70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education problems persist

It’s been 70 years since the United States Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to separate children in public schools on the basis of race. 

In the historic 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka case, the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment. The justices voted unanimously 9-0. 

This landmark decision ushered in the desegregation of schools, but challenges continue to persist when it comes to desegregation in today’s schools.

A 2022 report found that more than a third of students went to a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school during the 2020-21 school year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. 

“Because diversity within a school is generally linked to the racial/ethnic composition of the district, school district boundaries can contribute to continued divisions along racial/ethnic lines,” the 2022 report said. 

Pennsylvania State University Education Professor Erica Frankenberg said she is seeing a rise in segregating Black and Latinx students.  

“A key is to take some effort given that there is still racial segregation and inequality that exists within and between communities,” she said in an email. 

There are social and academic benefits of integrated schools, Frankenberg said. 

“Especially when structured to allow for cooperative, equal status integration within racially diverse school,” she said. “Students are more likely to have cross racial friendships, lower prejudice, and more likely to live and work in more desegregated settings as adults.”

Penick vs. Columbus Board of Education

Federal Judge Robert Duncan ruled Columbus Public Schools was illegally keeping schools segregated in the 1977 decision Penick vs. Columbus Board of Education. 

This ushered in a new school busing program in 1979 that bused some students out of their neighborhood to another school in a different part of the city. This lasted until 1996 when the district returned to a neighborhood school model. 

Simone Drake started kindergarten shortly after Columbus Schools started the new busing program. 

“I can say that I’ve had Black teachers in every school I attended,” she said. “Did they reflect the percentage of Black people who lived in the city? I don’t think so.”

Her family moved to the Far East Side of Columbus when she was in middle school and she was able to attend the neighborhood school Yorktown Middle School and said Black students from the city’s Near East Side were bused out to her school. 

“That’s a big radius of where they’re pulling students in to balance the demographics,” she said. “There weren’t very many kids who were Black who lived where I lived by that point. … When the neighborhoods are segregated, if you’re going to balance busing, then it becomes inevitable that you’re going to have people who have to really go all across town.”

When Columbus Historian Rita Fuller-Yates attended Champion Middle School on the city’s East Side in the 1980s, students were bused to her school from Northland. 

“They lived in newer communities,” Fuller-Yates said. “They had better type of clothing. So when they came here to the East Side of Columbus, I think it was an awareness for the Black people that there were Black people living differently than they were.”

She said Black students and white students at her middle school mostly kept to themselves. 

“I remember the white people — although we all went to school together — I cannot remember one white person’s name because we were in school together but we were separate,” Fuller-Yates said. 

That changed, she said, when she went to East High School and white and Black students played sports together. 

“You become close to your teammates, and some of those teammates happen to be white,” Fuller-Yates said, who was a cheerleader. “I think it was a good thing that this was happening because I think it not only taught awareness, but it took away some of the stigma that both of us were living with all of our lives about each other.”

Willis Brown said Brown vs. Board of Education was good politically and socially, but economically hurt some Columbus neighborhoods like Bronzeville.

“Economically it opened up a door… that will never be able to close. And as a result, you don’t have the economic strength that you once had here,” he said, referring to Bronzeville. “You didn’t need to go outside. This was your Mecca. You had everything here. … The biggest thing was being able to move the money outside of the neighborhood. … the quest for wanting to be equal superseded the analysis and the assessments of the economic impact.”

Shutdown

Simone Drake helped produce the documentary film Shutdown about the racially charged events at Linden-McKinley High School in 1971. The school was forced to close for a handful of days after tensions escalated between students after the Black nationalist flag went up on the flagpole outside of the school. 

Drake’s dad Eddie Poindexter was a student at LMHS at the time and the documentary was released in May 2023. 

“What they wanted was equal resources, and they didn’t have that,” she said. “You had these schools that were segregated, but like de facto segregation, as all the neighborhoods were segregated. But you had the schools with predominantly Black students not receiving the same type of resources, and so a lot of times their arguments were for that, not for integration.” 

Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on Twitter.