Civil Rights Movement and School Reform: Segregation and Equality

Introduction: Social Movements and Educational Reform

Social movements are an integral component of society. They are meant to bring about change in accepted norms or social configurations, and they represent a manifestation of collective behavior whose purpose is transformation — either personal or social. Educational reform is not a new concept; it dates back to the advent of public schools and has continued through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The ideal educational system is one where the child is seen as unique and the mission of the school is to allow each child's potential to come to fruition. The Civil Rights Movement and the school reform movement share a common concern: the issue of segregation and equal opportunity.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Legacy of Equality

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of tyranny, of which the people and government of the United States are guilty. He stated openly: "the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land" (King, "I Have a Dream").

King had a tendency to bring together moral principle, social facts, and their implications for society in general and the Black race in particular. He was able to combine the techniques of moral persuasion and documented social realities in a manner that lent itself to increasing both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of his cause. His cause was equality. Why, then, would Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities, claim that Martin Luther King's legacy has died in America's urban centers?

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King stated: "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirit" (quoted in Hollingsworth 17). This implied that reform is not a problem to the social order but rather a vital component in the process of human social evolution. King was not seeking special treatment for Black Americans, and he was well aware that many white people would view desegregation as discriminatory toward impoverished whites. His concerns were broader and not limited to a single group.

King explains: "It is the change in the racial climate on which all else depends. It is on the ground of individuality that blacks and whites can come together" (King, "I Have a Dream"). The revolution he advocated was a revolution in moral values — one that would include the peaceful resolution of inequality and other social ills, which he labeled "racism, materialism and militarism." His message was one of hope, forgiveness, and freedom: a better life was possible if people would lay down their prejudices, their misperceptions, and their old ways of seeing the world.

Segregation in Urban Schools: Kozol's Savage Inequalities

In an interview with The Christian Century, Kozol states: "The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King. In fact, the public schools today are every bit as segregated as they were in 1964. … There is a general sense that society no longer intends to bring black and Hispanic children into the mainstream of society" (Anonymous 541). The geographic isolation of low-income urban Black Americans from white-dominated neighborhoods has produced yet another dimension of the "victim mentality": a multiplicity of obvious discrepancies in the social and economic realities between Black and white communities.

Black Americans and other minorities have become both disadvantaged and disenfranchised through a lack of economic mobility that is simultaneously social and physical. This is especially visible in urban school systems, where segregation remains alive and well. In the urban schools Kozol visited, 95 to 99 percent of students were non-white. The reality of ghetto education as a permanent American condition appeared to be accepted without serious challenge. The nation, he contends, has turned its back — morally if not yet legally — on the legal precedent established by Brown v. Board of Education. When asked whether race was the decisive factor in the poor condition of his school, the principal of an elementary school in New York replied: "This would not happen to white children." A student in Camden declared: "So long as there are no white children in our school, we're going to be cheated. That's America. That's how it is."

At one point, Kozol asks a teacher whether education has returned to the ideas of a century ago, when "separate but equal" was the prevailing political phrase. She replies: "It is separate. That's for sure. … Would you want to tell the children it is equal?" Money, materials, and opportunity are the foundation of what Kozol proposes as the changes necessary to enable students living in poverty to receive an equal education. School boards and legislators believe that by offering "school of choice" to poor minorities they are providing equal opportunity. Kozol disputes this, arguing that such opportunity cannot genuinely exist when the informational and cultural prerequisites for meaningful choice are absent. He states: "School boards think that, if they offer the same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That is not true, of course, because the printed information won't be read, or certainly will not be scrutinized aggressively, by parents who can't read or who read very poorly" (62).

Among the many elements of change that King proposed was the Poor People's Campaign, described as "a contemporary social and economic Bill of Rights" that would ensure "full emancipation and equality of Negroes and the poor." He proposed that all people should have the opportunity for decent incomes, education, housing, and full employment. He articulated a concept of rights grounded in the principle of equality and insisted that Black Americans had been denied those rights for far too long.

Works Cited

Anonymous. "Falling Behind: An Interview with Jonathan Kozol." The Christian Century, May 2000, pp. 541–543.

Brown v. Board of Education. Supreme Court of the United States, 1954.

Hollingsworth, William G. "Y6B: The Real Millennial Threat." Sierra, Sept. 1999, pp. 16–17.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. "I Have a Dream." 28 August 1963.

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. HarperCollins, 1991.

Myers, Hector F., and Sylvie Taylor. "Family Contributions to Risk and Resilience in African-American Children." Journal of Comparative Family Studies, March 1998, pp. 215–230.

Robinson v. Cahill, 69 N.J. 449, 467, 355 A.2d 129 (1976).

Shanker, Albert. "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools." The New Leader, December 1991, pp. 6–9.