Who Betrayed The Legacy Of Brown V. Board?
So this one’s personal for me.
The day they bused the poor kids to my school was the first time I’d ever come face to face with children my age who were so poor they weren’t properly clothed. It was the first time – in a society where I saw separate water fountains for blacks and whites, and the black maid who helped my mom around the house explained to us she wasn’t allowed to use the dressing rooms at the local department store – that I was taught to – yes,taught to – sit across the aisle from a kid whose skin color was different from mine and treat him as my peer.
It was the first time the real public was allowed to show up at my “public” school. And although I was only seven years old, I’ve never forgotten it.
Perhaps that’s why – as I join the rest of the nation in commemorating the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that led to desegregating America’s public schools – I found this news item especially ironic:
The headline was not so surprising: “New Chicago High School To Be Named For Obama.” The president, after all, is a monumentally historic figure for breaking the nation’s color barrier in its highest elected office. And he is an adopted son of Chicago.
But then you get into the fine print, and you learn the Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett are building the Barack Obama College Preparatory High School on the North Side, and it’s going to be “a selective-enrollment high school,” with $60 million in tax funds financing it.
Then recall, if you will, Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett are the officials who oversaw last year’s mass closure of 50 schools – the worst such event in American history – in the neighborhoods of black and brown Chicago school children. Then go a little deeper.
As Chicago school teacher Fred Klonsky explained on his personal blog, the sparking new Barack Obama high will be constructed “on the land where public housing once stood. The public housing was torn down to make way for high-end town houses and towering condo buildings.”
Further, “Obama High would be just a few blocks from an existing selective admission high school … Contrast that with parts of the west side which now have neighborhood school deserts, entire neighborhoods where no neighborhood public school exists.”
And the announcement of the new Obama academy virtually coincided with a decision by Emanuel’s “hand-picked school board” to “fire every administrator, teacher, paraprofessional and lunch lady from three neighborhood schools … on the south and west side,” – i.e., where poor children of color live.
So 60 years after Brown v. Board, here’s what passes for advancements in civil rights: grand gestures of “progress” – honoring a mixed race president – that amount to empty symbolism, while more direct harm is done to minority school children every day.
It’s indeed a “tale of two cities,” to use Klonsky’s words. And it’s a tale of two nations.
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