Issues & Trends
A Call to Action on 70th Anniversary of Brown
July 12, 2024
Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the National
Archives and Records Administration and the National Park Service teamed up to host the Civil Rights Conference at the end of June. The multiday event explored the history behind the case, the decision itself, and its impact. On June 28, the conference concluded with “The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v. Board,” a virtual presentation by Dara Byrne, dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College in New York. Byrne’s work in civil rights scholarship includes coediting The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March.
Byrne began with a quote taken from Justice Thurgood Marshall’s 1992 Liberty Award speech: “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work.”
“We should think of this as a call to action because in order to achieve a flourishing democracy and true liberty, real justice does require the effort and active participation of everyone,” said Byrne. “In many ways, I think that’s what the broad goal of Brown is … the education and active participation of all citizens. It is a reminder to all of us, as we see in Thurgood Marshall’s words, that these ideals do not happen automatically. They require the constant work and vigilance of each and every one of us.”
Byrne described the current climate as counter to ongoing desegregation efforts. “It’s not lost on anyone that we are in a moment of significant backlash around efforts to build a more diverse and inclusive school system using public funding,” she said. In response to this attitude, she emphasized positive impacts after the Brown decision, including a significant increase in enrollment rates by students of color in K-12 and higher education institutions; increasingly diverse and inclusive curricula representing a broader range of histories; greater diversity in teachers, principals, and administrators; more research into educational disparities; higher public awareness of educational disparities; and significant investments in technology and infrastructure that have improved educational tools and environments for diverse students.
Byrne said that her own middle-school-aged child continually surprises her with school materials that would have been unheard of when she was a student. However, Byrne also identified a number of areas where work has remained incomplete. When The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March was published in 2005, she identified demographic trends toward resegregation, achievement gaps, policy changes and legal battles, charter schools and school choice, equity and funding, the digital divide, and other areas in which Brown’s progress has been thwarted, undermined, or challenged. Byrne said that the list represents an accurate description of the current state of affairs.
Byrne cited a report issued in May by Stanford University and the University of Southern California (USC) showing that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in the largest school districts over the past three decades. Data shows a 64 percent increase in segregation in the nation’s 100 largest school districts since 1988, as well as a 50 percent increase in segregation by economic status since 1991. Byrne said that this trend is due, in part, to policies favoring school choice over integration.
In addition to their report, Stanford and USC produced The Segregation Explorer, an online tool providing searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in U.S. states, counties, and metropolitan areas. Bryne asserted that trends toward resegregation are the result of policy changes, rather than demographic ones, pointing to the reduction in state and federal monitoring of integration in recent decades as an example of one policy change that has driven trends.
“This is important because there is a tendency to attribute segregation in schools to segregation in neighborhoods,” Byrne said. “This was argued by one of the professors associated with this project, Dr. Anne Owens, who works on public policy at USC, in pointing to the fact that the story is a little more complicated than that.”
Byrne drew information from “Our World in Data” detailing public funding for education as a share of GDP in seven countries from 1870 to 2021. The graph showed a series of declines in U.S. public spending in the past two decades. She followed this with data drawn from Connecticut schools demonstrating the broad disparity in funding among schools in the state.
Byrne said that the availability of data creates opportunities for students to learn about the importance of Brown and engage with ongoing efforts to combat segregation. “We teach these topics, like Brown v. Board and the Selma to Montgomery march, as historical matters, not as present-day influential issues that we need to be thinking about,” Byrne said. She also noted that data analysis, role play, and debates can get students to work together on the issues.
In addition, Byrne asserted that the participation of students in the continuing work toward an equitable, integrated society is critical to its success. Returning to Thurgood Marshall’s Liberty Award speech, she again quoted the justice: “The legal system can force open doors and sometimes even knock down walls. But it cannot build bridges. That job belongs to you and me.”
“While the legal system can enforce laws, dismantle discriminatory practices, and provide justice in specific cases, it alone cannot create understanding, cooperation, and harmony among people. It cannot address the underlying social and personal dynamics that contribute to division and conflict,” Byrne concluded, suggesting that it falls upon educators and policymakers to pursue the perfection of Brown’s promise.
“It is about calling upon individuals and communities, especially our educators and librarians, to be rather fearless in the work of fostering relationships, understanding, and community,” she said. “Building bridges between different groups of people requires personal effort, sustained effort, empathy, dialogue, and collaboration. These are the types of things that we’re trying to instill in our public school students. These all go beyond the legal mandates and strike directly at what is at the heart of the work that we do in any classroom, in any library, and, especially, what is needed in our curriculum.”
