BROWN
VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION: 50 years later
Segregation by income Much work remains
in Bay Area
Supreme Court ruling in 1954 aimed for
racial desegregation of students, but wealth has created separate and unequal
schools in Bay Area and elsewhere
Nanette
Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004
At
McClymonds High in a gritty West Oakland neighborhood, students make do with
miniature, prepackaged chemistry equipment because their school has no science
lab. The principal struggles to pay for advanced-placement classes. Teachers
get on-the-job training, and parents work two or three jobs and have little time
-- and less cash -- for the PTA.
At
McClymonds, 80 percent of students are black. Less than 1 percent are white.
Just
3 miles away is a leafier high school called Piedmont, with its own college and
career center paid for by the Parents Club. The school has 19
advanced-placement courses, a full counseling program, professional quality
library and 18 kinds of sports, from golf to water polo. More than half the
teachers have a master's degree or doctorate.
At
Piedmont, 71 percent of students are white. Less than 2 percent are black.
Today,
50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously outlawed school segregation
in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case, segregation thrives in
schools across the Bay Area, state and the nation. Even though no board of
education still has the power to exclude students based on ethnicity, the
schools' racial barrier lives on in the segregated lives of the rich and the
poor.
Two-thirds
of McClymonds students, for example, are poor enough to qualify for the federal
lunch program. At Piedmont, no one is.
The
result -- high-end white schools and substandard black-and-brown schools -- is
not much different from what a little girl named Linda Brown faced in Topeka,
Kan., so long ago.
The
law back then required Linda to attend Monroe Elementary even though a better
school, Sumner, was closer to home and had room. But Sumner was for whites.
Linda and her classmates were black.
Hatred
and fear soaked into the pores of life where school segregation was entrenched.
And where it wasn't, segregation was always an option -- until Linda's father,
Oliver Brown, sued the Topeka school board and won.
On
May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court said school segregation was "inherently
unequal" and had to go. But it set no deadline, and schools took their
time. Ultimately, riots, racists and Klansmen all failed to reverse Brown, and
the civil rights era that followed brought school integration to levels never
seen. The intention was to provide equal opportunities for all.
But
the 21st century still has many Linda Browns.
"The
Linda Brown of today is a child in poverty. She can be any color and live in
any region. We have become a society divided less by race than by the profound
barriers between the haves and the have-nots," Chicago teacher Leslie
Baldacci, author of "Inside Mrs. B's Classroom," told The Chronicle.
In
California, today's Linda Browns are students whose parents cannot afford to
supplement schools with computers, books, art classes and equipment as parents
in wealthier communities do.
And
they are about 1 million poor, ethnically isolated students challenging state
education officials in a class-action lawsuit that claims their schools are
worse than those attended by the rest of California's 6.2 million students.
"How
many white parents would send their kids to a predominantly African American
and Latino school in any major urban district in the state?" asked Mark
Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union, the students' lead attorney.
"These schools do not even meet pre-Brown standards because they are both
separate and unequal."
Not
all schools resemble life before Brown. Many are a mixed salad of colors and
languages that do well by their students.
But
in a state where Latinos comprise nearly half of enrollment and whites nearly a
third, most white students (63 percent) go to schools that are mainly white,
and 47 percent of the Latinos attend school where less than 10 percent of the
kids are white, says a new study by UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education
& Access.
"We're
having a discussion about money," said Melba Pattillo Beals, head of the
communications department at Dominican University in San Rafael. "It isn't
black, white, brown or yellow -- it's green. Access to wealth. Who's got the beef,
baby?"
Beals
knows about segregation, integration, and what's behind it all. She is one of
the Little Rock Nine, that historic band of Arkansas teenagers who endured
bullets, bricks and mob violence to integrate Central High in 1957.
"The
vision of 'Brown' was that everybody would have access to resources -- that
schools would be a melting pot," Beals said.
Yet
50 years after Brown, that vision has not been fully realized -- even in the
progressive Bay Area.
"If
I had a chance to design a school, it would be very peaceful and quiet,"
said Melvin Lane, 17, a junior at McClymonds. "We have students smoking,
driving by with loud music from their cars. We hear loud factories and people
yelling out their windows."
Ashely
Hirsch, 16, called the school environment "very distracting. One of the
worst things that irritates me is we have pipes that make noise when the
teacher is trying to teach."
Melvin
and Ashely, both black, are among the high-striving juniors in Yetunde Reeves'
advanced-placement U.S. history class at McClymonds, one of five AP classes
available this year.
Geographically,
the tranquil school of Melvin's dreams is not far from McClymonds. But in some
ways, the distance between Piedmont High and McClymonds is as far as that
between the segregated schools of Topeka before an NAACP lawyer named Thurgood
Marshall made the case for integration.
Northern
and Western states never had Jim Crow laws, but housing patterns, school
district residency rules -- and wealth -- have kept schools color- coded
despite Brown.
"We
often forget that white students attend some of the most segregated schools in
the country, and while those students often have great educational advantages,
they are also deprived of the personal contact and learning that come with
attending racially integrated schools," said Angelo Ancheta, a director at
Harvard's Civil Rights Project.
