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Tuesday, August 16, 2016

I hate racial segregation. It’s in my DNA. | Fred Klonsky

I hate racial segregation. It’s in my DNA. | Fred Klonsky:

I hate racial segregation. It’s in my DNA



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Back in 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled that when it came to race in America, separate but equal was the law of the land.
Apartheid was legal in this country until the Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in 1954.
The named plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education was Oliver Brown.
Brown’s daughter Linda was in third grade at the time. She had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to her segregated black school one mile away. Linda Brown’s daughter was a white school. It was seven blocks from her home.
Linda Brown:
… well. like I say, we lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal and they left me out … to sit outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn’t understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.
Former Arne Duncan advisor and now Eli Broad funded ed reformer Peter Cunningham complain that the fight against desegregation is too hard and too costly. Better to return to accept the notion of separate but equal. More than accept it, they suggest it as a policy.


Peter Cunningham’s latest apologia for school segregation, in U.S. News & World Report, is basically a defense of current reform policies that have been shown to re-segregate schools. It represents more than just the opinion of a lone education gadfly. Cunningham is paid millions to speak for some of the most powerful and wealthiest 
I hate racial segregation. It’s in my DNA. | Fred Klonsky: