Students Mark 50 Years of School Desegregation

At Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, students reenacted events that led to the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling half a century ago and heard firsthand about the difficulties faced by black students who integrated white Southern schools.

At nearby Manual Arts High, students wearing “solidarity” armbands -- emblazoned with black and brown fists -- staged their own commemoration by confronting the principal over the need for more college prep classes.

Fifty years to the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declared intentionally segregated schools “inherently unequal,” a new generation of students marked the occasion Monday by plumbing the ruling’s lessons and agitating for more change.

During the reenactment in Dorsey High’s mock courtroom, senior Porsha Jeffers portrayed a woman who wanted to integrate her local schools in Delaware but found little support, even among her African American community. And so she turned to Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP attorney who argued for integration in the Brown case and later became a Supreme Court justice.

The scene drove the point home for Porsha, 17, whose grandmother has privately shared her experiences about growing up in segregated Jackson, Miss.

“It shed a whole different light on it ... to actually be a part of it,” Porsha said. “It made me more appreciative of the education I am getting now. It wasn’t always a right to go to the school you want.”

The students from Dorsey High’s law and public service magnet program also sat through a panel discussion on the Brown decision and its legacy. Federal Magistrate Judge Jeffrey W. Johnson recalled how he and his sisters were “attacked and abused” when they attended “white” schools in South Carolina in the 1960s.

“You have to work for justice, and you have to work for equality and be willing to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” Johnson told the students at the high school where enrollment is 99% black and Latino.

The unanimous Brown decision on May 17, 1954, set off half a century of efforts to desegregate the nation’s public schools, primarily through mandatory busing programs. Those efforts faltered, however, amid post-Brown legal decisions that made it easier for the courts to release school districts from desegregation orders.

In California, voter backlash to busing and large-scale Latino immigration also contributed to growing school segregation, producing some of the most racially isolated campuses in the country.

Aware of segregation at their school and concerned about a shortage of resources, students at Manual Arts High held a protest Monday over one of their priorities: college prep classes.

About 100 students filed into a large classroom with news reporters in tow as school officials watched.

The students asked Principal Edward Robillard to sign a resolution to support efforts to provide more classes required by the University of California and the California State University systems.

A bill now in the Legislature would require all schools to advise students of their right to take those so-called A-G required courses.

“By being denied access to college prep classes, our educational system is denying equal access to education,” said Tamara Jara, 14, a ninth-grader at the school where, like Dorsey, 99% of students are African American or Latino.

Robillard told the crowd that all Manual Arts students already have access to such classes but that many have trouble passing, particularly algebra and foreign language courses. Robillard said many students arrive at Manual Arts unprepared for a college prep curriculum. In addition, more than a third of the school’s 4,000 students are still learning English, he said.

“I’m delighted to sign this resolution and make progress on these issues and make Manual Arts a great high school,” Robillard said.

The protest organizers, from the South Los Angeles group Community Coalition, held similar events at four other area high schools.

Other groups around the state marked the Brown anniversary in various ways.

In San Diego, San Jose and other cities, students, parents and community leaders staged mock trials, alleging that the state has failed to provide minority and poor students with enough qualified teachers and other resources.

The allegations are contained in a lawsuit brought against the state by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

In Los Angeles, about 70 children and parents marched Monday evening in the Wilshire district from the Ambassador Hotel -- where Los Angeles schools officials want to build a new high school -- to an immigrant community center about half a mile away. Some carried signs that read, “Quality Schools 4 Us 2.”

“We need to remember and get back on the bandwagon and realize the fight is not over,” said Kenneth Hill, whose son attends a middle school near the Crenshaw district. “They are not preparing our children because of their low expectations.”

The legacy of the Brown case also is finding its way into classrooms. It is the subject of a new online curriculum produced by the Anti-Defamation League.

The free six-part curriculum -- titled “Looking Back ... Reaching Forward: Exploring the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education 50 Years Later” -- examines desegregation through history, politics, art, law and social studies.

“We don’t view the anniversary as a time for celebration. It’s a moment that should be used as a teaching opportunity,” said Amanda Susskind, the ADL’s regional director in Los Angeles.

“In some ways, the experiment failed. The intention of reversing the separate but equal educational facilities has not been achieved.”

The curriculum was distributed recently to secondary teachers across the country, including 700 in Southern California. It is available at

adl.org/ education/brown_2004/.