VCC Magazine Spring 2018

Reflections at the Passing of the Symbol of Desegregation of American Public Schools By Phil Wishon

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Some six decades ago—sixty-four years ago (May 17, 1954), to be exact—the United StatesSupremeCourt ruled in Brownv. Boardof Education that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” and that desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.” One out of a collection of lawsuits around which arguments by the NAACP before the U.S. Supreme Court were based involved a suit filed in 1951 by Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas against the city school board on behalf of his eight-year-old daughter Linda Brown. Mr. Brown fought school board sanctions that compelled his daughter to negotiate Topeka’s busy railroad yards to catch the bus for a Black

of our communities educational practice is characterized by the inequitable

impact that it has had and that it continues to have on millions of poor, underprivileged, and disaffected youngAmericans. Poorly-budgeted, understaffed schools serving a high percentage of minority children from low-income families continue to struggle with inadequate supplies and overcrowded, substandard facilities, in their attempts to offer effective, high quality educational experiences. Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, and sixty-four years after Brown , the most significant

school twenty-one blocks away. He wanted Linda to have the right to attend the White school only five blocks from their home. Reading themomentous opinion for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Earl Warren remarked that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place, and that segregation in public schools deprived children of “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Most Americans who followed the news of the

domestic drama of our time—the struggle for social justice and civil rights for minorities, for women, for English language learners, and for those from diverse cultural backgrounds — continues to play out, giving us more reason to pause rather than to celebrate. Perhaps the most important message of Brown is that who we are and what we value most deeply are at least as important as what we know . Throughout the history of higher education in the Commonwealth, educator

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Linda Brown – Topeka, Kansas

1954 court decision—and the social instability that followed—recall primarily a singularly dramatic remedy that the court imposed on public school segregation practices: school busing, and the unrest that forced busing provoked in communities nationwide. In cities throughout America—Cleveland, Little Rock, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Richmond, Boston—outrage over efforts to force integration of public schools shook American socio-political sensibilities to their core. Reverberations from the anger and upheaval that was broadly expressed in the wake of efforts undertaken to integrate public schools are widely felt to this day, and they continue to find disorienting expression within many communities throughout America. Sadly, inequities in educational experience and opportunity, discrimination in the work place, and marginalization of the poor remain with us. Education in America today is not yet the bastion of social justice and human enlightenment for all students that many hoped for and dreamed it would be. In many

preparation programs, faculties, candidates, and alums have affirmed the belief that it is our obligation—our privilege even—to imagine societies the world over that are less oppressive and less unjust and to take whatever action we can to make them more humane. Faculty members in educator preparation programs in Virginia take pride in imparting to our candidates the belief that schools must prepare children and youth for a civic life in which they will have to live and work with fellow citizens of very different views to develop policies and institutions that can advance shared goals of peace, prosperity, and democratic deliberation. Themoral challengewhichguides thework of Virginia’s educator preparation programs has been and shall ever be to envision schooling as a compassionate concept by infusing conscience into the curriculum—promoting social justice and advancing education as a civil and public-spirited endeavor. Education for conscience—including denunciation of all dehumanizing aspects of human discourse—is

Bonnie Atwood is a writer with numerous state and national awards and a lobbyist who lives in Richmond, Va.

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V irginia C apitol C onnections , S pring 2018

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