Five myths about Brown v. Board of Education
By Imani Perry, Friday, May 16, 4:37 PM
... It’s true that the case concerned segregation in public schools, but its impact went far beyond education. Brown overturned the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson , which declared that segregated train cars did not violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While it wasn’t immediately clear, Brown would eventually dismantle segregation in all public facilities such as train cars, restaurants, department stores and more. The case emboldened civil rights protesters, who, for the first time in nearly 100 years of struggle and defeat, found the federal courts on their side ...
American schools are as segregated today as they were 40 years ago, largely because of residential segregation and the racial gaps in wealth and employment. In the 1970s, white flight to affluent suburbs weakened the tax base of cities, hitting black migrants to Northern cities hard. Their schools became under-funded and more isolated than in the Southern Jim Crow states they had fled. Today, the Northeast has the most racially homogenous schools; New York state and Washington, D.C., have the most segregated schools — by race and economic status. And since there is no constitutional right to an education, the federal courts cannot mandate that schools get equal funding. Within schools, advanced programs have become forms of segregation. One study found that, as of 2006, African American students were underrepresented by 48 percent in gifted education; Hispanic students are underrepresented by 38 percent ...
Affirmative action was imagined as a strategy to create integrated industries, professions, colleges and universities. For hundreds of years, people of color had been systematically excluded from institutions and opportunities. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, affirmative action started to crack open the door of opportunity. However, since 1977 the Supreme Court has been steadily limiting the policy’s scope. At present, only elite private institutions have the resources to create the very narrowly tailored affirmative action policies allowed by the court. The vast majority of public colleges and universities — which have a duty to serve a broad cross-section of the population — are hamstrung in their efforts to equalize educational opportunity
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-brown-v-board-of-education/2014/05/16/fd84b82c-dc3b-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html