In 1951, Oliver Brown, a black father from Topeka, Kansas, became fed up with the inequality of segregation after his 9-year-old daughter, Linda, was denied entry into Topeka’s all-white elementary schools and decided to file a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka.
It was just 64 years ago this month that the face, and race, of America’s education system was forever changed by the unanimous Supreme Court decision overruling Plessy, effectively disallowing segregation in America’s public schools.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics via UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, the percentage of black students in the South who attended a school that was at least 50 percent white was 0 percent in 1954 (just before Brown v. Board of Education was enacted), 44 percent in 1989, and 23 percent in 2011.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who was previously the chair of the pro-school-choice advocacy group, American Federation for Children, advocated for a “choice” system that, in her home state of Michigan often resulted in increasing school segregation as white students left for less diverse school districts, according to Bridge Magazine.
If we allow school zoning to erode diversity, we can easily find ourselves back in the old “separate but equal” days where a quality education was just out of reach for black students, negatively affecting their post-secondary education opportunities, future employment opportunities, and their overall quality of life.
