Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
Reaping benefits of talking

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White parents had just sued, saying it was unfair their kids couldn't attend Ballard High because of skin color. Racial charges flew. Whites were accused of trying to keep minorities out of North End schools. Some white and minority families, formerly friends, stopped speaking.

Amid it all, some people took a path not often traveled when race is on the table: They sat down together and talked.

A teacher introduced some white parents who had sued to leaders in the city's most prominent black groups, the Urban League and NAACP.

"A light went on as soon as we started talking," says James Kelly of the Urban League. "We all said, 'You know what? We can figure this out.' "

Parents, educators and civil-rights leaders hashed out a plan that concluded race was not as important as proximity to a school when determining who should attend. The group also proposed magnet programs at each high school open to all students districtwide.

I recall this story now for several reasons.

First, many readers responded harshly last week when I praised the work and vitality of the Seattle chapter of the NAACP.

Some criticized the aggressive style of President Carl Mack, which is fair game. But others said: Why do black groups always cry racism and play the victim? One reader challenged me to cite an example of a local black group doing something constructive.

The premise insults both the Urban League and NAACP, but I'll play along. So here they are, working together with whites on one of our most incendiary issues — the integration of schools. It doesn't get more constructive than that.

Second, the result of their work was unearthed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week and lauded as just the type of sophisticated approach the schools ought to use to achieve diversity. The court threw out Seattle's use of race in admissions, calling it a "stubborn adherence to the use of race for race's sake."
 
The School Board ignored the "Urban League plan" at the time. Kelly recalls he got only a minute or two to present it, after which the board asked no questions.

One board member, Michael Preston, said he didn't read it because he had better things to do, such as "play with my bass lunker fishing game."

"They never took it seriously," Kelly says. "We were saying it wasn't about race, but they just seemed caught up in this racial calculation."

This matters now because the current School Board has a decision to make.

It can pursue a dead-end legal fight that has cost $300,000 to date, defending a policy that the court showed had not made schools much more diverse anyway. Or it can look for new ideas on how to place kids in Seattle schools. Why not start by listening to people who came together to talk about race, instead of continuing to fight about it?

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday.

Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com