Today marks that 60th anniversary of the landmark unanimous decision by the Warren Court in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which established that segregated schools were unconstitutional. From Wikipedia….
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement Continue Reading
This morning after reading that this important case was decided on today’s date, I read this very good post by John Vall at Addicting Info – It’s The Anniversary Of Brown v. Board of Education: A Decision That Altered The Course Of History. John does a great job of discussing the conditions in the south during the start of the Civil Rights movement. After reading that post I started thinking back to my first year at the University of Florida and something that absolutely floored me when I first heard it! Somewhere along the line I heard that the first black football player at the University was Lowell George, who along with Wilie Jackson entered the University in 1968. Whoa, wait a minute I thought, that was only two years ago!!! Like I said, I was stunned, I came from an area where blacks and whites played sports along side of one another from the sandlots through high school without a second thought about color! You can read a good post –Generations of inspiration about Leonard George and Willie Jackson at ESPN Recruiting Nation Football. When I read this post I was again taken back to my days at UF because of the following:
In 1971, the Black Student Union staged a protest because it felt the university hadn’t done enough for black students, who first had been admitted to the school in 1958. Sixty-six students were arrested, and when President Stephen C. O’Connell decided to pursue charges, nearly a third of the black students and several black faculty members left the school.
Willie Jackson was the one who spoke to The Independent Florida Alligator student newspaper on behalf of the 10 black athletes on campus. He said they had decided to remain in school. “There’s got to be somebody left here to keep the pressure on so changes can be made,” Willie Jackson told the Alligator.
I am proud to say that I took part in those demonstrations and I like to think that we did something to move UF toward a more integrated campus!
Finally, as I read all these articles I thought about a post I had read last month about the current situation regarding segregation in the Alabama school system in the Atlantic – Segregation Now …Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back. It’s a sad story about Central High School in Tuscaloosa which points out that while we have come a long way, it seems that there a some who would like to see us return to the old days….
In 2000, another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. Central had successfully achieved integration, the district had argued—it could be trusted to manage that success going forward.
Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.Full Article
The results only point out that some folks can not be trusted to keep ALL marching forward! But more importantly we can not let Paul Ryan and other members of the “You know which party” win. We can not let them take away all that, those thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their twenty children fought for in 1954, or that Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fought for, no we have to fight them tooth and nail in Congress and at the ballot box! It’s the only to assure that our country provides “liberty and justice for ALL!” says Edward stepping down from his soapbox……
