Representative 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.
Before that, however, Green took 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 pass by white schools, where the buildings were newer, the buses were newer, where they had the best books,” Green told The Hill.
The lawmaker recalled receiving some of these books – which were considered “new” to him and his colleagues, although sometimes the name of the previous student was still written inside them. Other times, pages were torn out of books.
When he entered his senior year, Green transferred from the all-black WE Combs High School to the all-white Choctawhatchee High School.
Green said he was one of three black students in a class of 600.
“That’s when I started to realize more what was going on, what was happening to me,” he said. “Some people were really nice to me, but there were a lot of people who weren’t nice at all.”
Now, 70 years after the historic decision, Green and other prominent Black voices are concerned that the decision is slowly being undone.
“We have come a long way since the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (DN.Y.) told The Hill in a statement. “But today, the most segregated school systems in America can be directly attributed to policies implemented after Brown v. Wade.
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 countered that the Louisiana law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
The case reached the Supreme Court, but in an 8-1 vote, the court ruled against it.
In 1952, five different cases from across the country reached the high court. They would all be condensed into Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, explained Tona Boyd, associate director of the Legal Defense Fund.
“Oliver Brown was the father of Linda Brown, who at the time was trying to attend third grade at a school that was very close to her. But because the school was all white, she was rejected,” Boyd said.
Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a superior court judge, led a group of highly regarded 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 EC Hayes – in arguing the case before the court.
And when they won, Boyd said, it opened the door for change across the country.
“Brown was a case brought to challenge that evil doctrine that was endorsed by the court and allowed state-sanctioned segregation to be permitted in almost every area of American life, from public schools to trains, to cars, to places of public accommodation,” she said.
“The idea was that [education] it would be the first place to hit the heart of segregation and from there the dominoes would fall – and that’s exactly what happened,” Boyd added. “This allowed the passage of litigation and laws that eliminated state-sanctioned apartheid throughout the United States.”
But advocates warn that the remnants of segregation remain scattered across the country today.
A legacy at risk
“Even though segregation is illegal, our schools still remain segregated today,” Jalisa Evans, executive director 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, theTrust in Educationfound 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 a $13.5 million lack of resources.
Advocates also point to recent Supreme Court rulings that they say upset the 1954 decision.
“While we celebrate 70 years since the Supreme Court’s first decision to overturn Jim Crow in education – and the implications went beyond education – that celebration is tempered by the fact that we now have a Supreme Court that has embraced affirmative action and attacked voting. rights,” Rev. Al Sharpton told The Hill.
“If this Supreme Court had been sitting in 1954, they probably would not have voted for Brown over the Board of Education,” he added.
While 70 years may seem like a long time ago, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) points out that many still remember what it was like to be prevented from pursuing educational opportunities.
As a child, Beatty attended a segregated school before his father saved up to move the family to an all-white neighborhood in search of better opportunities.
“My father was not an educated man, but he was a strong worker, and so he worked three jobs in two different states during the year to save $7,000 because he couldn’t get a loan for that house because of redlining… because because of the color of their skin,” Beatty said. “And it all ties back to education.”
“After he managed to buy that house, trash cans were set on fire in our backyard, all because we wanted to integrate a school so that I – this black girl – could have a proper and adequate education,” he added.
The truth about what families like hers, or what Green endured, can be lost amid the politicization of black history, including Brown v. Wade. Board, she said.
“They’re trying to ban books that we can read about black people who were groundbreaking in this country,” Beatty continued. “Those individuals who fought for justice [in] Brown versus the Board of Education, they were doing it for a reason: They were doing it for the kids.”
“Despite seven decades of progress, the shadow of segregation still hangs over American education and beyond,” she added. “We must continue to fight for our children today.”
Advocates argue that limiting what students learn is just one way Brown’s legacy is being diminished.
Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill that segregation can also be seen in things like increased school choice or the ability of families to select alternatives to public schools. .
Studiesshow that school choice exacerbates segregation in public schools, and today’s schools continue to seesegregationat surprising rates.
“The new segregation we see in our schools is by no means isolated,” Horsford said. “In fact, it is part of a much larger effort to deny communities of color access to opportunities in our country.”
“As we mark the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and as we reflect on our progress over the past few decades, we must urgently confront efforts to undermine and reverse that progress on our campuses, in corporate America, in the federal government, and beyond,” he added.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
