Brown v. Board Gives Us Hope

By Cindy Reitzi

June 2004

“We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

— Brown v. Board of Education

In May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court introduced one of the first legal steps for racial equity in American education with its Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, ruling. Fifty years later, Brown has not accomplished racial equity in public education. That’s probably because the rest of society hasn’t either; educational institutions reflect the society at large and its values.

Nonetheless, Brown is probably the first ruling to press American public education to honor its obligation to true educational democracy: equal access to opportunity and equal inclusion. The Brown decision rippled through time and educational communities and called on us to eventually desegregate, not just by race, but by ability, religion, or any other signatures that distinguish us. With Brown, we in public education were called upon not to exclude.

Ironically, a few years later in the early 1960s when I went to school, this landmark ruling hardly affected me since I was educated in suburban public schools with all white, all able-bodied, all Christian individuals. As a child, I was not on the frontlines of busing battlegrounds; civil rights were far away from my reality.

I came to college from the segregated suburbs, ignorant of great movements before me or to come: ignorant of the civil rights movement, and a growing women’s movement at a time when Madison had not yet grown into its “urban-ness” in the 1970s. I arrived, rudderless and working class, only knowing that I badly wanted a college education – any education – and wondering whether I’d be welcomed into the academic clubhouse. I came to teaching not as a crusader for educational justice, convinced that I would change lives and liberate students, but nonetheless, with the highly idealistic, clichéd belief in the power of education to open doors of opportunity. I believed unshakably that everyone had the right to access and that those doors should never be shut in anyone’s face, denying them the privilege of an education.

Despite my own mundane backdrop far away from racial politics, the impact of Brown has quietly seeped into my consciousness and changed me from within.

I found this out at least a decade ago when I visited a colleague’s school. Once again, I stepped into a suburban school and felt a strange sense of déjà vu. The school felt familiar, yet foreign somehow. The atmosphere, although orderly, clean, and modern, felt vaguely uncomfortable. The more I looked at students in the halls, the more it registered: all the students were white. It looked as familiar to me as my schools growing up in the 1960s, only in the 1990s. I had a real sense of disconnection; as a teacher, I had grown so accustomed to diverse groups of students, that an all-white school now seemed an alien place.

I’m privileged to be in a profession that allows me to encounter the whole American pie, not just one slice of it. Our attempts to accomplish an educational mission of excellence, equity, and inclusion are still a clumsy choreography of small movements. Some people are still skeptical. After all, why is it important to stick us all together in the same space when many students today just self-segregate in the cafeteria anyway? I come from the segregated generation; I think there’s a difference. I can only speak for myself, but I think it’s like imprinting when you bond with a wide range of students. It’s a lot harder to maintain particular prejudices about a group different from yourself when real people you care about share a classroom for 50 minutes or more every day. I’m convinced that the only way that happens is face to face. You can’t read it in a book, study it from afar, or gather statistics to analyze it. It’s not that kind of process. And until we really live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same churches, make equal amounts of money, and have integrated workplaces, the only place some people will have the opportunity to meet and hopefully care about each other across class, race and gender lines is in a public school.

Posted June 2, 2004