Black teachers comprise just 7% of U.S. public school teachers even though 16% of their students are Black.
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Two scholars of inclusive education explain how segregated Black schools advocated for Black children in a way that’s often missing from today’s desegregated classrooms.
President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to do away with racial discrimination in the law. But discrimination persisted.
AP file photo
Concerns over how to make schools safe amid the coronavirus remain. But for many low-income students of color, old buildings in need of repair already presented a heath risk.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, surprised many court watchers by authoring the decision to expand the Civil Rights Act.
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Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Supreme Court as a conservative. But his ruling in a major civil rights case is part of a pattern of justices setting aside ideology to address historic injustices.
School segregation was the law of the land in the U.S. during much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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School integration is often thought of as something that took place in the 1960s. But the first Black student to desegregate a school by court order was an Iowa girl named Susan Clark in 1868.
A 1974 Supreme Court decision found that school segregation was allowable if it wasn’t being done on purpose.
AP
When the Supreme Court exempted suburbs in the North from the kind of desegregation orders imposed in the South, it enabled the ‘de facto’ segregation that continues in America’s schools to this day.
Thurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court in Washington in 1958. Marshall, the head of the NAACP’s legal arm who argued part of the case, went on to become the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice.
AP
While the Brown vs. Board of Education case is often celebrated for ordering school desegregation, history shows many black people in the city where the case began opposed integrated schools.
Jessie Dean Gipson Simmons, shown top center about age 37, c. 1961.
[Clockwise: daughter Angela, sons Obadiah Jerone, Jr. and Carl,
and husband Obadiah Jerone, Sr.; daughters Carolyn and Quendelyn are not pictured]
Simmons family archives
When Jessie Simmons applied for a teaching job in 1958, her application went to a separate file for “Negro teachers” and got rejected. An education scholar recounts how Simmons fought back and won.
Supporters and opponents of marriage equality demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court.
Reuters/Joshua Roberts
Americans have rediscovered the Supreme Court, as they do periodically when it’s at the center of controversy. With a president who attacks the legitimacy of courts, will their attention be benign?
Despite decades of attempts at integration, America’s school remain largely segregated.
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Better funding, integrated neighborhoods and a diverse teacher workforce are among the things needed to dismantle a long-standing racially segregated school system, a scholar argues.
Linda Brown Smith, right, and her two children in their Topeka, KS home 1974.
AP
While Linda Brown is being celebrated for her role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case that desegregated US schools, a researcher says the story behind the case is more complex.
Allison Davis, circa 1965.
Courtesy of the Davis family.
The leading conservative magazine National Review has played a critical role in creating modern GOP. Their repudiation of Trump signals crisis for Republicans.
People queue up outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC to hear the case of Fisher v University of Texas, Austin.
Jose Luis Magaua/Reuters
Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Broeklundian Professor of Political Science Emerita, City University of New York