Imagine that your walk to school lasts longer that sixty minutes even though a school is five minutes away. When you finally get there, you enter a shack with makeshift tables and a dirt floor. You do not get paper or writing utensils and you surely do not get good books. Your teacher, who did not even finish her education, hands you a book that another school determined outdated and tossed away. But on one glorious day, May 17, 1954, a promise of change is made. The Supreme Court gave you the right to attend that school at the end of your block, a previously designated white school (Rodgers 1). The next day you and your parents wear nice clothes and walk down the street to the school to enroll for the following school year. You get there and stand proud of yourself and of your new school as you move towards the Dean’s office. You are confronted with terrifying looks of disgust from your white counterparts as they deny you admission based on the color of your skin. Unfortunately, for many African Americans, this was a reality in the years following the Brown versus Board of Education decision (Stephan 19). Although we have made considerable progress since then, our job is far from finished. When examining statistics on testing scores, the quality of schools with African Americans making the majority, on housing segregation and white flight, it quickly becomes apparent that whites and blacks have different numbers. This is due primarily to the ongoing perspective that black people are inferior to them dating back to the pre-emancipation period. Even at the fiftieth anniversary of the infamous Brown versus Board of Education decision, discrepancies between the races remain prevalent. Oliver L. Brown painstakingly wat... ... middle of paper ... ...earch/reseg04/brown50.pdf>. Orfield, Gary, Daniel Iosen, Johanna Wald, and Christopher B. Swanson. “Losing our Future: How Minority Youths are being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis.” The Civil Rights Project. 25 Feb. 2004 < http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/dropouts/dropouts04.php#reports>. Rogers, Frederick A. The Black High School and Its Community. Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1975. Stephan, Walter G., and Joe R. Feagin, eds. School Desegregation: Past, Present, and Future. New York: Plenum Press, 1980. Toppo, Greg. “Integrated Schools Still a Dream 50 Years Later.” USA Today 28 Apr. 2004. United States. Bureau of the Census. Historical Income Tables. Washington: GPO, 2001. Yamasaki, Mitch. “Using Rock ‘N’ Roll to Teach the History of Post-World War II America.” The History Teacher 29.2 (1996): 179-193.
“The Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” is a book that tells the story of author, Jonathan Kozol’s, journey through the public school system. He looks deeper into inner-city, low-income schools and the re-segregation that has taken place. Kozol focuses on the struggles those children of poor and minorities face while trying to achieve equal education as those of the middle and upper class. This book gives a vivid description of what is happening in schools across the country and our failure as a nation to provide ALL students with the education that they deserve through the observations, interviews, and experiences of author Jonathan Kozol. Through this book he tries to shed light on what is really going on in schools across the nation and what most people are not aware of. “Many Americans I meet who live far from our major cities and who have no first-hand knowledge of realities in urban public schools seem to have a rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation they recall as matters of grave national significance some 35 to 40 years ago have gradually, but steadily, diminished in more recent years (Kozol 18).”
The second is the concern over segregation and the effect it has on society. Mr. Kozol provides his own socially conscious and very informative view of the issues facing the children and educators in this poverty ravaged neighborhood. Those forces controlling public schools, Kozol points out, are the same ones perpetuating inequity and suffering elsewhere; pedagogic styles and shapes may change, but the basic parameters and purposes remain the same: desensitization, selective information, predetermined "options," indoctrination. In theory, the decision should have meant the end of school segregation, but in fact its legacy has proven far more muddled. While the principle of affirmative action under the trendy code word ''diversity'' has brought unparalleled integration into higher education, the military and corporate America, the sort of local school districts that Brown supposedly addressed have rarely become meaningfully integrated. In some respects, the black poor are more hopelessly concentrated in failing urban schools than ever, cut off not only from whites but from the flourishing black middle class. Kozol describes schools run almost like factories or prisons in grim detail. According to Kozol, US Schools are quite quickly becoming functionally segregated. Kozol lists the demographics of a slew of public schools in the states, named after prominent civil rights activists, whose classrooms are upwards of 97% black and Hispanic — in some cases despite being in neighborhoods that are predominantly white. It has been over 50 years since Brown vs. Board of Education. It is sad to read about the state of things today.
Before the decision of Brown v. Board of Education, many people accepted school segregation and, in most of the southern states, required segregation. Schools during this time were supposed to uphold the “separate but equal” standard set during the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson; however, most, if not all, of the “black” schools were not comparable to the “white” schools. The resources the “white” schools had available definitely exceed the resources given to “black” schools not only in quantity, but also in quality. Brown v. Board of Education was not the first case that assaulted the public school segregation in the south. The title of the case was shortened from Oliver Brown ET. Al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas. The official titled included reference to the other twelve cases that were started in the early 1950’s that came from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The case carried Oliver Brown’s name because he was the only male parent fighting for integration. The case of Brown v. Board o...
“’The Supreme Court decision [on Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas] is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,’ Harlem’s Amsterdam News exclaimed. ‘It will alleviate troubles in many other fields.’ The Chicago Defender added, ‘this means the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life and the system…of segregation which supports it.’”
