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SHADOW OF SEGREGATION LOOMS  
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Cheyanne M. Daniels
May 18, 2024
The HIll
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_ On the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board _

, CORE

 

Rep. Al Green [[link removed]](D-Texas) was only
7 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case
that separate but equal was unconstitutional.

Before that, though, Green rode the bus from Fort Walton Beach, Fla.,
to Crestview, Fla., to go to school every day. 

“I can tell you what it was like to be in a segregated school and
drive by white schools, where the buildings were newer, the buses were
newer, where they had the best books,” Green told The Hill.  

The lawmaker remembered getting some of those books — which were
considered “new” to him and his classmates, even though sometimes
the previous student’s name would still be written inside. Other
times, pages would be ripped out of the books. 

When he entered his senior year, Green transferred from the all-Black
W.E. Combs High School to the all-white Choctawhatchee High School.

Green said he was one of just three Black students in a class of 600.

“That’s when I started to realize more of what was going on, what
was happening to me,” he said. “Some people were very nice to me,
but there were many that were not nice at all.”

Now, 70 years after the landmark ruling, Green and other leading Black
voices are concerned that the ruling is slowly being chipped away.  

“We’ve come a long way since the Supreme Court ruled that school
segregation was unconstitutional,” House Minority Leader Hakeem
Jeffries [[link removed]](D-N.Y.) told
The Hill in a statement. “But today, the most segregated school
systems in America can be directly traced to policies put in place in
the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.”

THE CASE FOR CHANGE

Before the Brown decision was handed down in 1954, there was Plessy v.
Ferguson. 

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Black man, refused to give up his seat to a
white man on a train in New Orleans. When Plessy was arrested, he
contested that Louisiana’s law violated the equal protection clause
of the 14th Amendment.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but in an 8-1 vote,
the court ruled against him. 

In 1952, five different cases from across the nation came before the
high court. They would all be condensed under Brown v. The Topeka
Board of Education explained Tona Boyd, associate director-counsel for
the Legal Defense Fund. 

“Oliver Brown was the father of Linda Brown, who was at the time
trying to attend third grade in a school that was just around the
corner from her. But because the school was all white, she was
rejected,” Boyd said. 

Thurgood Marshall, [[link removed]] who
would later become a justice on the high court, led a group of
esteemed lawyers — Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker
Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles and
John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.C. Hayes
— in arguing the case before the court. 

And when they won, Boyd said, it opened the door for changes across
the country. 

“Brown was a case that was brought to challenge that malignant
doctrine that had been endorsed by the court and allowed state
sanctioned segregation to be permitted in almost all areas of American
life, from public schools to trains, cars, to places of public
accommodation,” she said.

“The idea was that [education] would be the first place to strike at
the heart of segregation and then from there the dominoes would fall
– which is exactly what happened,” Boyd added. “That allowed
litigation and laws to be passed that got rid of state sanctioned
apartheid across the United States.”

But advocates warn that the remnants of segregation remain scattered
across the nation today. 

A LEGACY AT RISK

“Though segregation is illegal, our schools still remain segregated
today,” Jalisa Evans, chief executive officer and founder of The
Black Educator Advocates Network, told The Hill. “As white students
fled school districts to avoid integration, redlining continued to
create segregated schools through housing. Today, schools with large
numbers of Black students are underfunded.”

In December 2022, the Education Trust
[[link removed]] found
that districts with predominantly non-white students receive more than
$2,000 less per student than predominantly white districts. 

In a district with 5,000 students, that would equate to $13.5 million
in missing resources.

Advocates also point to recent Supreme Court decisions they say
disrupt the 1954 decision.

“While we celebrate 70 years of the first Supreme Court decision to
break down Jim Crow in education — and the implications were beyond
education — that celebration is dampened by the fact that we now
have a Supreme Court that has taken out affirmative action and
attacked voting rights,” the Rev. Al Sharpton
[[link removed]]told The Hill.  

“If this Supreme Court was sitting in 1954, they probably would have
not voted for Brown versus the Board of Education,” he added. 

While 70 years may seem like a long time ago, Rep. Joyce Beatty
[[link removed]](D-Ohio) points out that
many can still remember what it was like to be barred from seeking
educational opportunities.

As a child, Beatty attended a segregated school before her father
saved up to move the family to an all-white neighborhood for better
opportunities.  

“My father was not an educated man, but he was a strong laborer and
so he worked three jobs in two different states during the year to
save up $7,000 because he could not get a loan for that house because
of redlining … because of the color of his skin,” Beatty said.
“And all of this ties back to education.”

“After he was able to buy that home, garbage cans were set on fire
in our front yard, all because we wanted to integrate a school so that
me — this little Black girl — could have a proper and adequate
education,” she added.

The truth of what families like hers, or what Green endured, could be
lost amid politicization of Black history, including Brown v. Board,
she said.

“They’re trying to ban the books we can read about Black folks who
have been innovative in this country,” Beatty continued. “Those
individuals who fought for justice [in] Brown versus the Board of
Education, they were doing it for one reason: they were doing it for
children.”

“Despite seven decades of progress, the shadow of segregation still
looms large in American education and beyond,” she added. “We have
to continue to fight for our children today.”

Advocates argue that limiting what students learn is just one way the
legacy of Brown is being diminished.

Rep. Steven Horsford
[[link removed]](D-Nev.), chair of the
Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill that segregation can also be
seen in things such as the rise in school choice options, or the
ability for families to select alternatives to public schools. 

Studies
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school choice exacerbates segregation in public schools, and today’s
schools continue to see segregation
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“The resegregation we are seeing in our schools is by no means
isolated,” Horsford said. “It is in fact a part of a much larger
effort to deny Black communities access to opportunities in our
country.”

“As we mark the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and
reflect on our progress over the past several decades, we must
urgently confront the efforts to undermine and reverse that progress
on our campuses, in corporate America, in the federal government, and
beyond,” he added.

* segregation
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* Racism
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* Supreme Court
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