Chano’s taco joint in Oak Cliff: “Esta Yvonne los esta chingando…. (Yvonne is kicking their butts.)”

The Yvonne this patron talks about with pride is Dallas’ rookie superintendent, Lauren Yvonne Gonzalez. It is this 44-year-old Hispanic educator and former professor who is credited with bringing to an end the almost nightly episodes of angry racial politics, the sort that always brings out hard-looking blacks and the police, followed inevitably by negative press.

At the heart of the most recent school-board fights was a belief by black activists that the blond Hispanic was not at all right for leading a district they felt was theirs. You don’t bring in a Laredo Latino to educate blacks, they said. Not in Dallas. Not in the city where blacks have led most of the battles.

Like the anachronistic cowboy who says all he can know is his own time, Alcom pulls out his black-struggle reference points when discussing Gonzalez: “Coming to a school district like Dallas, with its history, we didn’t think she had the skills to be successful. And we still believe that.”

Following Gonzalez’s appointment in January-when all hell broke loose, when he risked being seen as a couthless cur insulting the smaller, blue-eyed superintendent in public-it was Lee Alcorn’s name one saw in the newspaper and on the evening news.

Not a dumb man, Alcorn takes care to say he does not dislike all Mexican-Americans. But he insists the fight is for black children he feels will suffer if the new superintendent proceeds with announced plans to make things better for Hispanic kids, Nevermind that almost half of the district’s 155,000 students are of Hispanic descent, or that projections are that the number will rise to 70 percent (roughly 100,000) within the next 10 years. Alcorn is stuck in a time warp, in a mind-set that still says we shall overcome when blacks are so deep in the game that they, too, fail society.

After seeing Alcom, I head for the offices of lawyer Adelfa B. Callejo on North Central Expressway. Callejo is a woman who has been at every political battle waged by Hispanics since the 1950s. Like few others in Dallas, she knows the casts, the stage, the lines. It is Callejo who can list the names of all the school administrators who passed up a shot at dancing with the Hispanics to waltz with the radical blacks. She brings up the name of Chad Woolery (an Anglo criticized for giving in to every demand made by blacks), and says that he, like predecessors Marvin Edwards and Nolan Estes, learned the downside to a turn around the floor with the activists. Fail to toe the line and the activists quickly change the music from something pleasant to something harsh.

Ask Callejo about former school board president Bill Keever’s last waltz and it sounds like she’s introducing the king of pain:

“They emasculated Keever. They made him apologize.”

Ask her about the woman who has scolded and ignored these same black activists, and the Hispanic lawyer stops shaking her learned head:

“All I gotta say is that it took a Mexican-American.”

The Mexican-American? Yvonne Gonzalez.

Ask about Lee Alcorn, and Callejo pulls no punches: “Can I ever support him? Like I said, we analyzed it and realized blacks can’t make it happen. What can blacks do for Hispanic children?”

RENE CASTILLA IS NOW DEEP IN LIBERAL arts over at Irving’s peaceful North Lake Community College, looking healthy and speaking freely. He’s had time to think about his years as a Dallas school trustee. He readily tells you he’s unloaded much of the painful baggage that got in the way of the job, meaning his many political clashes with blacks.

I ask him about the bare-fisted brawl between blacks and Hispanics some say has forever split both ethnic groups, and he nods as if he’s been waiting years for someone to ask the question. ’They play up slavery,” Castilla throws out professorially, “but it doesn’t ring true anymore. A lot of people work with minorities and they don’t see what Lee Alcorn sees.”



CREAM?” YVONNE EWELL ASKS FROM the kitchen of her East Oak Cliff house.

’’Black is fine.”

“It sure is,” she says, pouring.

Ewell is black, in her 70s, and the senior member on the school board.

“So,” I ask, face-up. “What’s with this resentment against the new Hispanic superintendent?” There is a cleaning lady sweeping outside and Ewell waves off answering until the broom moves on. That gone, she says, “My question is: Can she be sagacious enough to extricate herself from this system that handed her the job?”

Gonzalez is almost 30 years her junior- a child of another era, says Ewell. Point by point, she makes her case that this superintendent isn ’t ready for a big city like Dallas, that Gonzalez does not “have an ear” for blacks, that the hiring process that brought the inexperienced Mexican-American to the district’s top position was the quintessential “fix”; that is, that Anglos wanted her.

