Commentary | 70 Years After Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Is Failing at School Desegregation – By Jacinda Townsend (US News) / May 17, 2024
By allowing schools to resegregate, our country has broken the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.
On the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that racially separate public education was unequal, our country is getting a failing grade at school desegregation.
This anniversary should be a day of celebration, a time to recognize strides made and goals achieved. Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that our public schools have been quietly and insidiously resegregated. It’s time to acknowledge that many in this country never wanted to integrate schools in the first place, and the result is a backsliding and a disgraceful return to segregation.
According to a UCLA analysis of federal data, American schools were at their most racially integrated in 1988, the year I graduated from a public high school in Kentucky. Black, white, Latino and Asian students all passed through my high school’s halls. Through a mosaic of backgrounds, we learned far more than mere academics and broadened our perspectives alongside one another. When I matriculated at Harvard in the fall of 1988, I was prepared for the world in a way that many of my college peers who had attended private or less racially diverse public schools were not: I’d learned how to relate to everyone, even when they couldn’t relate to me.
Sadly, my own children haven’t enjoyed the same diversity in their public school classrooms in Indiana, Michigan and California. They have been the only Black students in their public school classes too many times to count. One of them, for a time, attended an urban public school that was 99% Black.
