Whether you know it or not, we are all still segregated in this country. If you can remember, the civil rights movement was fraught with segregation in almost every industry out there, including education. Within the next few paragraphs I will take you, the reader, on a journey through segregation in schools during the civil war, and segregation in schools now.
What Happened Then
One of the biggest cases back in the civil rights movement was of brown vs education, which changed the educational community forever. It all started because the northern supreme court came up with the though of actually making the schools interracial. This is a quote from the first few lines of the court papers “Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.”(1)
One revolutionary person that you may know of is a girl
called Ruby Bridges. She was the first black girl to attend an all white school. The school she attended was William Frantz Elementary, New Orleans, and the white population had a huge reaction to this. “Sure enough, people shouted and shook their fist when we got out of the car, but to me it wasn't any noisier than Mardi Gras, I held my mother's hand and followed the marshals through the crowd, up the steps into the school.” says Bridges, in March of the year 2000. She then goes on to talk about what happened that day and the next day.
What's Happening Now
After all of that, we still have problems with racial segregation in schools today, and you could say a big part of it is still based off of racial stereotypes retaining from long ago. According to a recent story from the American Broadcasting Corporation, “Kathleen Brose's 14-year-old daughter was turned away from her neighborhood school in Seattle after the district effectively issued a stark decree: no more white students allowed.”(3) According to the census taken on factfinder.cencus.gov, the white population takes up about 73.9% of the population of the United States of America(4) (with a 0.1 margin of error) and according to a classmate, Jonathan Aguila's blog, "...If you look at the data you would notice that this is mainly because it is based on where you live ... from what I see it is fixed on what is the dominant ethnic group in the state or city."(5). This information is really conflicting with the methods that schools have been undertaking recently. What I am talking about is the fact that schools and colleges alike are undertaking the “Equal Opportunity” method, which is to take in minority students as the majority of their student population.
In conclusion, I believe that this system is futile, because of two reasons. The first is the fact that they are leaving out the majority of the population, and second, it is becoming segregated yet again, which is against the 14th amendment and against what America now stands for.
For more information on Ruby Bridges, find the Ruby Bridges: Through My Eyes documentary at your nearest movie store, or at RubyBridges.com
Citations:
- United States Supreme Court. "FindLaw | Cases and Codes."FindLaw: Cases and Codes. 17 May 1954. 2 Oct. 2008 <http://laws.findlaw.com/us/347/483.html>.
- Bridges, Ruby. "Ruby Bridges."Ruby Bridges . 30 Sep. 2008
- (3) "ABC News: Debate Over Segregation in Schools to Hit Supreme Court Today." ABC News: Online news, breaking news, feature stories and more. 1 Oct. 2008
- (4) U.S. Cencus Bureau, ed. "United States by State -M0201, Percent of the Total Population Who Are White Alone: 2006." U.S. Cencus Bureau. 2 Oct. 2008
- (5)Aguila, Jonathan. "jonathan."jonathan. 2 Oct. 2008. 2 Oct. 2008
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