As one would imagine, Ewell is a historian on all to do with Dallas. “Supt. Nolan Estes used to say to me,” she recalls, ’”Yvonne, you take care of the blacks; I’ll take care of the whites.”’ She acknowledges that the hiring of Marvin Edwards in 1987-the district’s first black superintendent-was a fine day for blacks.

In Gonzalez, Ewell sees a woman eager to scuffle, easy to engage in racial scraps. Yes, black activists baited her, but Ewell says it wasn’t until Gonzalez bit back with her “Hispanics-first agenda” that things went from bad to worse. She criticizes the new superintendent’s inability to show a winner’s grace, her disinclination to offer olive branches south of the Trinity River, her refusal to think twice when demoting high-ranking blacks. In the end, it is a blistering backhand Ewell delivers: “She was clearly not the best candidate.”

Too much sweat has gone into advancing black needs in Dallas schools, Ewell says with all-out conviction, and it is with that in mind that she moves beyond Gonzalez, concluding: “Whites need to be just. This is a minority district, and whites need to share the power.”

GONZALEZ’S ARRIVAL FROM NEW MEXIco to oversee the tenth-largest school district in the nation came with her own eye-popping realization that this no longer was Santa Fe-the little town with fewer students (12,800) than Dallas has school employees (17,442). Dallas has a $ I billion annual budget, almost 10,000 teachers and 155,000 students. (Almost 50 percent of the teachers are Anglo, about 35 percent are black; only 15 percent are Hispanic or “other.”) Statistics, yes, but fodder for critics lo ask whether Gonzalez is up to the job. Anxiously, they pose a hard question: Is 16 months as superintendent in tiny Santa Fe enough?

“She has put a cloud of dishonesty over the whole school district,” Lee Alcorn says during our chat. “We’re as down as we’re going to go.”

Add to that the activist’s belief that Gonzalez is not truthful, does not care for black schoolchildren, employees or faculty, and Alcorn’s position is clear: These shortcomings have to be dealt with.

Yet, politics being the essence of a lively lava lamp, Alcorn is very much the dark glob in the mix: a loco Don Quixote to Hispanics, a sad imitation of ’60s black civil-rights activists to whites. It is these Dallasites-as well as some prominent blacks, including Mayor Ron Kirk-who tell him his gaseous protestations are passé, that the severe language of racism he uses no longer works, that to fight in the fashion of confrontation in this case is ridiculous because blacks have most of the jobs at the schools, and they have indeed benefited from special programs.

Alcorn is the last Black & White guy. Everything is either one or the other. “Why should we bring our black children to schools and believe white people will educate them?” he asks, mentioning the predominance of Anglo teachers and the white flight that has seen thousands of Anglo students leave the district. (Going into this school year, whites make up only 11 percent of students.) In a way, the question is dead-on, as is his answer: “My feeling is that if Dallas white people felt good about the education system here then their majority would still be there.”

Next, he rattles off fears. Alcorn believes the district’s 1971 desegregation order- again under review by U.S district judge Barefoot Sanders-will be ended, a move sought by the five non-black school board members and Gonzalez, who says it will save millions in legal fees and free the district from a host of constraints. Alcorn argues that gains made by blacks while under the court’s monitoring were needed. More than jobs, he believes, losing that directive will bring a return to the segregation days of old.

Fair enough. But what about the coming school year?

“There’s no white guy anymore,” I say, injecting the name of ex-board president Keever. “Can you pull the same protests with two women on stage (new board president Kathleen Leos and Gonzalez)?”

“The skirts?” Alcorn snaps. “One’s an Anglo married to a Hispanic and the other’s a Hispanic married to an Anglo. You think they got their heads on right?”

Were it a joke coming from Eddie Murphy, he’d likely explode in laughter. Alcorn doesn’t. His words say this crusade against the district will march on regardless of how he is vilified.

“They created a monster,” he says of Gonzalez.



