Civil rights.
Birmingham News has just published photos from the civil rights era that were considered too inflamatory to publish when they were taken. I was struck, in particular, by the expressions on the faces of the two young black women as they entered an all-white school for the first time and by the face of the white woman waving a confederate flag.
A segrated school in Birmingham. April 4, 1961.
Integration of a high school in Birmingham. September 1963.
If you are white, would you have been among these people protesting the integration of an elementary school? Would you have been this woman? She looks so sure of herself.
Would you have protested the integration of your high school, as these high school students did? How do you know what you would have done?
What is the civil rights issue of our day?
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School integration is still an important civil rights issue, 50-some years after the Brown v Board of Ed decision. Here in San Francisco, schools have resegregated since court rulings struck down the “no more than 30% of students of one race in a school” policy. Not total segregation, but enough to ensure that way more Black, Latino and Pacific Islander students go to “bad schools,” while White students tend to be clustered in “good schools.” Test scores, walk-in perceptions, and levels of fund raising contribute to the good/bad perceptions.
It’s not just San Francisco, of course.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard provides the best, most current information on civil rights in education that I know of. They have a current report on resegregation.
http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/
Comment by Jennifer Knudsen — March 2, 2006 @ 1:53 pm