Separate and unequal once more

By Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr.
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

May 17 marked the anniversa­ry of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racially segregated schools as “inherently unequal,” and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Now over half a century later, America’s schools are being resegregated. The NAACP states that “schools around the country are, in essence, returning to Jim Crow-era patterns of segregation.”

The figures are stark­. A 2009 Civil Rights report published by UCLA reports that African Americans attend schools more segregated today than they did on the day Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, with 32 percent of the student body living in poverty. The average Black child attends a school that is only 29 percent white, with 59 percent poor. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated, with schools that are 27 percent white and 57 percent poor. Overall, a third of all Black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent Black and Latino.

Ironically, the most severe segregation in public schools is not in the South, but in the big cities of the Midwest and in Western states, including California.

The Supreme Court decision that separate public schools were inherently unequal put the Court in the center of America’s fierce racial debate. A year after Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that desegregation could take place with “all deliberate speed,” which helped fuel the massive resistance to change throughout the South. Ambitious politicians like George Wallace and Orville Faubus “stood in the school house door,” trying to block Black students from entering. It took a Civil Rights movement, constant litigation, and federal intervention to make progress.

School integration reached its all time high in 1988, with almost 45 percent of Black students in the U.S. attending majority white schools. But as whites fled to the suburbs, the backlash to busing grew. Nixon perfected the strategy of playing on those racial divides. Segregated housing patterns produced schools divided along racial and class lines. In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court retreated from supporting extensive court-ordered desegregation plans, culminating with a conservative majority of a badly split Court invoking Brown as authority for overturning even voluntary desegregation plans.

But schools aren’t simply inherently unequal, despite equal resources and facilities. At the time of Brown, they suffered — and suffer to this day—what Jonathan Kozol described as “savage inequality.” Most school funding comes from local taxes; the most affluent districts support the best provisioned schools. They get the best teachers, the most modern laboratories and equipment, and the most modern textbooks. Those districts tend to be disproportionately white. The poorest districts — particularly urban districts — end up with the worst schools. The kids with the most need, in too many cases, get the least skilled teachers and the worst facilities.

The bulk of education funding from the federal government and—after extensive litigation — a portion of state funding goes to schools with poorer children, seeking to reduce the advantage enjoyed by the affluent. If living patterns lead to racially segregated schools, and the courts are retreating from trying to counter that, then at least the savage inequality of funding could be reduced.

But now, in the wake of the Great Recession, federal and state education budgets are on the chopping block. The harsh cuts in education spending on the drawing board in Washington and in states across the country will have ruinous effects on the most vulnerable students — and the poorest schools.

In 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court called on America to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity by ending segregated schools. Now segregation by law — racial apartheid — has been replaced with segregation in fact. In this increasingly diverse nation, our schools have become less diverse and more separate. And now they are headed to becoming even more unequal. In 1954, the Supreme Court helped to spark a renewed Civil Rights movement. Now a half century later, we need a new civil rights movement to demand once more equal protection under the law.

This article originally published in the June 20, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.