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3/9/2004 - By JOHN WHITTAKER
The fight to desegregate America's schools should continue despite continued debate over the historical legacy of the court case that outlawed segregation, according to Brown University professor James Patterson.
Patterson spoke to more than 175 people at the Robert H. Jackson Center during a speech Monday, including a large group of teachers attending as part of a Teaching American History Grant in-service day.
A noted scholar focusing on the famous U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Patterson said more integration of schools is a worthy goal even though Brown v. Board didn't have the effect desired by several civil rights activists, including Linda Brown Thompson, one of the two sisters for whom the case was argued.
''I think that greater racial integration of the nation's schools is a worthy goal,'' Patterson said. ''To tolerate further resegregation, which has been happening in public education, is to risk the greater resegregation of society at large and therefore to heighten the racial isolation and to deny equal opportunity.''
Patterson said it is impossible to claim that Brown v. Board of Education had no impact on the desegregation of schools despite the arguments of its detractors. The decision's early impact was championed by several civil rights leaders and it did lead, in part, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
''I think there are many causes out there that made the civil rights movement possible,'' Patterson said. ''The case was bold, radical, historic. It was necessary to the civil rights movement, but it was not sufficient to what was to me a large movement. The case did not, at least immediately, do that.''
What Brown v. Board didn't do was transform northern whites into civil rights fighters. Instead, there was no push for true equality until the mid-1960s as the country's leaders opted instead to change the system slowly - a stance seen by the lack of pressure by presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy as well as state Supreme Court justices. Blacks also weren't inspired, according to Patterson.
The only guidance
given to southern schools about desegregation came in 1955 when the Supreme
Court issued its decision in a second Brown v. Board of Education case with
its advice to proceed with ''all deliberate speed.''
''The decision, while supported at the time by a small majority of 55 or 60
percent of northern whites and a very small percentage of southern whites,
didn't transform these northern whites into forcible champions of desegregation,''
Patterson said. ''Until the 1960s, when militant civil rights activism and
television dramatically altered northern whites, most northerners cautioned
for cautious, incremental change.''
Patterson said the result is criticism of the court for not being more specific and of political leaders for not giving more force to the school desegregation movement. The lack of pressure from leaders of the time make it difficult to gauge the Brown decision's impact on the civil rights movement while the Supreme Court accepted only two school desegregation cases from 1954 to 1968.
The Brown decision also has not had a great impact on the actual desegregation of all schools, Patterson said, as reading levels and test scores in predominantly black schools remained less than those in predominantly white schools. Black parents then began moving to suburbs so that their children can attend schools where test scores are higher, leading to a defacto segregation of schools.
More lawsuits - which is the strategy pursued by then NAACP lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall - likely won't bring about substantial change. Instead, Patterson said, there needs to be more research into the gaps and actions taken to narrow them. The key to change is in increasing grassroots activism.
''A final
thought about strategies to promote racial justice,'' Patterson said. ''The
complicated history of Brown since 1954 suggests to me, and others, that the
key to advances in race relations has been the existence of powerful social
and political pressure. What you need to make any significant social change
is a movement, in this case a grassroots, broad-based civil rights movement.''