Gardendale is on the hook for nearly $850,000 in legal fees and expenses to the lawyers of black schoolchildren who successfully prevented the city from creating its own school district, a federal judge ruled.
U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala said in her ruling issued Monday that the awarding of fees to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and former federal judge U.W. Clemon were warranted because Gardendale “acted in bad faith” both when it attempted to set up the district and during the litigation.
In 2012, the Gardendale City Council approved a feasibility study of a potential separate school system from Jefferson County. Gardendale residents voted for a school tax to fund a school system in 2013 and formed a school board and hired a superintendent in 2014. But it has had no students, teachers or schools.
The Legal Defense Fund and Clemon, representing black students, contended that Gardendale’s proposal was racially motivated as an effort to preserve the city’s white majority status – an argument that both Haikala and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with. Gardendale argued that race was not a factor in its plan to secede from Jefferson County Schools.
Haikala pointed to messages on social media, including Facebook comments where residents said they did not want Gardendale to become Center Point – a city that was predominantly white as late as the 2000 Census that became majority black in the 2010 Census – and that Gardendale only decided to include children in the predominantly black Birmingham neighborhood of North Smithfield in the prospective school system only to fulfill county desegregation requirements.
“The messages of racial inferiority from the separation organizers and from the Gardendale Board [of Education] were public and unmistakable. It is enough simply to recognize that in its refusal to speak to parents of class members from North Smithfield, the Gardendale Board treated those students as tokens to be numbered and included in a municipal district only if necessary to achieve a court-ordered racial quota,” Haikala wrote. “The message is one of fungibility, like so many commercial goods counted and exchanged. Indeed, one of the separation organizers characterized the eleventh-hour inclusion of the North Smithfield students in the Gardendale municipal district as ‘a price to pay to gain approval for separation.’”
Gardendale also demonstrated bad faith when it argued to end the federal court’s supervision of Jefferson County Schools under the 1971 desegregation agreement, withdrew the request and then resurrected the argument to the appellate court, Haikala wrote.
“Gardendale’s lack of candor regarding its appellate argument is another example of the Gardendale Board’s willingness to take any position that serves its interest in the moment,” the judge ruled. “An award of fees is appropriate to deter others from behaving in a similar fashion.”
Haikala ordered the city to pay nearly $740,000 in legal fees to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and former federal judge U.W. Clemon and an additional $103,000 in expense costs to the LDF and $3,400 in such costs to Clemon.
“Unresolved desegregation cases like this one may look like ‘white-haired’ litigation to some white citizens, but to black citizens – thousands of whom remain members of plaintiff classes – these cases are reminders of the painstaking efforts that black citizens have had to undertake to gain access to public schools that were reserved by law for white citizens,” the judge wrote. “A fee award in this case hopefully will prompt more respectful arguments in the future.”
