Review: Education and Racial Justice

Second Quarter 2001

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its now famous decision that required an end to racially segregated, "separate but equal" schools. A new book by James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (Oxford University Press), examines that case and its consequences.

The difficulty in assessing Brown v. Board of Education, Patterson shows, is that its impact on desegregation has not led to the fulfillment of all the integrationist hopes held out for it by Thurgood Marshall and others who helped bring it about. It was one thing to force the end of legal segregation; it is quite another to achieve successfully the full racial integration of blacks and whites in public schools and society. School desegregation was not sufficient to keep people from moving to where they wanted to live. The end to legalized school segregation could not change the inequality of school funding that remained dependent on property tax revenues in different districts. Desegregation could not make teachers better teachers, or parents better pre-school educators, or black and white families better neighbors.

In fact, says Patterson, given the continuing inequalities in educational outcomes for black and white students, it is not clear that Brown v. Board of Education was a success or even that it was the crucial spark for the civil rights movement that many think it was. Certainly many developments since the 1950s have promoted progress for African-Americans, including "mass migrations out of the poverty-stricken rural South, the inspiring civil rights movement, strong and well-enforced federal civil rights laws, significant economic growth, wide expansion of public education, more liberal white attitudes, [and] memorable court decisions." All of these "vastly improved the legal and socioeconomic status of black people, including millions who by the 1960s were moving into the middle classes and sending their children to colleges and universities." But educational success for many minority children has not yet been assured and in many cases is more in doubt today than earlier.

What is surprising about Patterson's book is that nowhere in his frank assessment of the "troubled legacy" of Brown v. Board of Education does he step outside the box of the existing governance structure of American schooling to reflect critically on it. White flight from cities, the eventual rejection of busing by many black parents, the legal rejection of many affirmative-action programs—none of this appears to have driven integrationists like Patterson to ask whether more than the end to "separate but equal" is needed to do justice to the educational needs of black and other minority families.

For example, despite the leading involvement of Charles Glenn in the Boston desegregation efforts, which Patterson examines, the author fails to take into consideration Glenn's (and others') calls for an even greater transcending of the current governance structure of education to overcome discrimination. (See Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace, Princeton University Press). Despite the fact that upwards of 60-70 percent of black parents now would like to have a choice of schools beyond the government-run school their children are required to attend, Patterson gives no consideration to this phenomenon in evaluating the inadequacy of past reform efforts. Patterson appears to agree, for example, with those desegregationists who expressed dismay at a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2000, which showed that the court "tended to value parental choice over strategies that seriously tried to ensure racial diversity." In their preoccupation with achieving the "right" racial mixture and integration in public schools, many, like Patterson, fail to take into account other dimensions and institutions of human life—such as families and parental choices—that also require just treatment if African-Americans are to experience equality.

In an essay titled "Evangelical Cooperation in the Cause of Racial Justice" (in Religion, Race and Justice in a Changing America, edited by Gary Orfield and Holly J. Lebowitz, Century Foundation Press), I take up some of the concerns that Patterson overlooks, concerns about how to promote racial justice in a way that also does justice to parents, schools, religious convictions, and other dimensions of social reality. If African-Americans and other minorities are to be able to have the good schools they want and deserve, the change will come about not by government's attempts simply to force color integration within the current public schools. It will come about only with the reform of that structure to make possible the equal treatment of all parents and school-age children.
 

—The Editor