Stephen Suitts: The Racist History of “School Choice”
Stephen Suitts is an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.
In this illuminating and important article, he examines the roots of the “school choice” movement, which began as an integral part of the segregationist opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. Contrary to the rhetoric of Betsy DeVos, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and even some Democrats, school choice is NOT the “civil rights issue of our time.” School choice was born as a way to maintain segregation of the races. Read this article in full. It is a brilliant and necessary history of the fight to block desegregation of the schools in the South (and other regions), and it is a fight that is ongoing. Next time you hear Betsy DeVos lecture about “educational freedom,” bear in mind that she is echoing dozens of CONTINUE READING: Stephen Suitts: The Racist History of “School Choice” | Diane Ravitch's blog
