News: Interview
Janell Byrd-Chichester
On Segregation: Then and Now

School segregation is again on the rise, nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka that laws separating the races in school are unconstitutional. This ruling paved the way for a significant reduction in racial isolation. But that isolation, today, is growing again.

The Brown case was brought by the NAACP Legal De-fense and Educational Fund. The Fund, now independent of the NAACP, continues to play a central role in desegregation. Janell Byrd-Chichester, the senior attorney in the LDF's Washington, D.C. office, spoke recently with NEA Today's Alain Jehlen.

Q: What was the impact of the Brown case on the learning of African-American children?
In certain parts of the country, the South in particular, African American students benefited tremendously. Before Brown, they had been segregated in schools that were underfunded and had fewer course offerings. You've heard the story about Black kids getting the old books after the white children. Those types of fundamental resource issues changed for lots of minority students when desegregation came about.

Desegregation, along with Title I and other Great Society programs adopted around the same time, helped narrow the academic achievement gap between Blacks and whites.

Minority students also benefited by being in integrated settings in a country where whites are dominant and control the jobs and access to higher education.

Networking opportunities brought real benefits to a population that had been completely isolated and excluded from business, community, political, and educational circles. De-segregation opened up these circles in some ways-not completely, of course, because we still struggle with that today.

Q: What about the effects on white children?
For whites, the research shows a couple of things. One, students who grow up in desegregated environments are more likely to feel comfortable in desegregated workplaces, to live in integrated neighborhoods, to have a diverse group of friends. All of that, I would expect, would redound to the benefit of everybody. One of the fundamental things that Brown recognized was the socializing effect of schools.

And two, we never saw any academic decline as a result of desegregation.

Q: Where are we headed now with desegregation?
For the most part, we did not begin to get real desegregation until the very late '60s, early 1970s.

Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan Administration began efforts to turn back the clock on those desegregation plans. Many cases have been closed out already, and many are in the pipeline. So we're facing a real serious threat of losing a lot of the desegregation that we had achieved.

For example, the Supreme Court allowed the Oklahoma City school board to abandon its desegregation plan, despite the fact that taking this step would recreate the same 99 percent Black schools that existed before desegregation.

The Supreme Court adopted a more relaxed standard, with a focus on return to local control. Now the test is, have local schools eliminated segregation to the extent practicable?

And often a judge will say, well, this is all that's practicable. It doesn't mean there's nothing left that can be done, but this is all the court is willing to press the school district to do.

Q: What can an individual educator do in school to help build a multi-racial society?
It's really important that the kids feel they are a part of the school, not that this is the white school, and I'm just kind of here, but not really part of this. It's critical that educators find ways to integrate minority kids in things like extracurricular activities and school leadership.

It's also important that the curriculum reflect the diversity of our nation, even in a racially isolated school. If you're in a school district that is 99 percent white, you still need African American history. You need Native American history.

Q: Did you have any personal experience with segregation and desegregation?
My older sister was one of the first African Americans to go to an integrated high school in Oklahoma City. She had the highest grades in the class, but they made a white guy the valedictorian, and they gave her an award in private, in the office. They could not handle having a Black valedictorian.

So that was our first and only experience with desegregation in Oklahoma City public schools and the rest of us all went to Catholic schools, in part because of the treatment she received but also because of my parents' close ties with the Catholic Church.

Oklahoma City was and is a very segregated place. And I would say that the racially polarized nature of the community is what drove me to focus on these issues. But for Oklahoma, I wouldn't be doing this.

Q: If the next one or two appointees to the Supreme Court are conservative, what might be the impact on desegregation?
Devastating. I fear for our ability to get to the magic five votes. Conservatives historically have not supported desegregation. So it would put desegregation at greater risk.

And it particularly would put the voluntary desegregation measures at risk, measures that many school districts support, like magnet schools. Another example: the City of Rochester and some of the suburban school districts have a voluntary inter-district transfer program. It's been very successful.

These voluntary measures have been challenged in court. There's a case pending in Rochester, and we've got challenges to magnet schools. Those programs would all be at risk.

Resources

• Resegregation in American Schools, Gary Orfield and John T. Yun, June, 1999. From the Harvard University Civil Rights Project. www.law.harvard.edu/groups/civirights/
  publications/resegregation99.html.

• Racial Issues and Identities: A Guide to Resources on the Web. A New York Times follow-up to the series, How Race Is Lived In America, www.nytimes.com/library/national/
  race/web-guide.html.

• Teaching Tolerance. 64 pp. Semi-annual magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center (free to teachers).

• America's Civil Rights Movement. Video/text kit for middle and upper grades, with teacher guide. One kit free per school from Southern Poverty Law Center.

  Fax: 334-264-7310.