This past week marked the 60th anniversary of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne to safeguard the nine black students who entered that school and defied the taunts of the white mob and the defiance of Governor Faubus.
Now, the Little Rock public schools are again segregated due to white flight and are under the control of the state board of education, thanks to the efforts of the Walton family, which pretends to care about children but cares only about union-busting and school choice.
The white power structure in Arkansas has reasserted control of the public schools.
The same story is playing out in Jackson, Mississippi, where white state leaders are taking control of the Jackson public schools. This effort was carried out behind closed doors. It attained a special urgency due to the election of a progressive black mayor in Jackson.
Jeff Bryant tells the story here. It is a story that shames our nation. Or should.
The truth of Little Rock repeats itself over and over in communities throughout the South and across the country.
Jeff Bryant writes:
More recently, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, researching a story about the current effort of the state to take over the local school district there, much in the same way Little Rock schools were taken over. Jackson is similar to Little Rock in that it is a school district populated predominantly by non-white students.
For two days, the Mississippi Department of Education staged a series of meetings that illustrated once again how white elites continue to define education opportunities for black and brown communities.
The racial symbolism of the events was inescapable.
MDE officials, who were predominantly white, presented their case in a room limited in seating and closed to the public over an hour prior to the meeting’s announced start time. Members of the State Accreditation Commission and the State Board of Education, who were predominantly white, decided the fate of Jackson schools in separate closed-door sessions completely sequestered from public view.
Some 100 local citizens, who were predominantly black, were relegated to an auditorium, where they watched events unfold on a live stream video that was often interrupted and garbled during transmission, and then they waited for hours to have decisions announced to them.
Local school officials, who had had a mere seven school days to muster a defense, presented detailed documentation of their recent and ongoing efforts to correct problems in the district, but the thick binders they presented were generally left unread on the meeting room tables as commission and board members convened in closed chambers to cast their votes.
Should the governor agree that Jackson schools are in a state of “extreme emergency,” as the state contends, the district’s school board is dissolved, the superintendent is dismissed, and an appointed conservator, reporting directly to the state Board of Education, is put in place to oversee the schools. In fact, the conservator has already been chosen.
The day the State Accreditation Committee decided to yank the district’s accreditation – a necessary step before proceeding to the Board of Education’s hearing the next day – Jackson’s recently elected progressive mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told those gathered on the sidewalk outside of MDE headquarters that they had just witnessed a “perfunctory exercise” in which “every commissioner who stepped into that room had already reached a decision.”
He declared “the burden of proof” in the state’s case “was not met.” And he called for ‘turn[ing] the page in Mississippi” and departing from the state’s history of denying black communities control of their schools. “We will not stand silently as they rob our children of an education.”
In D.C., we have a president who assails black football players who express their objection to racism; Trump portrays his attack on the athletes as a “defense” of the National Anthem. He would have us believe that he is patriotic and those who exercise free speech are not.
And we have a Secretary of Education who thinks that black colleges were created because black students wanted to exercise “choice.”
Has racism diminished since 1957, when the Little Rock Nine entered Central High School, protected by federal bayonets?
In many ways it has. We elected a black president. We see black actors on television and in the movies.
But in many ways, racism remains as virulent as it was in 1957. The selection by Alabama Republicans of Roy Moore as their Senate candidate reminds us that racism thrives; Trump reminds us daily that racism is alive. The efforts by the Waltons and other white elites to strip black communities of any role in their community public schools–and to offer them school choice instead–reminds us that racism comes in many forms.
