The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement
MANASIAC said:
Hello Community,
We all know that this month is the celeberation of Brown V. Board of Education. I wanted to start a thread about the current state of Education and what progess and or non-progress has anyone seen at the hand of this landmark decision, which was enforced with All Delibrate Speed,
Manasiac.
Hey Brother Manasiac...good topic.
I'm what people refer to as a "baby boomer" so I know firsthand what it's like to have attended a segregated Black public high school and an integrated white public high school.
Because of Oliver Brown and his landmark challenge of the segregated public school system in Topeka, Kansas, most of our children have the ability to be educated equally with white students. In what ways has that benefitted us and in what ways has that hurt us? Unlike Plessy v. Ferguson when the U.S. Supreme Court held that "separate, but equal" was okay, the Brown decision paved the way for much more than integregtion of the classroom. (Did you know there were a total of four States involved in that one case that began it's history in 1952?)
Many people who are products of the 50s and 60s are now debating as to whether to describe the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision a "celebration" or simply a "recognition." Personally, I prefer the latter description because I don't believe there's much to
celebrate in terms of the quality of education that we were/are afforded under an integrated system. I would like to see a comparison of graduation rates of Black youth pre-desegregation to those post-segregation and then let's see whether there's any significant improvement in the quality of our education.
And for the record, the enforcement of the Brown decision did not occur with "all deliberate speed" either. In 1955 the Supreme Court had to declare that schools should ve desegregated that way. Even then school districts across the country took their time to implement the changes. It took 10 years before my school district enforced it, by court order in 1964. Prince Edward County in Virginia vehemently refused to enforce it and actually shut their school system down for five years in protest. So for five years, children had to get their education the best way they could all because school administrators at that time were in support of Jim Crow Laws.
There's a little known fact that there was a case that preceded Brown by 9 years and it challenged segregated public schools in California in 1945 (
Mendez v. Westminster). The NAACP Legal Defense Fund also participated in this case, led by Thurgood Marshall. But this case was brought by a Mexican family who protested the fact that the State of California separated Mexican children from white children in public education. Nine years later, the famous Brown case was successfully and brilliantly argued before the Supreme Court Justices (100% white men) by Marshall. It was that case that launched Marshall's famous legal career in the U.S. judicial court system.
Has segregation of our schools been as successful for our youth as it was hoped to be? Segregation was lauded as a "better" education for Black youth. Has the "quality" of education improved for them? Was there ever a concern about the socialization of Black youth once they attended these schools? How has that contributed to the education of our children?
Queenie