Fifty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the monumental decision that erased the notion of separate but equal and put the force of law behind the civil rights movement.The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in Topeka, Kan., by Oliver Brown on behalf of his 8-year-old daughter, Linda. Brown had tried several times to enroll Linda in a school seven blocks away from their home rather than send her trekking to one 21 blocks away. The nearer school was for white children, however, and the school and lower courts refused to admit Brown's black daughter.
The Court ruled, in the historic Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, that separate is inherently unequal. Only an idiot or a bigot would debate the rightness of the court's decision. Using race as the basis for refusing enrollment in a school — especially a publicly funded one — is simply wrong. It is an affront to morality and American citizenship.
But the Court didn't stop at simply allowing students to enroll in the school of their choice. Convinced that segregation caused "adverse psychological" harm to black children and impeded their learning experience, the Court issued a series of rulings between 1954 and 1973 that turned Brown's simple quest on its head. Fifty years later, educators, lawyers, parents and school districts — including here in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties — are still struggling with the consequences.
Frustrated by the slow process of desegregation during the '50s and '60s, the Court finally ordered districts to integrate their schools immediately, using buses to do so if necessary. In a country where segregated residential patterns are the norm, that was no mean feat, but with the threat of federal funding being cut otherwise, districts around the country began in earnest trying to comply.
In most communities that meant plucking black students out of their all-black neighborhoods, piling them onto buses and hauling them to previously all-white schools. Brown's quest to get his daughter enrolled in a school closer to home resulted in masses of black children being bused miles away from theirs. Brown's suit seeking the right to choose the school his daughter attended was answered with a mandate that for years meant millions of black children would have no choice.
Black parents complained but endured. They complained that the distance made it more difficult to participate in their children's school lives, less convenient for their children to involve themselves in after-school activities, and less likely they would have the comfort and stability of attending school with neighborhood friends year to year.
They endured not just because integration was the law, but because it was the civil way to live in a democratic society. They endured because somewhere inside them resides an idyllic image of little white boys and girls playing harmoniously with little black boys and girls, and then taking their unencumbered attitudes into adulthood.
They endured because the alternative to the inconvenience was the ugliness of segregation.
Now that endurance seems to be wearing thin. Parents and educators are increasingly asking if the contortions districts perform merely for the sake of keeping their classrooms integrated are worth the casualties.
Initially, practice seemed to bear out the Court's assumption that integration would improve the academic environment for black children. Between 1971 — when significant numbers of districts began integrating — and 1988, reading gaps between black and white students narrowed, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. However, NCES reports that since then, the gap has increased.
Gaps in scores in math and reading on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests have also widened at all grade levels since the late 1980s. Additionally, in 2003, black students were three times as likely to drop out of school and twice as likely to be suspended from school as white students. Black students are over-represented in special education classes and underrepresented in college preparatory classes.
The trend is troubling to black educators and others who say school districts have become so preoccupied with implementing complex desegregation plans that educating black students has become a secondary concern.
Pinellas County gave credence to that argument recently when the school board's attorney filed in federal court for a special dispensation to circumvent portions of the No Child Left Behind Act. That act, signed by President Bush in 2002, allows children enrolled in sub-par schools to transfer to better schools. The intent, of course, is to motivate failing schools to get their acts together in order to hold onto students and federal funding.
Some districts, including Pinellas County, worry that transfers under the act will throw a monkey wrench into their "Choice Plans" for desegregation, skewing the carefully controlled proportions of black and white students at some schools.
"They need to adhere to No Child Left Behind," said Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg lawyer who's also president of the city's branch of the NAACP, an organization that traditionally has opposed anything that remotely threatened desegregation efforts there.
Now, however, Rouson and a coalition of educators and others concerned about what he termed the "inequity in quality of education" are fighting the school board's attempt to compromise the No Child Left Behind Act.
"We've come a long way," Rouson said, "only to realize that, in certain respects, segregation wasn't so bad. We realize that black faculty and staff had a vested interest in their students achieving, in nurturing them."
Rouson, whose academic career took him to all-black schools, black-majority, black-minority and black-overwhelmingly minority, came away with this lesson: "Integration does not make the learning environment."
Attempts to quantify the cumulative effects of integration on black academic achievement have not been conclusive. Other than the slight narrowing of the gap in test scores — which ended and started reversing itself in the late 1980s — most indicators point in negative directions.
Studies testing the Court's concern that segregation had a debilitating psychological effect on black children do not support that assumption. More than 25 studies from the 1970s and '80s analyzed by a panel of black scholars for the book A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society, showed that black students' occupational and educational aspirations remained equal to whites or became lower after desegregation. The aspirations tended to decrease as the population of white students increased.
Pinellas and Hillsborough counties operate under desegregation plans that ensure black students will be minorities at all of the districts' schools. Hillsborough's target racial "balance" is 20 percent black and 80 percent non-black. In Pinellas, the black student population can't exceed 42 percent.
Several of the studies concluded that blacks in desegregated schools had lower self-esteem than blacks in segregated schools.
So with such indicators that the increasing problems black students are having may in some ways be attributable to our focus on integration, why aren't advocates such as Rouson suggesting we take a half step backwards and reinstall some aspects of black schools under segregation, which has been done with some success at several experimental schools?
"We don't have the voice yet as powerful as it should be to affect spending issues," Rouson answers simply. "We don't control the dollars. They will easily spend more on the predominantly white school."
While the net influence of integration on educational achievement is unclear, it has been a constant that students in school systems that spend freely to educate them score better than those in more frugal districts.
So 50 years after the historic Brown decision, our schools remain integrated not because of the noble ideals the justices touted, not because of that idyllic image in the back of our heads, not because of the educational environment. Schools remain integrated largely because black folks still don't trust white folks with the money.
Fifty years later, it seems the justices could have prevented a lot of headaches by just granting black parents what Oliver Brown asked for: the right to send his child to the school of his choice. Period.
Freelance writer Elijah Gosier, who for many years wrote a column for the St. Petersburg Times, lives in St. Petersburg. He can be reached at egosi2000@yahoo.com.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2004.