The Richmond Times-Dispatch: Web Edition Articles (Virginia)
A common misconception about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision is that it ended segregation in American classrooms overnight. While the justices’ unanimous 1954 ruling declared the idea of “separate but equal” unconstitutional, hundreds of thousands of students of color remained deeply segregated as Southern states like Virginia took little action to integrate.
Still, the court’s decision made an impact. It became one of the biggest catalysts of the Civil Rights Movement. Seventy years later, it serves as a clear reminder of all the effort and sacrifice needed to bring about liberating change. Additionally, its proximity to us in history should provide an important warning: The progress we’ve made is not set in stone.
I write these words aware of how hard it can be for some young people to picture life in 1954; a time when some of our grandparents were only teenagers.
A few years ago, as an assistant professor at Virginia State University, I worked on a team that catalogued and digitized more than 100,000 historical items belonging to the Virginia Interscholastic Association (VIA). African American secondary school officials organized the VIA, one month before Brown v. Board, to oversee athletics, arts and academic competitions for Black students during segregation.
When we think about the history and legacy of African Americans, we don’t always highlight the more joyful moments. The VIA provided many. It was a space where Virginia’s Black student council organizations, honor societies and athletic associations could show what Black excellence truly looked like.
And yet, many of the thousands of pictures I observed during my VIA research could be jarring. I saw crowds full of Black faces in gymnasiums and classrooms prohibited from mixing with their white peers due to the hate-based norms of the day. The Black schools where VIA competitions occurred were dilapidated, lacked lab equipment, and often possessed outdated library books discarded from white institutions.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling undoubtedly energized African Americans at the time, their fight to get what the court said was theirs continued with many legal efforts and protests. In Alexandria, Black residents had to sue the school board just to get the city to obey the Supreme Court. The courts got involved when the Prince Edward County School Board essentially closed its public school system rather than integrate. Still, Blacks remained undeterred, chipping away, bit by bit, at a white supremacist system that worked to deny their children equality. Virginia’s high schools would ultimately fully integrate in the early 1970s.
That era, wrought with exclusion, happened only one lifetime ago.
Now, I worry the tactics relied upon by activists to bring it to an end are being increasingly used by those who want to erase much of the progress America has made bit by bit.
Lawsuits, protests and school board takeovers dot the country as opponents to America’s growing diversity work to rob students of color of the historical lessons they need to build themselves up. I routinely tell my students that you don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. But if your school doesn’t have a book about your own culture due to a state law or school board directive, how do you even get that far? Today, the attack on critical race theory and related practices is not an attack on the use of this theoretical framework. It’s an attack on Black and brown bodies, the counter-narratives we collect, and critical scholarship that challenges whiteness to achieve racial equity. It’s reminiscent of efforts to suppress Black empowerment in 1954.
At Children’s Defense Fund, we combat this societal regression with our CDF Freedom Schools program. Its origins can be traced to the Mississippi Freedom Summer project of 1964 that aimed to keep Black youth safe and give them rich educational experiences not offered in Mississippi’s public schools.
Our founder Marian Wright Edelman revived the program almost 30 years later to become a powerful model of culturally relevant literacy education for youth of color. We improve participants’ reading, language and interpersonal skills, while strengthening families and connecting children to needed medical and social services. As the National Director of the CDF Freedom Schools program, I’m proud we serve an average of 12,000 children or “scholars” at more than 150 sites in 25 states and the District of Columbia annually.
Black children interested in their own histories need institutions like these that provide self-empowerment as we resist efforts to take America back to the days before Brown v. Board. Such programs have long answered challenges faced by Black America, from Jim Crow to decolonizing the mind in the era of Black Power. Still, we need the nation’s leaders to stand with us and reject those committed to erasing the story of America’s diversity.
James W.C. Pennington, the first African American to attend Yale University, once said: “There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I can never forgive. It robbed me of my education.”
We cannot let another American generation be robbed of their education, too.
Author: KRISTAL MOORE CLEMONS
Originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on May 17, 2024