May 17, 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. In it, the Court overruled “separate but equal” schooling. The Court found that, in a structurally racist society, Black children would not be provided an equal education when they were placed in separate schools. One form of racism was declared illegal.

Brown was part of a multi-racial civil rights revolution. The NAACP’s lawyers used a 1946 case – Mendez v. Westminster – where a court found that a school district was separating Mexicans in order to provide them with an unequal education.

Racism and Reaction

Since 1954, many white people and structures have resisted Brown v. Board. 2004 also marks the 30th anniversary of the 1974 Boston busing crisis. White parents threw rocks at buses carrying Black students into white schools, blocked streets, and hurled racist insults at children as young as 5 years old – after Boston was ordered to desegregate based on Brown.

Thirty years of right-wing attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement have followed. In the 1973 Rodriguez case, filed in Texas, the Supreme Court found that Mexican students did not have the right to equal spending on their education as compared to white students. A year later, the Court ruled on Milliken in Detroit, stating that governments could not integrate schools across city-suburb boundaries – at a time when white and middle class flight from cities was massive, city tax bases were devastated, and corporations were stripping urban cores of unionized manufacturing jobs by the millions. Proposition 13 in California – approved in the 1970’s by a majority white electorate, but affecting majority students of color – stripped schools of property tax funding from the rich. Federal court decisions in the 1990’s were the final straw – confirming that, as long as it could not be proven that districts were intentionally segregating, they were free to have racially-segregated schools.

This year, the Harvard Civil Rights Project reports that levels of segregation for Black students are back up to those of 1969, and those for Latinos are also climbing. Why does this matter? Segregated Black and Latino schools are 10 times more likely to serve low-income students than majority white schools. These schools average twice the size in student population as white schools. They have class sizes that are 15% higher, lower-quality curriculum, and far higher teacher turnover rates. Brown’s victory over “separate but equal” is now a nightmare of separate and unequal.

Segregation and Integration

Fifty years after Brown, racial segregation continues to be imposed on many people of color – in housing, schools, banking, the workforce, access to transportation, health care, insurance, and jobs. The result for many is poverty, unemployment, underemployment, under-resourced schools, police occupation and profiling of communities, and a public health crisis.

We believe there are benefits to racially-integrated schools. But, not because of the racist idea that children of color will learn better if they sit next to whites. Rather, we believe that forging mutual understanding across racial groups is crucial in the fight for justice and learning. But, we also believe that families in communities of color have the right to publicly-funded schooling that has separate aspects to it if they wish – because of their cultural, language, and national rights, and in response to historic oppression. Separate might mean schools that have measures of independence, or separate classes that focus on native languages or group histories. Today, in the absence of a broad anti-racist movement and well-funded education, the progressive possibilities for both – integrated schools and those that support elements of separation – remain unfulfilled.

Movements to Restore and Expand Brown

Fifteen years after Brown, in the late 1960’s, many in communities of color got tired of waiting for foot-dragging districts to integrate schools. Many organized movements for community control. The idea was that, even if schools remained segregated, families in communities of color should have control over everything from curriculum to staffing to budgets.

Today, we should support both the fight for racial equality, reflected in Brown, and the fight for community control, reflected in the legacy of those who grew impatient for Brown’s implementation. In a structurally racist society, fighting for equality means fighting for equality of school conditions and student outcomes – in graduation and college acceptance rates, in reading and wage levels. This calls for educational reparations – massive, non-time-limited funding to reach these levels of equality, and to go beyond, into a realm where oppressed community and human rights rule over budget cuts and profit.

The fight for control means demanding community power over curriculum, budgets, and more – including the power to determine whether integrating schools is desirable, in an era of entrenched housing segregation and white flight. And, when schools are throwing away Spanish books, and erasing everything from the Haitian Revolution to the Black Panthers from the curriculum, control means we must set up our own study groups, in the tradition of SNCC’s Freedom Schools of the 1960’s.

In Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ), based in LA, hundreds of parents, students, and teachers are planting seeds for these struggles. On June 8th, CEJ will demonstrate at 4:00 p.m. at the LAUSD Board, demanding that class sizes be capped – one step in the fight for equality. As JROTC programs have been expanded in Black and Latino schools since the 1990’s, CEJ is demanding that they be after school rather than regular school programs, and that the decision to have them at all be left to the school community. This is a step towards community control – especially relevant today, as Iraq is brutally occupied in the service of U.S. empire, where Iraqis and U.S. soldiers are killed daily, with many of those U.S. soldiers having been recruited from schools after being convinced that few non-military options existed for them. CEJ is also demanding that LAUSD take a stand against Bush’s law, No Child Left Behind, that requires schools to give students’ personal information to the military. Resisting this law, and its recruiters, can be another step towards community control. With this kind of organizing, we might begin to restore and expand Brown. We hope you will join us on June 8th and beyond.

These views are of the authors as individual Left organizers, and not necessarily those of organizations in which they work. Comments are encouraged.