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January 29, 2004

It’s not over yet

When the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education, blacks all over the country were ecstatic. There were several reasons for their elation. First of all, it was no longer legal for public school districts anywhere in the country to promulgate policies to segregate students by race. Secondly, the opinion specifically overturned the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that sanctioned the dread policy of “separate but equal.” And thirdly, many blacks mistakenly believed that in America, the land of laws, whites would simply change their state of mind about race to comply with the law.

Many blacks believed that a lawsuit was like the Super Bowl. When it was over there would be a winner and a loser. No matter what one might have thought before, there was a duty to comply with the letter and the spirit of the law once the Court’s decision was announced. However, according to a recent report from the civil rights project at Harvard University entitled Brown at 50: King’s dream or Plessy’s nightmare?, “Now black communities in every part of the country are experiencing increasing segregation, though nowhere near the level of the pre-civil rights South.”

An example of the extreme resistance to the law was the decision of Prince Edward County, Virginia, to close public schools and give families vouchers to attend private schools. A number of white-only private schools were established in the county, and there were no public schools between 1959 and 1964. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the re-opening of public schools, which became substantially all black in 1964.

The threatened loss of their tax-exempt status caused the all-white academies to integrate. Whites gradually returned to the public schools. By 2001, the typical Prince Edward County School was 58 percent black and 41 percent white. Ironically, the integration rate in what was the most resistant system was far above the national average for racial integration in 2001.

Resistance to the Brown decision was great for 10 years, especially in the South where 98 percent of black students remained in segregated schools. However, there was substantial change from 1964 to 1972. The Civil Rights Act denied federal aid to schools that refused to comply with the requirements of the courts. A dramatic graph in the report shows southern school integration at zero in 1954, climbing from 1964 to a height of 45 percent in 1988, then trailing off to about 30 percent in 2002.

The concern of the report is that despite considerable evidence that school integration benefits blacks, Latinos and whites, the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to require city-suburban school districts to be formed. As a result, Latinos and blacks have become the dominant population groups in the cities, making racial integration impossible to achieve. The concern is that the segregated school populations suffer from poverty.

According to the report, “Concentrated poverty turns out to be powerfully related to both school opportunities and achievement levels. Children in these schools tend to be less healthy, to have weaker preschool experiences, to have only one parent, to move frequently and have unstable educational experiences, to attend classes taught by less experienced or unqualified teachers, to have friends and classmates with lower levels of achievement, to be in schools with fewer demanding pre-collegiate courses and more remedial courses, and to have higher teacher turnover.”

Despite these problems we must establish academic proficiency as the goal of public education in Boston and unite and organize to achieve this objective.

 

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