‘Shadow of segregation looms’ on 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board 

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was just 7 years old when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal was unconstitutional.

But before that, Greene took a 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 past a white school, where the buildings were new, the buses were new, and they had the best books,” Green told The Hill. told.

The congressman remembers getting some of those books. Although the books were considered “new” to him and his classmates, some of them still contained the names of his former students. Other times, pages were ripped out of books.

When he entered his senior year, Green transferred from the all-black WE Combs High School to the all-white Choctathatchee High School.

Green said he was one of only three black students in his class of 600.

“That’s when I started to understand more of what was going on and what was happening to me,” he said. “Some people were very kind to me, but there were also a lot of people who weren’t kind at all.”

Seventy years after the landmark decision, Greene and other leading black voices are concerned that it is being slowly eroded.

“We have come a long way since the Supreme Court ruled that campus segregation is unconstitutional,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said in a statement to The Hill. Told. “But today, the most segregated school system in America can be traced directly to policies put in place in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.”

A 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 New Orleans train. When Plessy was arrested, he claimed that Louisiana’s law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him by an 8-1 vote.

In 1952, five different cases from around the country were brought to the High Court. All of that was explained to Tona Boyd, Associate Director and Counsel for the Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

“Oliver Brown was Linda Brown’s father, and at the time she was trying to attend third grade at a school just down the road. But she was turned away because the school was all white,” Boyd said. Ta.

Thurgood Marshall, who later became a high court judge, was a member of Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spotswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Lewis Redding, Charles and John Scott, and Harold R. -Boulware, James Navrit and George EC Hayes argued in court.

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

“The Brown case is an escalation in the pernicious doctrine that has been approved by the courts and allowed state-sanctioned racial discrimination in nearly every area of ​​American life, from public schools to trains, automobiles, and public accommodations.” “It was a lawsuit filed to challenge it,” she said.

“The idea is [education] That’s the first place you hit the heart of racism, and it’s going to be a domino effect from there, and that’s exactly what happened,” Boyd added. “This enabled the passage of lawsuits and laws to eliminate state-sanctioned apartheid across the United States.”

But advocates warn that remnants of racism still dot the country.

Heritage in crisis

“Racism is illegal, but our schools continue to be racist,” Yalisa Evans, CEO and founder of the Black Educator Advocacy Network, told The Hill. Ta. “Redlining continued to create segregated schools through housing as white students fled school districts to avoid integration. Schools with large populations of black students are now underfunded.”

In December 2022, educational trust It found that districts with a majority of non-white students received more than $2,000 less per student than districts with a majority of white students.

For a 5,000-student district, the missing resources equate to $13.5 million.

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

“As we celebrate 70 years since the first Supreme Court decision that defeated Jim Crow in education, its impact went beyond education, instituting affirmative action and That celebratory mood is dampened by the fact that we now have a Supreme Court attacking the right,” Rev. Al Sharpton told The Hill.

“If this Supreme Court had been sitting in 1954, it probably wouldn’t have voted on Brown v. Board of Education,” he added.

While 70 years may seem like a long time ago, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) remembers how many people were prevented from pursuing educational opportunities. He points out that he still remembers it.

As a child, Beatty attended a segregated school, but his father saved enough money to move the family to an all-white neighborhood in search of better opportunities.

“My father wasn’t an educated man, but he was a strong worker, working three jobs in two different states and saving $7,000 a year. Because the house was redlined and I couldn’t get a mortgage because of the color of his skin,” Beatty said. “And all of this has to do with education.”

“After he was able to buy that house, a dumpster was set on fire in our front yard. It was all about integrating schools so that I, this little black girl, could get a proper and full education.” “Because I wanted to,” she added.

She said the truth of what families like hers and Ms. Green endured can be lost in the politicization of black history, including Brown v. Board.

“They’re trying to ban the books we can read about black people who have done progressive work in this country,” Beatty continued. “Those who fought for justice [in] Brown v. Board of Education, they were doing it for one reason only: they were doing it for the kids. ”

“Despite 70 years of progress, the shadow of racism still looms large in American education and beyond,” she added. “We must continue to fight for our children today.”

Supporters argue that limiting what students learn is just one way to diminish Brown’s legacy.

Rep. Stephen Horsford (D-Nev.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill that racial discrimination has led to increased school choice options and the ability for families to choose alternatives to public schools. He said that this can also be seen in the fact that

the study School choice has exacerbated racial discrimination in public schools and continues to exist in today’s schools. separation At amazing speed.

“The racism we see in our schools is far from isolated,” Horsford said. “In fact, this is part of a larger effort to deny Black communities access to opportunity in our country.”

“As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and reflect on the progress of the past few decades, we stand by our campuses, corporate America, the federal government, and beyond,” he added.