Brown v. Board of Education Never Fully Implemented - Whites Resist Going to School, Living with Blacks
Sunday, March 20, 2005 at 12:56PM
TheSpook
In
the 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial
segregation in public schools, the nation has yet to fully implement
the U.S. Supreme Court decision, said a leading civil rights attorney.
Charles Ogletree Jr. addressed a luncheon meeting Tuesday at Duke
University of the Harvard Club of the Triangle and Harvard Law School
Association. About 30 people heard Ogletree discuss the Supreme Court
and his recent book "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First
Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education." Ogletree is a Harvard Law
School professor. He represented Anita Hill in her allegations of
sexual harassment in 1991 against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas and is lead counsel in a lawsuit seeking reparations for the
1921 Tulsa, Okla., race riots. Although the Brown decision, whose 50th
anniversary was observed last year, is often thought of as decisive and
singular, it was one of several legal challenges to public-school
segregation, Ogletree said. Perhaps more significantly, it was really
two cases, with the second one providing the means of integration. But
its opinion also contained the phrase of his book's title, which in
legal parlance meant that schools could take their time about
integration, in deference to those who would resist it indefinitely.
"That's exactly what happened," Ogletree said. The resistance hasn't
ended, he added "In some sense, 50 years after Brown, we're seeing the
same problems," he said. They include "white flight," de facto
segregation of schools by shifting attendance patterns. [more]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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