In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

176 30 Public Education in Los angeles: Past and Present Paul Marcus I was born in New york City, but we moved to Los Angeles when I was a young boy in the mid-1950s. We lived in a dense working-class area in the central part of the city, and I went to the Los Angeles Unified School District public schools. My neighborhood was very diverse, with many different religious groups and racial groups. Overall, the vast majority of kids—white, black, Hispanic, or Asian— went to fairly homogeneous public schools at that time. But my school, Alexander Hamilton High School, was atypical—it geographically covered a wide range. To the far eastern poor part of the district, where I lived, there were working-class families from African American, white, and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic groups. But the far western part of the district was quite a wealthy area, Cheviot Hills (still a very well-to-do area), and in those days almost all the kids went to the public schools. My earliest memories involve interacting with children of other races and backgrounds: in the neighborhoods where I lived, in schools, and certainly in sports. When I got a part-time job as a teen the people I worked with were of different races—Asians, blacks, whites. It was quite common playing sports in those days as a young child on teams that were pretty mixed. For me, that was very positive. I was a basketball player in high school. And there, race was irrelevant . How many points could you score? How good a defensive player were you? And the teams were made up of a variety of people. Arguably the single wealthiest person I ever met in high school was on the basketball team with me, along with other students—Asian, black, and white—whose families were struggling to make ends meet. And that was a positive and bonding experience for all of us. The greatest tension that I saw growing up in the public schools had to do less with race than with economic differences. There was a real upper stratosphere of wealthy white kids, but the lower end of the scale was not delineated much by race; it really was defined by economics. So there would be Paul Marcus 177 poor white, Hispanic, and black kids, and the tension was much more between them and the children from college-oriented, well-to-do families. I graduated in 1964, and it was quite striking to me that the biggest difference I saw racially was not in the public schools but in college and law school. I went to both at UCLA, which is a very large urban public school. The number of minority students in those two settings was exceedingly small—much smaller than I had been used to seeing in high school. That I found remarkable. The mix in college was low, and it was even lower in law school; there were very few students there who were not white and generally from upper-class backgrounds , with parents or siblings with substantial educations. As I look back, it seems to me that my comfort level for dealing with all different kinds of people is pretty high. I work in the criminal law area, so often I am engaged with people who are poor and come from backgrounds different from mine, certainly different from where I come from today, although not so different from what I grew up with, and I feel positive about that. It is an attitude I try to share with my children in their life experiences and in their work As I reflect today on the impact of Brown and the ensuing civil rights movement, the positive effects can be seen in the overall changes in our national culture. In other countries it is not at all unusual, even today, to hear jokes in mainstream entertainment about race and religion. And one has the sense that the people making the jokes and laughing at the jokes simply have not grown up with different kinds of people in their schools and housing and jobs. So in that sense, in promoting an interracial culture, Brown was extremely positive. There appears to have been a negative side, though, whether or not it is directly traceable to Brown. After I graduated from high school, but while I was in college and law school, there was a real rethinking in Los Angeles about whether our community was...

Share