Thurgood Marshall Was Right
By Rachel Tompkins
The U.S. Supreme Court decided last week that schools could not choose to end racial segregation by assigning children to schools based on racial characteristics. The court suggested that was just as bad as the century’s long practice of using race to exclude children from school.
It’s an Alice in Wonderland type of reasoning that, as one commentator said, doesn’t pass the kindergarten test of “which of these things is alike and which is different.” Other commentators, some of whom at one time supported or even benefited from school desegregation, weighed in support of the decision.
Juan Williams, journalist and biographer of Justice Thurgood Marshall, wrote an op ed in the New York Times arguing that the decision was correct. He thinks it is time to end the era of forced integration and just focus on making all schools good whatever their racial composition.
I can understand that reasoning even if I don’t agree with it. It reminds me of a meeting I attended in a church basement in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1970’s at which an elderly African-American gentleman talked about his long struggle for school desegregation in that city. He said: “ I have spent my life trying to get our kids into their schools thinking they would be better. I have come to find out that most of their schools aren’t so good either. Now we’ve got to work to make all the schools better.”
But will it ever happen if the children are sorted into racially separate schools?
On this point, Williams cites an interview with Marshall who says that he didn’t fight for school desegregation because he thought there was magic in having black children and white children sit next to each other. He said he did it because white folks would have to provide resources for all children if they were together in the same school.
Thurgood Marshall was right then and he is right today. It’s about the money and what the money can buy.
As schools desegregated in the South, many whites with the resources to pay for private school tuition fled the public school system and created private schools. In the cities, both north and south, they fled the city for the whiter and more affluent suburbs. Public schools in many places, both urban and rural, were left to the poor and are now almost completely African-American.
In all too many rural districts, a white elite still controls the school board and other local governments, keeps property taxes low and argues for vouchers as carry-home public subsidies for their private schools or tax credits for their private school tuition. The data tell the story.
States in the South with high percentages of African-American children in rural schools spend the least in the country on public education and especially low amounts on instruction. Instructional expenditures in rural schools range from $3600 in Oklahoma to $7900 in New York. Among the lowest are Mississippi ($3688); Arkansas ($3790); Alabama ($3793); South Carolina ($4188) and North Carolina ($4165).
Federal dollars were supposed to help these districts compensate for disadvantage.
Yet since the passage of NCLB all of these districts receive fewer dollars each year as a result of purposeful tinkering with the formula to ensure that states that spend more on schools get more and that certain favored large urban (Boston) and suburban constituencies (Fairfax County) get more money. It is the old rule of “them that has gets and them that has more gets more.”
The blatant discrimination in the formula for these poor rural districts with high African-American enrollments is bad enough. But NCLB rules penalize these schools even more. The direct correlation between poverty and achievement scores means that these schools have generally low test scores; the lack of resources to hire and keep the best teachers and principals means that the scores are likely to stay low. Indeed, the law penalizes the schools that start the most behind. Even if their students make a lot more progress than students in other schools, they are more likely to be deemed “failing” schools. And the emphasis of urban civil rights partisans on the great value of separating achievement scores by sub group does absolutely nothing for schools in which 90% of the students are African American.
So 60 years after Thurgood Marshall celebrated the victory of the Brown decision, most poor rural black children in the South do not go to school with whites and an entire system of school finance, from the local level through the state legislature to the federal government, discriminates against them.
And today a new generation of African-American parents and citizens and their allies must organize and litigate to change the system that is still designed to keep them second class.
In Mississippi, these activists have finally got the state to fully fund an improved finance system.
In South Carolina, they continue to fight policies of a governor that would give tax credit to parents sending their children to white Christian academies.
In North Carolina, years after the State Supreme Court said the financing system was unfair for poor rural districts, they are trying to get the legislature to do what the Court ordered.
In Alabama, they are working to make certain that state facilities funding flows to small community based rural schools where achievement is likely to be higher and dropouts lower rather than supporting only large consolidated schools.
In Arkansas, they won a court case, fought a massive school consolidation plan and succeeded in getting major new state dollars invested in rural schools.
This new generation of civil rights advocates wish that the outcomes of the Brown decision sought by Thurgood Marshall had come to pass long ago. But they will continue the struggle to end inequality in education in the United States.