Segregation: A nation still stained Milwaukee Journal ; Milwaukee, Wis. [Milwaukee, Wis].

Segregation: A nation still stained

Milwaukee Journal

; Milwaukee, Wis. [Milwaukee, Wis]. 18 May 1994: 22.  

IT MAY have been the US Supreme Court’s finest hour. Forty years ago this week that court smashed the legal foundation on which rested walls of racial segregation. The case in hand, Brown vs. Board of Education, outlawed the policy of keeping the races apart in public schools. But the ruling had a domino effect, bringing down government-sanctioned segregation elsewhere: on beaches and buses, at lunch counters and sporting events, in movie houses and hospitals.

Yet, 40 years later the United States remains highly segregated a testimony to the intractability of race, and racism, in American society. As in a surreal movie, walls of segregation came tumbling down, only to reveal new walls. A big lesson to be learned 40 years after Brown is that an egalitarian America will require still more struggle.

Part of the problem, ironically, has been the Supreme Court, which not always lifts this nation to its ideals. In fact, the court can do the opposite: lower the nation to the racial gutter, as the court did in 1896, in Plessy vs. Ferguson, the ruling that the Brown decision undid.

Anyway, the high court blunted the egalitarian movement prompted by Brown with two subsequent decisions. Overturning a lower judge in 1973, the court ruled that rich school districts need not share the wealth with poor districts, despite the 14th Amendment, which requires states to give citizens equal protection of the law. The next year the high court made it difficult for a city to sue End of 1st Leg suburbs over school segregation.

The latter ruling helped make integration more and more academic. In many city districts white students became too few to spread around to all schools. Thus, today, segregation often manifests itself through the presence of black city schools and white suburban schools. What’s more, the 1973 ruling helps ensure that the two systems remain unequal.

But you think segregation is bad in the schools? Check out our neighborhoods; segregation there is worse, the 1968 Open Housing Law notwithstanding. Many landlords and real estate agencies flout the law, as field tests repeatedly have shown.

Integration has the virtue of acquainting people from different cultures with one another, and it thereby broadens minds and promotes tolerance. But there’s a compelling practical reason to break up the residential apartheid that is most of America. Segregation is right now being used to isolate African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, other minority groups in order to discriminate against them for instance, by keeping jobs out of minority neighborhoods. This policy is helping to fuel all manner of social mayhem and racial divisiveness which integration should ease.

But 40 years after Brown the integration movement is dead in the water, and the Supreme Court no longer seems to give a hoot. The nation must wake up and reverse its continued, dangerous drift into two societies separate and unequal.

Word count: 480

Copyright Journal Sentinel Inc. May 18, 1994

Works Cited

“Segregation: A Nation Still Stained.” Milwaukee Journal, May 18, 1994, pp. 22. ProQuest, https://0-search-proquest-com.librus.hccs.edu/newspapers/segregation-nation-still-stained/docview/333665170/se-2.