Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education

Conclusion

177 Conclusion Jeanne Theoharis The separation provision rests neither upon prejudice, nor caprice . . . . Separation of white and colored “children” in the public schools of Virginia has for generations been a part of the mores of her people. To have separate schools has been their use and wont. We have found no hurt or harm to either race. —Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Federal District Court (1952) In these days it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. —Brown v. Board of Education (U.S. Supreme Court, 1954) 347 U.S. 483 (1954) It was not the inequality of the facilities but the fact of legally separating children based on race on which the Court relied to find a constitutional violation in that case [Brown]. —Community Schools v. Seattle (U.S. Supreme Court, 2007) Barbara, an African American junior, attended a school that enrolled no white students and contained twice as many children as it was built to hold. Classes sometimes took place in the school auditorium and other makeshift spaces. The district’s only concession was to erect tarpaper shacks to hold the extra students that often were very cold. The school lacked a cafeteria and a gym. It had limited science labs, and the school 178 Conclusion did not offer physics, world history, or Latin. Teachers were underpaid and had to do jobs reserved for janitors in other schools.1 Tanisha, an African American junior, also attended a school that enrolled no white students and held nearly twice as many as students it was built to hold. Sometimes there were not enough desks, and students had to work at the teacher’s desk or on top of the bookshelves. It was often too hot or too cold. The district’s only concessions were to add trailers as extra classroom space and then move the school to a year-round schedule. The cafeteria was much too small and lunch period was only a half hour, so many of the students did not eat lunch. The school had limited science labs and few AP classes. Teachers were underpaid, and many were temporary. The separate and unequal conditions of these young women’s schooling bear a striking similarity. But a significant difference lies between them. Tanisha Smith attended Fremont High School in 2004. Barbara Johns, on the other hand, was one of the student leaders at Moton High School in 1951. The student strike she led against the poor and inequitable conditions at her school compared with the white school across town helped spur the lawsuit Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952). This case, along with four others, formed the basis of the NAACP’s suit in Brown v. Board of Education more than fifty years ago. Much of our public conversation about Brown has sidestepped the similarities between the schools that educated Black and Latino students in the pre-Brown era and many of those that educate Black and Latino students today. Indeed, much of the public debate in the aftermath of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown has misrepresented the nature of the cases and the realities of present-day segregation. One of the key strands of the NAACP’s case—embodied in the Moton High School student protest— was that these differences in resources, facilities, and teacher pay fundamentally compromised the kind of education Black children were receiving and, accordingly, Black advancement in American society. Barbara Johns organized a student strike in 1951 after some of the Black male students who worked at the white high school after school came back and told her and her friends how nice the white high school was. She recalled , “I remember thinking how unfair it was.” This difference between the schooling they were receiving and what white students were getting at the more well-equipped high school across town had become an inequality too great to bear. Students assembled in the school auditorium to hear Johns speak. She told her classmates that “it was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent high school, time Conclusion 179 for the students themselves to do something about it.”2 Segregation...