Integration and James Baldwin

Integration and Baldwin

Almost every person who has stepped foot in a college classroom has experienced ethnic diversity within the students in the room. This has not always been the case however. Up until 1954 blacks and whites attended different schools and weren’t allowed the same schooling opportunities. It took a young girl, Linda Brown, and her father, Oliver Brown, as well as many other courageous African American families to stand up to the old law of “separate but equal”, decided in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1892, and fight for equal educational rights for whites and blacks. Even though the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Brown family in 1954, this did not mean that everyone was so eager to accept integration so readily. In fact, right away things hardly changed at all, especially at the higher levels of education. It took a man by the name of James Meredith, the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, to further expand what the Brown’s had started and further break the racial boundaries put around education. Presently school integration has greatly improved but there is still definitely room for improvement. Baldwin was accurate in describing his present day conditions of school segregation in that it was almost a joke and that no “progress” had been made but he was wrong to say that, “the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems” (Baldwin 336). It is American good will and unity that has brought all races together to improve integration in public schools and although there is still room for improvement everyone’s attitudes have shifted to make schooling improved for all students.

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... “Down at the Cross.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 296-347.

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Krock, Arthur. “In the Nation.” New York Times. 9 Oct. 1962. 40.

Lee, Chungmei and Gary Orfield. “Brown At 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?” The Civil Rights Project. 17 Jan. 2004. Harvard University. 8 April 2004. http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/reseg04/resegregation04.php

Rodgers, Herald R. “The Supreme Court and School Desegregation: Twenty Years Later.” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 89, No. 4. (Winter, 1974-1975): 751-776. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00323195%28197424%2F197524%2989%3A4%3C751%3ATSCASD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5.

“Segregation Groups Increasing in South.” New York Times 14 Oct. 1961: 1.