Thursday, June 03, 2004

Misleading headline

The headline says "Segregation persists in town behind Brown". It goes on to tell of a local public school that is 99% black, and another one that is 90% white.

OK, but the 90% white school is a private school. Brown v. Board of Education was about public schools and certainly couldn't force the integration of private schools.

I've lived in the rural South, and one of my junior high schools had been the black senior high. I'm not under any illusions about why that private school is there, and there are countless others like it throughout the South.

But can no one else see something fishy about a statement like "separate is inherently unequal", such as is asserted in Brown? Someone actually claimed that "...if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation." Yeah, right - black kids are automatically shortchanged if white kids aren't present. Am I the only one that sees that as insulting to blacks?

It's long past now, and IMO integration did me good. I didn't have to spend half my day commuting across town to satisfy some judge's idea of racial justice though. There had to be a way to make this happen without inflicting such questionable law on us in the process.

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