On May 10, 2019, the Center for Education & Civil Rights and the Africana Research Center at Penn State hosted Brown@65, a national conference for the 65th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. An earlier AJE Forum post summarized the panel presentations from the day. This post, meanwhile, focuses on the keynote, delivered by New York
In 1935, in the Journal of Negro Education, WEB DuBois posed the question: Does the Negro need separate schools? His answer foreshadowed the aftermath of forced desegregation when he explained: “They are needed just so far as they are necessary for the proper education of the Negro race. The proper education of any people includes sympathetic touch between teacher
For those advocating for desegregation in 2019, I suggest returning to a civil rights lawyer’s interest in causation. These attorneys insisted on speaking of desegregation not only in terms of individual and collective racism, but in terms of nameable, consequential, enduring policy choices. If we were to do so today, I believe, it would be
In June 2019, an exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden during the first round of Democratic primary debates touched off renewed conversation about busing and school desegregation, and leading Democratic presidential candidates were asked about their positions on school segregation. As K-12 integration, including the past and possibly future federal role to further school
In the 2019 Democratic Primary debates, school integration resurfaced in the national policy discussion, after a long period of absence. The short exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at the June 27thdebate sparked extensive media attention and analysis in the weeks that followed. At the second round of debates on July 31st, moderators reprised the skirmish between
Sixty-five years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the school integration movement is at an inflection point, defined in mathematics as the place on a curve where it begins to change shape, often from a low point to a high point. Similarly, the movement for school diversity is caught between a contemporary low
