Kansas City citizens were clearly not up to the task. They had shown their distrust of the KCMSD often enough. So in 1985, after eight uneventful years on the case, Judge Russell Clark made the boldest move of his or any judge’s career: he unilaterally doubled taxes on Kansas City property owners and raised the payroll taxes on its work force. He also levied a huge assessment against the state of Missouri. An astonishing decision, this was clearly the toughest of Clark’s career. But hey, if Harry Truman could drop the A-Bomb without hesitation or regret, Judge Russell Clark wasn’t going to brood over a school tax. “Never lost a wink of sleep over the case,” he says dispassionately.

Perhaps without fully realizing it, Clark had crossed a constitutional Rubicon. In the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton had argued for judicial independence precisely because they would not “ xxxxx. ” Hamilton and his fellow patriots had gone to war over a comparable affront by the British. “No taxation without representation,” they protested, a rallying cry that echoed throughout the centuries until it fell on deaf ears in a Kansas City courthouse.

Missourians who cared about their history--or about their taxes--were outraged by Clark’s decision. Their outrage did them little immediate good. Unlike Truman and FDR whose urge to act could be checked--as it often was--by the two other branches of government, Clark accounted only to his fellow judges, and the judicial environment continued to support him. In 1990, the Supreme Court voted to uphold most of Clark’s tax decision, but the margin was a hair thin 5-4, and the opposition was growing stronger.

Public resentment was growing as well, and once more, geography came into play. Back in 1981, after four years (but only two weekends) in Kansas City, Clark had finessed a transfer of sorts back to Springfield. This was his home. It was who he was: a quiet, patriotic, family man. A night out on this town was dinner with another couple. Sundays meant a family trip to the Methodist Church and afterwards golf with Jerry, his wife--a greater love of family no golfer could imagine.

But Kansas Citians did not understand the man nor the reason for his remove. Clark’s Springfield posting made him seem aloof, imperious, remote--the disdainful General of an army of occupation.

As the taxes were raised for the construction of 17 new schools and and the rehabilitation of 55 old ones--perhaps the single greatest one-man construction levy since Ramses II--frustration mounted throughout the state, and without a democratic outlet, it sometimes got ugly. Among Judge Clark’s least fond memories are the death threats.

Tenacious and determined, Clark refused to step aside. Quite the contrary. In a truly Sisyphean ruling, he insisted that the courts would oversee the schools until the city’s students reached the national norm on academic achievement, even if it took a generation. The judge may not have realized it, but proverbial calf was getting heavier.

Worse, the magnet scheme was not really working. “I always think Judge Clark tried to do the right things,” says former Kansas City School Board president Ed Newsome, “but he was always given pretty bad plans with which to operate.”

Though grandiose, the plans seemed to many untested and unfocused--in the words of John Ashcroft, “a gold-plated Taj Mahal . . .planetariums, pools and pay increases.”

As plaintiff’s attorney Arthur Benson slowly came to realize, the problem went beyond the plans: Clark couldn’t turn the schools around unless he intervened directly on issues of curriculum, training, and especially on personnel. He couldn’t just spend extravagant sums. He would have to hire and fire people, clean out the patronage--much of it minority--and deep six even the illusion of democratic control. This, Clark refused to do. Judicial activist or not, Clark had gone far enough. He would not go any further.

Benson had his own unspoken constraints. Despite a radical willingness to use judicial power and a genuine passion for the case, he never entreated Clark to look for a solution beyond the public school paradigm. “I think we both disappointed each other a lot,” Benson acknowledges today.

As Ed Newsome notes, “The results were what you’d expect after 12 years of being run by lawyers and courts.” The drop-out rate remained high, the academic achievement remained low, and the white students kept leaving, if at a slower rate. “A failure,” Newsome adds, “even on integration issues.”

Nationwide, judicial momentum had begin to stall, and in June, 1995 the Supreme Court rapped Clark’s knuckles. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing now for the majority, admonished Clark to forget about test scores and “restore state and local authorities to the control of the school system.”

By 1997, the calf had grown too heavy. Clark could no longer lift it. For the first time in twenty years he dreaded the drive to Kansas City and the interminable hearings. He chafed at the restraints the Supreme Court imposed but now doubted whether he could solve the District’s problems even without them. Too many fatherless children, he came to see. Too little motivation at home. “I don’t know,” he muses, “if the disparity (between KC’s black and white students) can ever be eliminated. Probably not.”

And so, after twenty years on this thankless case, and hundreds of thousands of miles on the lonely road between Kansas City and Springfield, Judge Clark finally gave it up.

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