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Media Contacts:
Rev. Dr. Janette C. Wilson Esq.
revjwilson@rainbowpush.org
773-256-2731
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“Separate Is Inherently Unequal” For 61
Years
Where Are We Today?
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Chicago, Illinois, May 16, 2015 -- Reverend Jesse L. Jackson,
Sr. -- The preeminent scholar of public school desegregation, UCLA’s Gary
Orfield, concluded a year ago that six decades after Brown there has
been “great progress, a long retreat and an uncertain future.” He said the
“Brown decision set large changes and political conflicts in motion and
those struggles continue today.”
His study concluded there has been “a vast transformation of the
nation’s school population since the civil rights era,” including a dramatic
drop in white students of nearly 30% and a quadrupling of Hispanic students. The
nation’s two largest regions, the West and South, now constitute a majority of
Hispanic and African American students with whites the second largest group in
the West. “The South, always the home of most Black students, now has more
Latinos than Blacks and is a profoundly tri-racial region.”
After Brown, in the South from the mid-1960s to the
late 1980s, substantial desegregation progress for African Americans was made
and “contrary to many claims, the South has not gone back to the level of
segregation before Brown.” However, “it has lost all of the additional
progress made after l967 but is still the least segregated region for Black
students.”
Segregation has soared and is most pronounced for Latino
students in the West, negating previous progress in the 1960s. But “a clear
pattern is developing of Black and Latino students sharing the same schools,”
and it is this development that “deserves serious attention from educators and
policymakers.”
Again Orfield’s study concluded that segregation is usually by
both caste and class. “Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a
substantial majority of poor children,” while white and Asian students attend
middle-class schools. School segregation is most pronounced in central city
schools in large metropolitan areas, in central city schools of all sizes and in
the suburbs of our largest cities (which are now half nonwhite). Latino
segregation is greater than Black segregation in the suburbs.
The Supreme Court has dramatically weakened desegregation laws
“and many major court orders have been dropped” with the result that segregation
has “increased substantially after the plans were terminated in many large
districts.”
Research since Brown “shows that many forms of unequal
opportunity are linked to segregation” and it “also finds that desegregated
education has substantial benefits for educational and later life outcomes for
students from all backgrounds.” Thus the goal of a public education of equal
high quality for all students is still an aspiration of the future.
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