Brown v. Board: The education of a nation

In 1960, only 20 percent of the black population finished high school, compared with 43 percent of the white population. Only 3 percent of African Americans graduated from college, less than half the white graduation rate of 8 percent, according to a report from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.

Ups and downs
“The State of the Dream 2004,” a report released by United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit focusing on income and other economic disparities in U.S. society, found that the dropout rate for black high school students has declined 44 percent since 1968, while the white dropout rate remains relatively steady.

By 1980, over 50 percent of young African Americans were graduating from high school, and 8 percent of black students graduated from college, still less than half the rate of white graduates, the Cornell report said.

A July 2001 study from Harvard found school systems resegregating, despite the impact of Brown, and more diversity among school-age children.

In 1999, about 86 percent of African Americans from 25 to 29 years of age had graduated from high school, a rate comparable to that of white students.

A 1999 brief from the National Science Foundation reported that participation of women and minorities in science and engineering higher education continued to rise, though not yet equal to their representation in the U.S. population of 18- to 30-year-olds.

But there's a downbeat amid these undeniable signs of change. A July 2001 study from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that school systems are resegregating, despite the impact of Brown.

Perhaps — in a nod to the idea of perception being as powerful as reality — that's why the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found, in its 2002 National Opinion Poll on education, that most whites rate their local public schools highly, while most African Americans and Hispanics give their schools only a fair grade.

New imbalances at the schoolhouse
The disparities, Dent noted, point to “people [realizing] fragments — and for some, more than fragments — of the American dream. But race is still a barrier for many people.”

Gary Orfield, a Civil Rights Project researcher and co-director, found that schools have not been as racially unbalanced since 1968, the year that witnessed a series of Supreme Court decisions that put muscle behind desegregation, the Associated Press reported.

Desegregation reached a high point in the late 1980s, but has since eroded, Orfield's research found. Most white, black and Hispanic students still go to a school where they are in the racial or ethnic majority.

“The ultimate irony is that a lot of people ... are talking about everything else but desegregation, and the country has resegregated many of its public schools,” said Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Where's the president?
What Dent finds missing from the national dialogue on race is the voice of the president. “I don't need to hear the Democrats on race anymore,” he said.

“We really need to know more from Bush; he needs to be pushed more,” Dent said of the president whose first Cabinet reflected the highest penetration of African Americans in any administration in U.S. history, but whose January 2003 statement on the admissions policy of the University of Michigan led one member of Congress to call it “a slap in the face of black America.”

“You can twist both sides of the affirmative action argument,” Dent said. “You can tweak it into this platform to justify no affirmative action in education — the whole colorblind argument — or to call for strict quotas. Rather than looking exhaustively, looking independently, people have generally used Brown to justify their own positions.

“People can take Brown and use it to justify their own racial policies that they've expressed before now,” Dent said. “Too few people are willing to step outside the box and really think about race in a way that appreciates its complexity, looks deeply at the persistence of certain kinds of racial unease in this society. Basically, we're too comfortable ... Like the MLK celebrations or the 'I Have a Dream' speech — it's a very sanitized way of looking at the persistence of racial tension in our society.”

'It's huge'
For scholar and author Roger Wilkins, education is at the crux of a life's accomplishments: assistant attorney general in the Johnson administration; Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, history and culture professor at George Mason University; National Public Radio commentator and author of “Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism,” an acclaimed 2001 study.

To Wilkins, the power of Brown is simply expressed: “It's huge. If you're black and you were born in segregation, you were aware of the fact that most people, particularly whites, didn’t have a clue of what segregation was about. It was really a massive coast-to-coast, border- to-border effort on the part of the culture to destroy the spirit and self-confidence of black people.

“You really lived on eggshells,” he said, “because at virtually any moment, any white person could insult you or deprive you of your dignity, and you never knew when it was going to happen.”

'Burst of energy'
“What Brown did was to delegitimize segregation,” Wilkins said. “It unleashed a concentrated burst of energy that lasted 16 to 20 years, by blacks and their white allies to being the country in line with where the Warren court said the country ought to be,” Wilkins said. “I'm fairly convinced there wouldn't have been a successful Montgomery bus boycott had that decision not come down.

‘I’m fairly convinced there wouldn't have been a successful Montgomery bus boycott had that decision not come down.’ — ROGER WILKINS educator and author

“The whole country got a tutorial about what was going in the South for years. People started to see dignified, working-class black people demonstrating peacefully for some of the simplest basic rights there were.”

Wilkins noted that the passing of the torch to John F. Kennedy's generation in 1960 added fuel to the fire for educational parity — whether the best and brightest knew it or not.

“Kennedy grew up rich and white; he didn't know anything about black people,” Wilkins said. “But he was forced by the energy created by Brown and the later demonstrations. They knew from outside the government and inside their own administration that they weren't moving fast enough — all of that goes back to Brown.”

'Flashpoint of resistance'
“The resistance to integrated schools was beyond anything anyone could have imagined,” Wilkins noted. “There was a movement toward integrated education but it became the flashpoint of resistance to racial progress.

“Racism is a central part of American culture,” Wilkins said. “One hundred years before we were a country, we were deep into it. We constructed a country where a good part of whites' working-class sense of who they were depended on the suppression of black people. That still exists to a real degree today, which is why there's such virulent resistance to efforts to desegregate schools.”

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