A little more than 48 years ago a federal District Judge ruled that the Owen County school system could not use the threat of overcrowding as an excuse to delay racially desegregating its classrooms.
Now, nearly a half century later, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency, is going back in time to examine thousands of school systems across the country, including the Owen County case, to determine which schools desegregated under court order — and which ones might still be under a court’s control.
Peter Minarik, regional director of the commission’s southern regional office, said it has been a tedious effort.
“We looked and searched and hunted, and if we thought they were under a court order, we sent them a letter,” he said.
Owen County School Superintendent Mark Cleveland thought he had been mailed yet another routine survey last June when he received one of the thousands of letters Minarik sent out.
“From time to time I get letters that say, ‘We’re running a survey, to check up on this or to audit that,’” he said.
But Cleveland received a second mailing last week that was more specific, referencing a 1959 federal court case. And that piqued his interest.
Still, he was unsure of how to handle it.
“It said legal action may have occurred,” Cleveland said. “Which sounded to me — to be honest — like a fishing expedition.”
Though Minarik conceded that  about 15 percent of the letters his office sent out ended up being in error, often stemming from an employment battle or some other non-related legal issue involving a school system during the desegregation era, the case referenced in the second piece of correspondence sent to Cleveland did involve an Owen County court case that focused on integrating its classrooms.
Federal District Judge H. Church Ford ruled on Grimes versus Smith in favor of the plaintiff in February 1959.
The plaintiff, Mary Lena Harris-Grimes-Johnson, was an Owen County mother and NAACP representative. The county high school had been racially integrated the prior year, following an earlier decision by Judge Ford, according to the Feb. 19, 1959, edition of The News-Herald.
According to that same newspaper, the school system argued in 1959 that combining two African-American elementary schools, located in New Liberty and Owenton with a combined enrollment of 79 students, would overcrowd classrooms.
The school blamed voters, who had rejected a referendum during the previous election that would have set up a special building tax for the schools.
The school’s argument did not persuade Judge Ford.
“If we waited for districts to vote new taxes in order to integrate, there wouldn’t be many integrated schools,” he was quoted as saying in The News-Herald in 1959.
The civil rights commission’s leadership, a panel of eight commissioners appointed by the White House, decided in a May 2005 meeting to study the issue of court involvement in desegregation.
Minarik said the study is to simply get the facts on record, not to judge the school districts.
“We’re not saying who’s doing anything wrong,” he said. “We’re just trying to confirm the status of all these desegregated school systems. Nobody knows.”
It’s an intensive project for the civil rights commission, which has about 50 employees nationwide and was established in the 1950s to focus on voting rights.
“We may be the smallest federal agency there is,” Minarik said.
During his investigation into what schools in the South were ever under a court order, Minarik said the research has seemingly shown that the involvement of courts in desegregation has covered a wide spectrum.
He noted that Kentucky and Tennessee had relatively few cases, with between a dozen and 20 occurring in the commonwealth.
Minarik postulated that populations of black people in those two states are concentrated in certain areas, falling into the same districts.
“There weren’t many places affected by this” in Kentucky, he said.
By comparison, Minarik said, about half of Florida’s 67 school districts were under court order.
But it took some legwork to come to that conclusion.
One district contacted by the agency, in Monroe County, Fla., included schools that had been damaged several times by hurricanes, making old records hard to come by.
Still, after some digging, the commission was able to find answers.
The superintendent looked up the person who held his job during the desegregation era, who happened to remember the case.
In others districts the puzzle was easier to solve for Minarik and company.
“In Alabama everybody — every one of them” were under court order, he said. “Technically, Alabama was the easiest one for us to do.”
The U.S. Department of Justice swooped into many districts in the South during the 1960s. The NAACP and other groups took districts to court in other cases.
To this day, some districts still have to go before a judge to get approval to build a new school, Minarik said, resulting from the federal enforcement of racial integration.
In the case of the Owen County school system, Minarik said he believes the school has “unitary status,” a term used by the agency to note that the courts have delegated control back to the school system.
But he has requested for the Owen County School District to search for any official records it may have on the matter in order to reach a more definitive conclusion.
Cleveland said the district may house a copy of the court order in its records, but it may prove hard to locate.
“To be honest, I don’t know where to go to start looking for that,” he said.
The superintendent said he will try to help the agency solve its puzzle here in Owen County, but he noted that the daily responsibilities of his job may prevent him from spending too much time digging through old records.
Minarik said he is unsure of a deadline for the federal project. Nonetheless, he said it is a task that needs to be completed — despite the half-century delay on putting it all together.
“Nobody ever knew this,” he said, noting that he believes this is not simply the case of a federal bureaucracy trying to update decades-old records. “I don’t consider it house cleaning. … I really believe this is a story that needs to be recorded somewhere.”

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