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It started out with one child, but the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education ended up affecting millions of schoolchildren and changed the entire face of public education.
Today, the University will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision that has been heralded as the most important of the last century at the University's convocation. The event will take place in the EMU Ballroom and will be followed by a forum titled "Unfinished Legacy: Brown v. Board of Education at Fifty" in Room 175, Knight Law Center. "We are going to examine its impact and what yet remains to be done," Margaret Hallock, director of the University's Wayne Morse Center of Law and Politics, said.
The case began with an elementary school girl, Linda Brown, who had to walk farther to get to her black elementary school even though the white elementary school was just seven blocks away. When her father tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, she was denied admission because she was black, so he appealed to the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for help. The NAACP took the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ultimately decided that the precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed public facilities to be segregated if they were "equal," was unconstitutional because separate facilities are inherently unequal. The decision forced schools all over the country to desegregate and open their doors to children of all races.
Though the decision is most often associated with schoolchildren, it had direct legal implications for public institutions of higher education as well. Brown v. Board of Education expert Raymond T. Diamond, who is the keynote speaker at the convocation, said there were at least 17 states that mandated racial segregation in institutions of higher education before the Brown case. They too were required to allow people of all colors to apply to their institutions. However, he added that the goal of desegregating public education has not been reached.
"Education in this country is not by and large desegregated at the elementary and secondary level," said Diamond, who is also a research professor of law at Tulane University.
Hallock said much of this segregation occurs because "living patterns have become segregated."
Some have similar criticisms of institutions of higher education. Freshman Jontae Grace said he didn't feel the goals of Brown had been reached at the University.
"I feel that we're progressing but that we have a long way to go," he said. "We need more students of color."
"The legal equality is intact, but the social equality hasn't progressed as much as people would have thought," said University philosophy professor Naomi Zack, who will participate in the panel discussion today. "One remedy for that is affirmative action." Affirmative action has been an issue of controversy, especially with the recent Supreme Court cases involving the University of Michigan.
"(Affirmative action) tries to address institutional equality, which is the fact that people are not equally prepared (for college)," Zack said.
Freshman Josue Pena said the issue of affirmative action is a difficult one. "It has a lot of good points, but some people think it's unfair," he said. Zack said the fairness of standardized tests used in college admissions has also come under fire, with many claiming the tests are biased against students outside the mainstream, white, middle-class culture.
"We've heard for years that the tests are biased," she said.
She added that one study found that students of color actually did better than white students on difficult SAT questions because they did not contain words from the white mainstream lexicon.
"(Students of color) do worse on the easy questions because the prevailing words on the easy questions are going to come out of the mainstream white society," she said.
While part of the event will examine the shortfalls of the Brown decision, it will also celebrate the great strides that were made in public education because of the decision.
Diamond said the landmark decision ultimately, "disestablished a system of racial caste in the country."
Pena said he feels the decision opened up huge opportunities for himself and other students of color.
"I think it's definitely the reason I'm in college now as a student of color," he said.
moriahbalingit@dailyemerald.com
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