A few people who remember the world that preceded the Brown decision felt inspired to write about it. This is by Sue M. Legg of Florida. She is a retired faculty member from The University of Florida “who used to run the ‘dreaded’ statewide assessments for the Florida DOE back in the days before everyone in every grade seems to be tested everyday.”
Sue Legg writes:
“Reflections on Segregation”
Two years after the 1954 Brown decision, I graduated from Richmond High School in California. You know, Richmond High of Coach Carter fame, but that was later.
In the Richmond of 1956, segregation was in some ways, a non-issue. Richmond had been a small company town with a little over 20,000 people in 1942. The port then became a center for ship building in WWII. By 1944, the city had over 100,000 people of every description. People came from the dust bowl, from small southern towns, from everywhere to find jobs in the ship yards. The federal government built miles of barracks and families moved in.
Children from those families hit schools which were totally unprepared. Double sessions were required; schools could not be built fast enough. The Richmond High class of 1956 had 1,000 graduates. After all, it was the only high school in town. We were tracked into different programs, but the college bound were accepted at the nearby University of California, Berkeley if they achieved a B average in the required courses. We were told on arrival that half of us would likely not make it through, but most of us did.
After graduating from Berkeley, I taught in Richmond, and things were different. New schools had been built outside of town. Richmond High had been split into three schools, one for blacks and two for whites. Residential segregation ensured school segregation. Even today Richmond High makes news across the country as it struggles to solve its social and educational problems.
In 1966, I moved to Gainesville, Florida and saw the struggle for desegregation first hand. The town was in an uproar over bussing; riots broke out. Lines were painted in one school to separate the races. A group of women, black teachers and white faculty wives, formed the Gainesville Women for Equal Rights. Those of us involved found ways to make peace in the community.
Over time the district has shifted zone lines, bussed white children to formerly black schools and vice versa, and created magnet schools. We have maintained a reasonable racial/socio economic balance in most schools. We have taxed ourselves to provide what the state fails to provide. Housing is more integrated, but areas with declining populations are a challenge.
They are surrounded by private religious and charter schools. None of these schools has enough money to serve the students well because they are all too small. Yet, that seems to be their appeal, and the district has no control over these unnecessary schools that the legislature promotes.
Parents of low income minority children are getting the short end of the stick yet again. School choice is not improving learning. If we are to stop the slide, we need to offer parents the best choice, not the easy choice. We found a way 50 years ago. We can do it again.”
Sue Legg
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We found a way 50 years ago. We can do it again.
Yes
I remember also what it meant to be a teacher then. I hope that is not lost now.
One point that should be considered in these discussions about Brown and segregation is the dramatic and continuing changes in US demographics, which have changed or at least challenged people’s notions of what segregation means.
Like every major segregation case before Brown (to my recollection, at least), Brown was, factually, about segregation between whites and blacks. The words “Negro” and “colored” appear 45 times in the opinion. The word race, which is the operative legal concept, appears only 11 times.
I don’t have a 1954 Statistical Abstract of the United States in front of me. (Do kids today even know what that is? It was like the Bible to me growing up, or at least the Old Testament to the Gospel of Bill James’s Baseball Abstract.) But as everybody knows, the big demographic trend of the last few decades is the explosion of the Hispanic population. Cities like NYC have also seen huge influxes of Asian immigrants. The result of this is that on a percentage basis, the populations of the two groups that are the central players in the history of segregation — both whites and blacks — are declining and are expected to continue to decline.
This was one of the interesting points in the recent UCLA study about the hyper-segregation of schools in NY and NYC. In 1990, 21% of students in NYC were white, and 40% were black. In 2011, the percentage of white students was down to 14.5%, and the percentage of black students was down to 29.8%.
I believe this is a national trend, too. Whites and blacks will continue to decline as a percentage of the US population as their “organic” growth is outpaced by ethnic groups whose growth is fueled by immigration. No matter how one defines “segregation,” it seems to be a foregone conclusion that it will be less and less common to find whites and blacks sitting next to each other in schools as each group becomes scarcer.
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Addendum: Although what’s happening now is different in scale and scope, the black population of NYC has ebbed and flowed for as long as the city has existed. An interesting note from the UCLA report:
How does she figure that they “found a way”? Found a way around integration has been our history. At the present time, charter schools and neighborhood private schools in economically depressed neighborhoods appeal to parents because they weed out behavior problems and low performers.Most provide a very basic form of education. There are some model public schools in LAUSD which provide quality education to an integrated population. Carthay Center and LACES are two examples. Although extremely difficult for a poor minority child to gain admittance, they are far superior to most of LAUSD’s integrated schools of the 70’s horrendous busing disaster. Even in the worst schools in the ‘hood, however, there exist exemplary teachers who rival those who work among the privileged classes. Perhaps some are even better as their skills are honed to teach the ‘difficult to teach’. If public schools in poor neighborhoods are to survive, they need to establish academies for the high achievers especially at the middle and high school levels because these places can be outright dangerous to attend. As Jaime Escalante famously stated, “if you want to turn this school around, you have to start at the top.”