In order to understand the magnitude of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, one must understand the hardships that African-Americans had to endure. For example, the case of Davis Knight “illuminate[d] racially mixed communities [,] delineate[d] the legal and social responses to attempts at racial desegregation and black enfranchisement during the era of the New Deal and World War II” in 1948 (Bynum 248). Davis Knight was a 23 year old man from Mississippi who appeared to be a “white,” but indeed was a “black man, who later married a white woman by the name of Junie Lee Spradley” (247). The case was presented to the Jones County Circuit Court where Knigh...
Education has long been regarded as a valuable asset for all of America's youth. Yet, for decades, the full benefits of education were denied to African Americans as a result of the prevailing social condition of Jim Crowism. Not until the verdict in Brown V the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, would this denial be acknowledged and slowly dismantled.
African Americans are still facing segregation today that was thought to have ended many years ago. Brown v. Board of Education declared the decision of having separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As Brown v. Board of Education launches its case, we see how it sets the infrastructure to end racial segregation in all public spaces. Today, Brown v. Board of Education has made changes to our educational system and democracy, but hasn’t succeeded to end racial segregation due to the cases still being seen today. Brown v. Board of Education to this day remains one of the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the good of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t just focus on children and education, it also focused on how important equality is even when society claimed that African Americans were treated equal, when they weren’t. This was the case that opened the eyes of many American’s to notice that the separate but equal strategy was in fact unlawful.
Fayetteville Public High School was the first Arkansas High School to publicly announce it would be integrated. On May 22, within a week following Brown vs Board of Education, Fayetteville announced its intention to desegregate, and, three months later, white and black students were attending the same local high school together.(Deaf) The decision to integrate saved the district five-thousand dollars a year, funds that were normally spent on bussing, board and tuition at distant high schools for its black students. Fayetteville and Charleston were both facing financial situations and made their decision based on these facts and not their moral desire to integrate.(Johnson124) Although many black students were subjected to cases of verbal harassment and dismissive treatment from their teachers, they were also able to form positive relationships with...
Today's education is often viewed as failing in its goal of educating students, especially those students characterized as minorities, including African American, Hispanic, and Appalachian students (Quiroz, 1999). Among the minority groups mentioned, African American males are affected most adversely. Research has shown that when Black male students are compared to other students by gender and race they consistently rank lowest in academic achievement (Ogbu, 2003), have the worst attendance record (Voelkle, 1999), are suspended and expelled the most often (Raffaele Mendez, 2003; Staples, 1982), are most likely to drop out of school, and most often fail to graduate from high school or to earn a GED (Pinkney, 2000; Roderick, 2003).
America demands that all youth receive an education and that its educational system is free and open to all—regardless of class, race, ethnicity, age, and gender. However, the system is failing. There is still inequality in the educational system, and minorities’ experience with education is shaped by discrimination and limited access, while white people’s experience with education is shaped by privilege and access. The educational experience for minorities is still segregated and unequal. This is because the number of white children that are withdrawn from school by their parents is higher than the number of people of color enrolling. White parents are unconsciously practicing the idea of “blockbusting,” where minorities begin to fill up a school; whites transfer their children to a school that has a small or no minority population. They unconsciously feel like once their child is in a school full of minorities that school would not get the proper funding from the federal government. Bonilla-Silvia (2001) states that “[i]nner-city minority schools, in sharp contrast to white suburban schools, lack decent buildings, are over-crowded, [and] have outdated equipment…” (97). The “No Child Left Behind” Act, which holds schools accountable for the progress of their students, measures students’ performance on standardized tests. Most white children that are in suburban schools are given the opportunity to experience education in a beneficial way; they have more access to technology, better teachers, and a safe environment for learning. Hence, white students’ experience with the education system is a positive one that provides knowledge and a path to success. Also, if their standardized testing is low, the government would give the school...
Brown v. Board of the Education in 1954 was a landmark decision in the education arena. The decision maintained that schools that separated students by the color of their skin could no longer be maintained. The court saw this as necessary, since in their mind schools for black students would always be inferior. This inferiority would not be caused by lack of resources, although that usually was a contributing factor to the poor quality of the school, physically and performance-wise. As the Supreme Court saw it, s...
Low-income and minority students are the individuals and groups that are the most negatively affected by the United States educational failure. The number of Hispanic students in the United States is expected to grow 33 percent by 2020 and the number of multi-racial students are expected to grow 44 percent, however their educational future does not look bright. Historically, minorities are the most likely to be impoverished. Dozens of policies have been drafted and implemented in order to fix this problem, however the solutions have not worked, since at least 50 percent of elementary school students are now attending schools where the majority of students are low income and minority. The high poverty, educational environment the students are in leads to less high school graduation and college attendance, thus in turn will lead to a large population that will burden the United States economy later on in areas such as healthcare and welfare.
On the seventeenth day in May 1954 a decision was made which changed things in the United States dramatically. For millions of black Americans, news of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education meant, at last, that they and their children no longer had to attend separate schools. Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court ruling that changed the life of every American forever.
The research done in 2005 revealed that the Black American students who studied at white dominated schools were very low than in any year since 1968 (Thomas 57).” According to Thomas (102), many factors contributed to rapid re-segregation of schools since 1991. The court turned against the desegregation plan adopted earlier by denying new petitions to desegregate schools, the executive arm reduced the initiatives to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Brown right that was so successful in the 1970s (Donnor and Dixson 2013).
Segregation in schools is real, it’s happening, and it’s not subtle. Brown VS the Board of Education, the groundbreaking case that ended the