Opinion
Schools More Segregated Now
“Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now”
B ERNIE F OSTER
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The Skanner Newspaper, established
in October 1975, is a weekly publica-
tion, published each Wednesday by
IMM Publications Inc.,
415 N. Killingsworth St.,
A
s we approach May 17, the
60th anniversary of the
U.S. Supreme Court’s
Brown v. Board of Education
landmark decision outlawing
“separate but equal” schools, sev-
eral studies show that our schools
are more segregated now than they
were three decades ago. And there
are no indications that things are
likely to change for the better in
the foreseeable future.
A report by the Economic Policy
Institute (EPI) titled, “Brown v.
Board at 60,” concluded, “Today,
things are getting worse. The typi-
cal black student now attends a
school where only 29 percent of
his or her fellow students are
white, down from 36 percent in
1980.”
Actually there were two Brown
decisions. The first, in 1954, out-
lawed racially segregated public
schools, which had been defended
as “separate but equal.” Faced
with foot-dragging by intransigent
school officials in the Deep South,
the Supreme Court issued a sec-
ond ruling in 1955, sometimes
called Brown II, declaring that the
schools had to be desegregated
“with all deliberate speed.”
But speed was nowhere to be
found. Two years after the court
ruling, no Black child attended
schools with a White student in
eight of the 11 former Confederate
states, including Alabama.
The Leadership Conference on
Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition
of nearly 200 organizations, noted,
“It took ten years after Brown, but
beginning with the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, the nation committed
to desegregation and it worked.
African-American leaders also
played a role in dismantling
T HE C URRY desegregation.
R EPORT
An investigation of resegrega-
tion in the South, conducted by
ProPublica,
focused
on
George E.
Tuscaloosa,
Ala.,
my
hometown.
Curry
The city had been under a federal
desegregation decree since 1979.
In 1993, with Tuscaloosa vying
for a new Mercedes-Benz plant,
Courts and executive agencies business leaders decided it was
consistently supported desegrega- time for them to make a move.
“Publicly, the city’s movers and
tion plans and from 1968 to 1988,
as more schools integrated, aca- shakers said the lack of neighbor-
demic achievement increased for hood schools made the district
unattractive … Behind closed
African American students.”
doors, they argued that if they did
However, that progress stalled.
“…The legal and political tide not create some schools where
turned against integration during white students made up the major-
‘The typical black student now attends
a school where only 29 percent of his
or her fellow students are white, down
from 36 percent in 1980’
the 1980s,” LCCR observed.
“Courts stopped ordering desegre-
gation
plans
and
began
dismantling existing plans – both
court-ordered and voluntary. Fed-
eral agencies stopped aggressive
enforcement and by 1989 schools
were beginning to resegregate,
reversing many of the academic
gains of the previous 20 years.”
Upon entering office in 1981,
President Ronald Reagan set the
political climate for retrenchment.
And so did an increasingly conser-
vative Supreme Court. But some
ity – or near it – they’d lose the
white parents still remaining,” the
investigation found. “Districts
under desegregation orders aren’t
supposed to take actions that
increase racial separation. And so
the city’s leadership decided the
desegregation order needed to go,
and they believed the time was
ripe for a court to agree.”
The court did agree to bow out
after some Black leaders went
along with the plan.
“The roster of witnesses lined
up behind the school board
shocked many in the black com-
munity,” ProPublica reported. “It
included some of the city’s most
influential black leaders, including
a city councilman, a state senator,
and Judge John England,
Jr…Rumors spread within the
community that England’s and
others’ support had been part of a
secret arrangement with white
leaders.”
A person with direct knowledge
of the arrangement confirmed to
me that a deal was indeed made
whereby a new Black school
would be constructed on the pre-
dominantly West Side of town in
exchange for supporting an end of
the court-ordered desegregation.
However, after extracting what
they wanted from Black officials,
Whites reneged on the deal and no
new school was erected.
Another reason schools are
being resegregated is that segre-
gated housing patterns have
remained intact.
“Schools remain segregated
because neighborhoods in which
they are located are segregated,”
said the EPI report. “Raising
achievement of low-income black
children requires residential inte-
gration, from which school
integration can flow.”
Without dismantling segregated
residential housing patterns and
getting federal courts or the Jus-
tice Department to retain some
jurisdiction over court-ordered
desegregation plans, public
schools are on a path to return to
their pre-Brown status of being
separate and unequal.