The
fix, many say, is as radical today as racial integration was in the mid-20th
century: Financial integration of neighborhoods.
"Since
the 1950s, Californians have created profoundly segregated neighborhoods,"
said John Rogers, associate director of UCLA's Institute for Democracy,
Education & Access. "We've built cookie-cutter suburbs with houses of
nearly identical prices and, as a result, with residents of similar incomes.
"The
strong relationship between race and income has meant that most low- income
neighborhoods are Latino and African American, and most middle and upper-income
neighborhoods are white. Attendance boundaries keep the children in different
schools."
Piedmont is a case in point.
"Board
policy has always been that students need to be residents of the
community," said Principal Pam Bradford of Piedmont High.
"Can
I take a third of the population of McClymonds into this school? No. There are
policies and structures that don't allow that," she said, launching into a
discussion of the community and its so-called legacy families that have
attended Piedmont for generations. "Would I if I could? Sure."
The
pattern repeats across the Bay Area.
In
the San Jose school district, poor kids go to Olinder Elementary (75 percent),
and middle-class kids go to Los Alamitos (94 percent). Result: Olinder kids are
88 percent Latino. Los Alamitos kids are 59 percent white.
In
Palo Alto, 94 percent of Addison Elementary students are middle class, and
enrollment is 78 percent white.
Across
the freeway in East Palo Alto, Belle Haven Elementary has 94 percent poor kids.
Enrollment is 73 percent Latino.
Busing
is the traditional fix. Yet some of today's most ardent opponents of busing are
not whites trying to exclude nonwhites, but low-income people of color who
prefer to send their children to a neighborhood school.
So
the issue today is how -- not whether -- to integrate.
It
wasn't like that at the time of Brown. Then, it took three years for the Little
Rock school board to reluctantly permit integration at one school, Central
High, the best in the region. And the nine students who broke that color
barrier paid for it, in Beals' words, with their innocence.
"In
1957, while most teenage girls were listening to Buddy Holly's 'Peggy Sue,'
watching Elvis gyrate, and collecting crinoline slips, I was escaping the
hanging rope of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing
away burning acid sprayed into my eyes," writes Beals in the opening
sentence of her 1994 memoir, "Warriors Don't Cry."
On
what was to be the first day of school, the Arkansas National Guard used
rifles, bayonets and sticks to turn the children back. The mob proved so
vicious that President Dwight Eisenhower sent the Army's 101st Airborne to
escort the nine to class. Thirty years later, all nine returned to Central High
amid hordes of reporters instead of rope-wielding racists. Beals winced as she
entered the building she recalled as a "hellish torture chamber."
Yet
she would do it again. Segregation was a torture chamber even more hellish than
Central High.
"Brown
is a blessing," Beals told The Chronicle. "Prior to Brown, I had no
hope or opportunity. Brown opened the coffin and let me out. What we have to do
is to give that key -- inclusion -- to everyone and carry that lesson to the
21st century."
In
California, the new century dawned with a lawsuit meant to do that. The ACLU
sued state education agencies in 2000 on behalf of poor, mainly nonwhite
students "being deprived of basic educational opportunities available to
more privileged children," says the suit. Williams vs. California
describes "appalling conditions" at schools with crowded classrooms,
vermin, poorly trained teachers, and rooms too hot or cold.
The
students want the state to set standards for conditions, establish
accountability, and give "basic educational necessities" to all.
The
lawyers are now in settlement talks with the state.
Back
at Piedmont High, a group of sophomore boys -- white, black and Asian American
-- stood in the sun discussing who gets to go to good schools. The friends
agreed: Money matters.
Yet
Calvin Logan and Ryan Pollard, the black students in the group, knew there was
more to it. Of all the students, only Calvin had been told by a cop to move on
as he waited for his dad at a Piedmont corner. And only Ryan's dad had been
steered away from Piedmont when searching for a house.
"There's
racism," said Eric Yao, an Asian American. "But not among us."
"There
is, dude," said Justin Sherman, a white student. "If we had learned
not to discriminate, we wouldn't be having this discussion."
COMPARING
OAKLAND AND PIEDMONT SCHOOL DISTRICTS
Attendance
at the Piedmont City Unified and Oakland Unified school districts is for the
2002-03 school year:
McClymonds High School
Piedmont High School
PIEDMONT CITY UNIFIED 2,566 students
PIEDMONT
CITY UNIFIED 2,566 students
White:
70%
Asian:
19.5%
Hispanic
or Latino: 3.5%
African
American, not Hispanic: 3.2%
Other:
3.8% .
OAKLAND UNIFIED: 52,501 students
African
American, not Hispanic: 43.3%
Asian:
15.4%
Hispanic
or Latino: 32.2%
White:
5.8%
Other:
3.3%.
Free and reduced meals participation
34,495 students (66%) in the Oakland
Unified School District receive free and reduced meals. None of the students in
Piedmont receive the meals..
Sources: California Department of Education; ESRI; Geographic
Data Technology