As a school counselor in a Title I minority elementary school in Austin, I observed the same ambivalent “system” of segregation becoming pervasive in Austin ISD that I grew up with in pre-Civil Rights North Carolina. When I spoke up about the mistreatment of children in the punitive authoritarian environment of the AISD Title I schools, I was targeted for being a “trouble maker” and was bullied by the AISD administration. I resigned in protest of the administrative bullying to children and employees, and especially to minority children in Title I Schools. I am still continuing to protest against the toxic environment that has been created as a result of the obsession with standardized testing in Texas schools. I would like to share this “protest article” that I wrote prior to my resignation. It is long, but I think it may give some insight into a “particular kind of evil” that has once again presented itself in our public school systems:
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The System
On a three year march to Exemplary status at the elementary school where I have worked for the past 5 years, the principal has implemented what she calls her system. As the school counselor, I have expressed concerns about that system, not just the one at my school, but others like it. I have advocated for the students, since they are the ones whose lives will be most impacted by it, and because the psychological damage will not be visible for years. AISD has ignored my concerns by assisting the principal with bullying and threats and attempts to keep me quiet by destroying my credibility, and taking away my job. I cannot share the principal’s pride in the Exemplary prize because I know what it cost the students. Instead, I am sad for what they lost.
Why would I continue to stay in a hostile environment when I have already reached retirement eligibility and could live in the cool mountains of NC near my family? It is because I do not want to abandon these children without knowing that they are in good hands. They deserve an environment that will protect and preserve their natural talents and gifts, that will allow them to become their own person, and not be turned into an automaton produced by a factory school in Texas.
Students have strong emotional bonds with their counselors. They know I care about them. They know they can talk to me and I will listen empathically. They trust me. We have shared many experiences, bad times and happy times. I have been in their homes and worked with their families. For years I have created guidance activities to help them develop a strong sense of self. I have used art & creative activities to help stimulate their imaginations and help them develop good problem solving skills. I have encouraged them to think for themselves, to connect with others by sharing their ideas, and to value the ideas and opinions of others. I have nurtured them with kindness and respect and watched them grow for five years. Many of them live in harsh circumstances, and they have an even greater need for gentleness, along with kindness and respect. However, in complete disregard for my students’ bonds with me as source of their emotional support, the principal has no place for me or my advocacy in this system. I do not fit into the system’s 3 R’s, one of which is the right people. The right people are those who think the same way as the principal. I would not call it a system, I would call it a regime.
The system will break young children’s spirits, take away their imaginations and lead them into despair. It creates institutional dependency. It is the same kind of dependency and despair that results from entrapment in any oppressive environment. This system, which has been implemented in one of Austin’s historic schools, is now being celebrated and perpetuated by descendants of people who once bravely fought against it and called it immoral.
I was introduced to the system when I entered first grade in a segregated all white school in an ambivalent southern culture that had a split personality as opposite as black & white. It was pretty on the upside, but it had a dark underside. I grew up thinking that our culture was normal, until the Freedom Riders came into my home state of North Carolina in 1961 with a powerful message that woke me up. It really woke me up. I wanted to be on their bus! I cheered them with my heart as I watched TV and saw their courageous peaceful persistence unflinched by the hostility and cruelty that met them throughout the south. Those brave young people are some of the best role models to grace the chapters of history, but their message is once again being ignored. It is being ignored every day that a young child walks into a Texas school to be initiated into an oppressive system that leads to institutional dependency and victimization of bullying.
How could my family and community have lived in that split culture for so long and not recognized that it was immoral? It was because we grew up thinking it was normal. It was because we grew up in socially isolated white segregated communities with people who all thought the same way about our culture and never questioned the status quo.
As a child, I did notice that people of the black culture were treated differently. When we went shopping in the city, I would notice the “Colored” and “White” signs over the drinking fountains, but our ambivalent culture conditioned us to ignore anything that didn’t fit into our perfect world. I was conditioned by high expectations to focus on my own performance and interests and not to interfere with other people’s affairs. If something seemed “not normal” in our perfect world, we learned to ignore it and keep up appearances at all costs, even if that meant ignoring cruelty and indignities to ourselves and others. We were in denial and overly self-absorbed, the classic hallmarks of southern pride and narcissism passed down in most white families of the south for generations. Those are the same characteristics that I believe led to the system I observe in my school today. The system that conditioned black people of the south to be submissive for a hundred years after the Civil War, is the same system that is teaching the students in my school that submission to oppression is normal. It is not a racial issue, it is about abuse of power and corruption.
