A native of Humbolt, Tennessee, Kenneth E. Sullivan moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1968. He completed a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in education while attending Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Kenneth completed his dissertation for a doctorate in curriculum and instruction at Trinity College and Seminary. Pastor Sullivan is the author of the book Let Our Children Go.
May 17 will mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that segregated educational facilities were inherently unequal and violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guaranteeing all citizens equal protection under the laws.
The Brown decision was a sound one. It was about freedom and equality—the freedom for African American children to access the same quality of public education that the nation offered to its white children. The schools that African American children were forced to attend were grossly inferior, underfunded, and neglected. While the Brown decision was a fair and just one, the means (desegregation) decided on to satisfy the demands of the decision were far from just and fair. What African Americans wanted was peaceful integration, but what they got, in too many cases, was desegregation by one-way forced busing. The whole experiment was flawed and unfair from the beginning. One-way busing of African American children into hostile territory was cruel and inhumane. Angry white parents screamed and jeered at African American children and in some cases attacked the buses.
The climate was hostile, many of the teachers were disinclined to give fair and equal attention to African American children, and the expectation for these children was low. Although African American families had not been the cause of segregation, they were expected to carry the full burden of school desegregation. African American children were shuffled from one grossly unfair situation to another. The problems inherent in one-way forced busing were never adequately addressed, and we wonder why there is a persistent achievement gap between the races. Granted, there are other factors in the equation that contribute to the achievement gap between African American and white students, but current and historical attitudes about race must be taken into account.
The real issue has always been to ensure that African American children receive the same quality of environment, materials, and instruction, which had been deliberately denied them under the system of segregation.
The concept of desegregation, in my mind, has never been based on the idea that an American child will learn more by simply sitting next to a white child. That very idea reinforces the attitude of intellectual superiority. The real issue has always been to ensure that African American children receive the same quality of environment, materials, and instruction, which had been deliberately denied them under the system of segregation.
African Americans pushed for integration, believing that if their children were placed in the same classroom as white children, they would receive the same quality of education as white children. They anticipated a firestorm of protest and violence from southern whites and even from a number of northern whites, but many were shocked to see cities that prided themselves in their culture and refinement, like Boston, Massachusetts, resort to mob violence, attacking school buses full of innocent children.
African American leaders naively thought that once the storms settled and whites saw that African Americans were no different from themselves and only wanted the same things they wanted in life, whites would accept the idea of integration and move on to educate all the children with an equal effort.
But the desegregation efforts have been unsuccessful both as a social engineering experiment—inner-city schools in most American cities being overwhelmingly African American and Latino—and as an academic experiment. The dropout rate for African Americans continues to climb, and their test scores continue to dip below that of whites.
Many whites moved to different school districts, and those who could afford it put their children in private schools. Since African Americans are an overwhelming majority in many urban centers, there is once again a disparity between the amount of money being spent to educate African American children and that being spent to educate white children.
Today African Americans are still locked in inferior schools. Parents still do not have the freedom to choose the best schools for their children because the best schools are economically inaccessible. But there is reason for hope. In the summer of 2002, the Supreme Court made another landmark decision, which upheld the constitutionality of school voucher programs like the ones in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In my estimation this most recent decision holds more promise for freedom and equality in education than the Brown decision because, rather than seeking to artificially force schools to desegregate, school vouchers provide parents with funds to pay for their children to attend whatever school the parents choose—private, public, religious, or nonreligious. School vouchers allow parents to shop for the school that best suits the needs of their children. The dollars follow the children to whatever school the parents choose for them. School vouchers could be the solution to reestablishing neighborhood schools in the African American community. Vouchers would also put control of those schools in the hands of African Americans.
Aside from the academic issue associated with education, there is a major economic issue. Education is a multibillion-dollar industry. If school vouchers become a reality across this country, many of these dollars could be captured by African American communities all over the nation and used to support and expand existing minority-owned schools. This great infusion of dollars could promote the establishment of more of these kinds of schools. We could also witness both the transformation of urban education and the placement of the control of educating African American children in the hands of African American citizens. This economic infusion could drive a large number of school-related businesses all across the country and facilitate the exploration of innovative ways to educate African American children.
Public schools are receiving these huge sums of money to educate America’s children. In the case of most urban public schools, most of the children being educated are African American and Latino. Yet the African American community benefits only marginally from this huge amount of capital. Control of these dollars is not in the hands of African Americans. Instead, those outside the African American community receive the lion’s share of the contracts to service the many consumer demands of these large school systems. If these same dollars were placed in the hands of parents in the form of vouchers to take to the schools of their choice, schools and businesses owned by African Americans would gain control of these vast sums and begin to grow like mushrooms. Religious schools owned and operated by African Americans, secular private schools, and charter schools could all benefit from a school choice voucher program.
The kinds of African American companies that could benefit from these education dollars could include construction companies that build new schools and additions onto existing schools (including church schools), food product and service companies, transportation companies, security companies, school equipment and supply companies, custodial services companies, produce companies, printing companies, health services companies, heating and air conditioning companies, publishing companies—and the list goes on. This great infusion of dollars could help revitalize the African American community.
The Brown decision was extremely important. The ruling was right on target because it made its contribution to ending racial segregation as an acceptable social condition in an otherwise great nation. However, desegregation as a method of achieving a fair and equal system of education was a dismal failure.
The Meantime Volume 3 Number 3