Log in

The 60-year journey from ‘Brown’




Until 1970, though, the city's educators had come up with truly bizarre ways to give a polite nod to integration. For a period, black teachers went to teach in white schools, while white ones taught in the black schools. To this day, I can't figure out the proportional representation that had black teachers in the white schools about a third of the time, with white teachers in the black schools about half of the time. My numbers may be wrong, but both black and white students were short-changed when they were robbed of the continuity of instruction.

On the days that Auntie Annie Mae had to go to the white schools, she woke up muttering that this was not integration, and mumbling that "all these years after Brown" integration had not happened in Moss Point schools. Since the "kid breaker" didn't really yell, she took her frustration out on anyone who would listen, talking legalisms, history, and the way it ought to be.

Occasionally Auntie would say, "at least we aren't in Virginia," then she would talk about the schools that actually closed rather than admit black students. Virginia developed a plan of "massive resistance" that denied funds to integrated schools that had the effect of denying education to black children for at least four years.

In 1969, most African Americans had experienced de facto segregation, but few Californians had experienced the de jure segregation that Brown ended. Without the Mississippi experience, I would have thought that segregation was as much a fairy tale as Santa Claus, or as distant as "the old days." Neither fairy tale, nor distant fact, de jure segregation is alive and well today.



There are dozens of other consequences to de facto segregation, including the racial achievement gap and unequal access to scholarships, internships, networking, and employment opportunities. Brown opened the door and, by ending de facto segregation, changed the terms and conditions of African-American life. It got us to the starting line, but now, 60 years later, we are still a long way from the finish line.

(NNPA columnist Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based economist and writer and President Emerita of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C.)

Add comment

Security code