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Mental Illness is Our Dirty Little Secret
I
’m tired, my sisterfriend says.
I don’t know how much longer
I can hold on. As I hear her I
have a couple of choices. One is to
tell her to get with her pastor and
pray; the other is to tell her to get
real with her illness. Running her
to her pastor takes her to a familiar
place. Pushing her to help takes
her out of her comfort zone.
When my beloved brothers and
sisters share that they are stymied
in the way they live their lives, I
don’t mind praying and encourag-
ing spiritual counsel, but I do mind
ignoring the medicinal help that
could assist my sisterfriend.
Mental health is our nation’s
dirty little secret, and if it is whis-
pered in the nation at large, it is a
silent scream in the African Amer-
ican community. We are afraid,
ashamed, frightened to own up to
it, using our own lingo (s’kerd,
shamed) to wrap ourselves around
the fear that goes with “coming
out” on mental illness.
So we are silent, even when we
lose a warrior. Karyn Washington
was a 22-year-old Morgan State
University sister who committed
suicide, last week. This young and
brilliant one turned her pain into
power when she created a website,
“for brown girls” (www.forbrown-
girls.com) that lifted up and
affirmed our brown skin girls.
Karyn was a colored girl whose
mental issues were apparently so
severe that she chose to take her
own life while affirming those of
Page 2 The Portland and Seattle Skanner April 23, 2014
B ENNETT
C OLLEGE
Julianne
Malveaux
others. From all accounts Karyn
experienced depression. How
many feel it and don’t say it? How
many nod and just don’t mean it?
How many exhale, inhale and real-
ly reach out to a brother or a sister
to listen, have a cup of tea, take a
know why the caged bird sings.”
I chose to focus on this because
in one scant week I have spoken to
African American women who
have experienced depression or
feel shackled by other mental
health issues. They walk like they
hold the world in their hands;
sway like they are hearing drums
from another continent, yet cry
behind closed doors, like they
have the weight of the world on
their shoulders. They are sad,
ground down, depressed, and we
play off their pain, trivialize it,
instead of responding to it. We are
losing too much genius when we
They walk like they hold the world in
their hands; sway like they are hearing
drums from another continent, yet cry
behind closed doors
walk, or just reach out and touch?
The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar
wrote, “We wear the mask that
grins and lies that hides our cheeks
and shades our eyes.” Many in our
nation, especially African Ameri-
cans, wear the mask. When we
peek/speak/tweet from behind the
mask we realize, yet if we were
real, we would have to acknowl-
edge in the words of Paul
Lawrence Dunbar that to make a
poet Black and bid her sing is to
challenge her and her two realities.
In the words of Sister Maya, “I
play off the scourge of metal ill-
ness. We decide that it is their
problem, not the problem of a
nation that would inflict, rather
than attempt to fix, mental illness.
For all the care the Affordable
Care Act has offered, we must ask
if it has offered enough to combat
mental illness.
We in the African American
community have paid more and
received less to be perceived as
“normal” members of society.
Despite injustices in Scottsboro,
Groveland and other vile places in
our nation, we have been expected
to show up, with amazing dignity,
ignoring the massacre of our sons
or daughters with well-modulated
emotion. Too many of us fear or
fail to speak our pain. Poverty and
mental health are correlated, yet
the poorest of us see our pain as
“par for the course” and we don’t
speak about it. Whether African
Americans are wealthy or finan-
cially challenged, mental health is
elusive for some. And faith with-
out works is dead, which means
fall on those knees if it comforts
you, then run to the doctor who
may help you with medication and
therapy.
Baby girl Karyn Washington
inspired this column, and as I
thought of her, others kept remind-
ing me of their own pain and the
ways it has been ignored. If you
don’t get it, read from Terrie
Williams’ “Black Pain.” And if
you get it/read it, remind folks that
this is not a sympathy issue, this is
a public policy issue. So weep sis-
ter soldier, brother warrior. Those
who bear the scars of mental ill-
ness have often fought longer,
harder, and with the chemical
imbalance that makes them feel it
all so much more intensely. Men-
tal health is not an embarrassment;
it is a national health issue. It is a
silent killer that we have yet to
acknowledge.
Read the rest online at
www.theskanner.com