The competition of measuring schools by test scores has led to this system. It is the wrong measure. The true measure of success will come when the child has to function on his own. Fifty percent of our college students in Texas drop out and never complete a degree. It isn’t because they can’t pass the admissions test. They have learned to be good test takers. Is it because they are products of this same system? They don’t have a strong sense of self, they don’t have a purpose or sense of direction. They are like boats afloat in an ocean without a rudder. They can’t think for themselves. They are indecisive and have difficulty making decisions. They don’t have an identity of their own. They struggle with relationships. As young children, they were incarcerated in classrooms with teachers who had absolute control. They were taught to depend on someone else to tell them what to do and how to think and what to learn. They were conditioned to shut down their own original thoughts and creative ideas and focus focus focus. They were obedient, well behaved children who performed well, trusted authority and never questioned it. They became submissive and codependent, which are the major symptoms of the system.
The more overly ambitious a principal becomes, the more oppressive the environment. Children in Exemplary schools have become trophy children. They are being exploited at any costs. Pride, in this case, is not a virtue. We should be reminded of over ambition as “a particular kind of evil” that Shakespeare illustrated so well in Macbeth, one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. It is that same dark tragedy that forces children into a system that will rob them of their greatest gift and best tool for their future, their imagination.
The Exemplary status rating for this school in east Austin created emotional contagion in AISD’s higher echelon, and the principal was invited to teach all the other principals how to implement the system. It is becoming pervasive. Who questions the absolute power given to one person who will impact so many lives. What process did AISD follow to evaluate the psychological impact of this system on young children? Who were the mental health consultants and child development specialists who approved it?
The children in my school live in the difficult circumstances of a low socio economic area. However, they are as intelligent and talented as any other children in Austin. Putting them into a rigid school environment with chronic stress from obsessive testing and non stop boring rote drill day in and day out resembles a prison. Isn’t that the opposite of what they need? They need structure that allows freedom to create and explore. They need kind and respectful positive behavior modeled for them by people who have empathy. They need time to relax their brains and move their bodies. They need imaginative play. They need a stress free lunch break to socialize with their peers, rather than repetition of the 1000 words on the cafeteria wall. Do they need their brain held captive every thinking minute of the day by someone drilling it with with forced learning? Behavioral engineering is mind control. These are children, not computers.
The perceptions of this system, which I and my principal have, are as opposite as the black and white culture in which I grew up. We perceive things according to our own experiences, and our interpretations of those experiences in relation to our world. Therefore, people who place a disproportionate emphasis on scores over social and emotional development, tend to perceive things according to their own needs. Those who have not been trained to recognize psychological impact on children will think this system is efficient and gets results. It is efficient and it does get the results the principals and administrators want. This system, which AISD is perpetuating in order to bring them recognition and fame through exploitation of children, is the same poisonous pedagogy that
conditioned the children of Germany for decades leading up to WWII. This system was efficient then, just has it has been efficient throughout history for leaders who abuse power. It produces adults who are obedient and submissive to authority, follow orders and perform well on assigned tasks, lack emotions of empathy or guilt, and are unable to think for themselves.
Frederick Douglas said:
“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.”
As a child, the only thing I knew about Frederick Douglas came from my pre-Civil Rights Era 5th Grade North Carolina history book: He was an outlaw slave, a renegade. He was a violent and dangerous man who inspired slave uprisings throughout the South, where many innocent southern white people were attacked and murdered. My book and my teacher made him sound evil. That one paragraph in an elementary school book probably caused generations of little white girls in the south to fear black men. I trusted that information at the time. I was only 10, and the Freedom Riders had not yet arrived.
What changed my perception of Frederick Douglas, in spite of the fact that I am a product of the Old South? My perception now, which I hope is more accurate, is that Frederick Douglas was using his experience as a former slave, and his brilliant talents of writing and oratory, to inspire people to take action against a particular kind of evil.
That particular kind of evil has woven its way in and out of history. It was perpetuated by my slave-owner ancestors through ignorance and denial, just as it is being perpetuated now by AISD. It is the opposite of freedom. Our democratic system was based on equality, and established a balance of power to prevent that particular kind of evil. However, when systems are allowed to be put in place to govern young school children, and the regime requires that everyone think alike, it is a dangerous sign. It can lead to abuse of power. It can lead to totalitarianism, which is the opposite of democracy. It already has at my school and other schools across Texas.
Is it not time that we listen to the messages of Frederick Douglas and the Freedom Riders?
Joyce Murdock Feilke: Frederick Douglass also wrote—
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
Thank you for helping make us unfit.
😎
You are welcome 🙂