JESSE DIAZ FROWNS IT OFF. THE PLEA-sant Grove Realtor, head of a small League of United Latin American Citizens chapter, characterizes himself as the superintendent’s Zorro. It is Diaz who saddles up to defend Gonzalez whenever blacks attack. Newspaper clippings substantiate his claim. Insisting to me that he is nonpolitical, Diaz nonetheless is a savvy operative. Mano-a-mano exhibitions at school board meetings are how Dallas came to know him last spring, but he’d rather talk about his work on the Latino Advisory Council, a quieter effort on his part to push the Hispanic cause on the schools front. Still, at a rowdy board meeting earlier this year, Diaz was seen beelining for a black man pointing the wrong finger at him. It turned out the offender was Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Not (hat it mattered to Diaz, whose voice and manner are similar to those of Brooklyn actor Joe Pesci. In his forties, Diaz is the first to say his fists aren’t as practiced as years ago, when as a recalcitrant teen he whipped his share of Dallas punks.

Diaz nonetheless approached Price with his own macho religion, which was: “Come on, you black-ass motherfucker! You wanna piece of me, or what!?” He laughs now, but says the outburst followed a barrage of nonsense the blacks aimed at Gonzalez. “I kept hearing these black guys rag on us all night long,” Diaz continues. “The usual crap, you know. ’Go back to Mexico.’ That kind of shit. Well, they should have known Hispanics were damned fed up with their messing on Yvonne’s parade. I, myself, went for it, ready for chingasos [a fight], man. Until four cops grabbed me from behind and dragged me away.”

Alcorn, he says, uses the NAACP’s flag to drop a wet rag on anyone he does not like. “What Alcorn (he sounds it, ’El Corn’) doesn’t say is that it hasn’t been all roses for us!” Diaz fumes. “We’ve been killed, hung and raped, too. We’ve had our property taken. Blacks think we’ve had it easier. But we’ve had the same shit happen to us! My parents remember they had to ride the back of the bus. I hate to hear blacks talk about it, because we, too, went through hell! The only difference is we don’t cry about it. We move on.”

To Diaz, the Lee Alcorn show is all about bad theater. Derisively, he calls him a wannabe: “He’s a bullshitter, but the press buys into his bullshit. He says he’s going to do this and do that, but there “s never more than 20 negroes with him….”

Madder still is Callejo, who Gonzalez refers to as “my mentor.” Says Callejo: “The blacks have no bitch about Hispanics. We supported them for years, and they know it. Lee Alcorn knows it better than anyone.” The record shows, she adds vigorously, that Hispanics supported causes blacks thought important, endorsed blacks seeking office and bent over to help the minority cause.

When Gonzalez’s star rose and blacks moaned, there was no one angrier than Callejo. It was then, she says, that “everybody in the Hispanic community said, lWe don’t need the blacks.’”

I ask her about the possibility of peace. “Hispanics do not want a coalition with blacks,” she replies, tersely. “We brothers, as they call us, feel betrayed.” The quick segue to winning politics is pure Callejo: “Whites have the power. You better make your coalition with those in power. His-panics are right in allying with the whites.”

Castilla still remembers the biting criticism he received from black trustee Thomas G. Jones (now a justice of the peace), who, when Castilla in 1987 cast a vote many blacks felt sided with the whites on the school desegregation issue, told him: “You are the enemy. I will never break bread with you again.”

Callejo laughs about that one: “Blacks used us–our numbers-to achieve what they wanted! We don’t have any problem with that, but they never reciprocated. There was a time Hispanics couldn’t play the game because they didn’t even know the language to voice their concerns. Blacks forget that. They don’t know Hispanics culturally! They are acting in fear of Hispanics. They don’t threaten and intimidate Hispanics.”



MUCH HAS BEEN MADE ABOUT BLACK opposition to Gonzalez being a small segment of the city’s large black population. But it is also true that within this group, to say nothing is to lose everything. They have seen the school district sway to the Hispanic numbers and they have asked: What can we do about this old ally’s newfound political currency?To hearthem agonize about the worst prospect, it is as if the suspicion they express over and over certainly comes-at least to them-with the smell of soul-killing change.

During my visit, Alcorn re-creates the action that set in motion his entry into the school fray. He tells me it was trustees Hollis Brashear. Ewell and Kathlyn Gilliam who contacted his office after Gonzalez’s appointment in January, seeking a summit where they and others, includ-ing The Rev. Zan Holmes and Commissioner Price, could plot strategy to avoid total defeat. As Gonzalez acted, their feeling was that turf won long-ago was now being torn in a bombs-away attack they had not expected.

“They wanted to see how we could influence that situation,” Alcorn says, referring to fears that the black voices on the school board stage were speaking into dead microphones. “I felt that if our school officials did not have a voice in school affairs.. .then we didn’t need to have trustees.” And so he crafted an island-like posture that pitted blacks first against the school board, then against Hispanics. As Alcorn describes the mood of the black trustees, “It was like a frustration level beyond their ability to restore it. I told them that was something the NAACP could work with.”

The group “talked techniques.” There was, Alcorn says, reason enough for using the exacting language of race-on-race, for barging in with flamethrowers. That would get attention. As for his input, Alcorn recalls he felt “compelled, almost obligated, to do something to bring about some change.”

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he tells me. “It just energized me to listen to the arrogance being described by the school board members.” He remembers it was trustee Ewell leading the group’s discussion. “She was just looking for relief. Anything that would help. I told her there was nothing we could no! do if we set our minds to it.”

Alter several meetings. Alcorn was convinced that everyone present had endorsed his solution; vicious con from at ions. “We told them we would use techniques that would disrupt the meetings.” Alcorn says. “We said the school board should not be able to function if our board members could not function.”

And so. with the black trustees’ full support. Alcorn confronted with vigor. He halted board meetings using words of hate, and with the backing of the New Black Panthers, practicing intimidation of old-

I mainly, wear black and took ghetto-lough. The police stormed in, completing the rumble backdrop. Dallas agonized; Alcorn never apologized. Neither did elected officials in his camp. Bui his strategy backfired when disgusted voters dumped Kathlyn Gilliam, who had been on the school board for 24 years. Her negativity and the continned racial bickering prompted young, politically-green Ron Price to run against her. With support from blacks, whites and Hispanies, 30-year-old Price scored an upset victory in May over Gilliam.

Price has lei it be known that his primary contribution to the school board will be serving the needs of children and not those of any ethnic group. Whether Price, who is black, can fend off Alcorn’s attacks is a huge mailer for the board at large. (Alcorn tells me he fully expects Price It) be a “black trustee,” meaning no different than the blacks-first Gilliam, or he’ll face the wrath of the city’s black community. ) On the side of Gonzalez, Price can play a big role in quelling any uprising Alcorn may have in mind. On the side of Ewell and Brashear, he can only contribute to the mess that’s fueled Alcorn in the past. (Brashear and Gilliam did not return phone calls.)

Price, however, is a quick study. Less than a month after laking office, he found himself mired in a racial scrap with fellow trustee Jose Plata over comments Plata reportedly made about blacks and alcohol. As could be expected, the ethnic fray was big news. Price, however, deftly nipped the controversy in (he bud by calling a news conference, with Plata in low, at which he said this one would 1101 linger beyond a discussion bel ween both men.

Stilt the rift is so strong, so black and brown this lime, that il is not hard to find rough comments about Gonzalez even inside the district’s Ross Avenue offices.

“She is so arrogant, so about herself,” says one black administrator. ’That’s what white Dallas wanted. It has nothing to do with qualifications. I think that she was the weakest of the candidates but probably the easiest to manipulate.”

Another time and another woman, the hurtful words would likely make for long nights of crying and eventual resignation. Yvonne Gonzalez, however, is not one to cry or be run out of Dodge. With her, there is a clear- sense that loud, black men such as Lee Alcorn and John Wiley Price are not the big problem white women used to think they were. One only has to look to her office bookshelf for confirmation. There titles such as Women Who Run with the Wolves and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories jump ai you from alongside academic tomes and fairy tales like The Little Prince. The wolves book is a favorite and there is no need to ask why: Its essence is that there is a method to a woman’s ability to survive in a man’s world, and a large part of that method lies in not fending off tough times and tough hombres, but in taking them on- in fitting them where women, not men. want to fit them in. You run up against a lough dude–you ask him to make an appointment.

Will she cry? I ask her that during one of our conversations, and she brays the laugh of & chicana border woman, telling me crying is. well, laughable. Will she quit if black protesters again raise the heat this coming school year? She looks at me as if it is a question her husband has perhaps asked. and says: “I’ll have no peace forthose four years. I know that.”

Maybe James Washington, edilor of the black-oriented Dallas Weekly, has it right. “If she can get the parental support.” he says, “Yvonne Gonzalez can tell everybody to go to hell.”

End of story.

End of race war….