A CONTINUING AMERICAN DILEMMA

By Anne C. Lewis

Illustration © 2003 by Mario Noche

FOR MOST Americans, December 7 is a date that serves as a reminder of the beginning of a horrific conflict that thrust us forever onto the world stage. World War II changed our economy, our society, and what we thought of ourselves and of our values.

Few Americans, however, realize that December 7 -- especially this year -- needs to be remembered for an event that shook up society as much as, if not more than, the war. On that day 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court began three days of final hearings on Brown v. Board of Education. The arguments presented to the Court provided the last chance for the stalwarts of segregation and the proponents of racial equality to state their legal cases.

The chamber of the High Court filled with emotion. Making his last appearance before the Court, 80-year-old John Davis of South Carolina pondered the effect on children if classrooms in Clarendon County, S.C., were predominantly of "colored" children. "Would they be any more serene?" he asked. He ended with tears on his cheeks.

Thurgood Marshall, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, argued arcane legal questions. (He once told a colleague wearily that "sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man's soul.") His last words to the justices, whom he would later join as the first black Supreme Court justice, dispensed with legalese and addressed Davis' point. "I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday," he said, "that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart. . . . Those same kids in . . . South Carolina . . . play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, [but] they have to be separated in school." The segregation laws were nothing but "black codes," Marshall said. The only way the court could uphold them would be to declare that "Negroes are inferior to all other human beings."

For Chief Justice Earl Warren, sitting on the Supreme Court just a few days after his appointment, the momentous debate was followed by months of careful negotiations. During that time, the majority opinion, obvious at the regular Saturday morning session held after the hearings closed, was shaped into a unanimous decision, delivered on May 17 of the following year.

The memos the justices wrote to one another and to clarify their own thinking reveal a general consensus that knowledge and values had changed since the doctrine of separate but equal was established in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The justices were also well aware of potentially violent reactions to a Supreme Court decision that would end segregation. Neither the North nor the South had adapted its racial practices to reflect the values professed since the Civil War, Justice Robert Jackson wrote in a memo. "The race problem," he argued, "would be quickly solved if some way could be found to make us all live up to our hypocrisies."

The country has been dealing with its hypocrisies on the race issue for the last 50 years. It has been wracked by further lawsuits, dumbed-down curricula, desegregation plans often directed by federally appointed masters, multicultural initiatives, resegregation, compensatory education, and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, this new law is the latest attempt to erase the effects of prejudice and discrimination from the education system, though some of its supporters would never describe it as such. They seem willing to use the law for other purposes more likely to fracture the public school system than to give it a high moral purpose.

Despite all this attention, much of the last five decades has been spent avoiding the issue of race in public education. We don't even want to talk about it, contends Mica Pollock of Harvard University. In a forthcoming book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School (Princeton University Press), she notes that educators assume that members of racial groups achieve differently but often suppress that idea when they try to explain the differences.

One group of school districts is finally refusing to pretend that racism is not a lingering issue in the schools. Since it began more than five years ago, the participants in the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN; www.msanetwork.org), now numbering 22 districts, have been saying that race must be on the table in their work. Nearly two years of discussions and reflections were required, however, for the network's Research Practitioner Council, composed of teacher and central office representatives from each district, to produce a statement on the relationship between race and achievement. Adopted by the MSAN governing board last summer, the statement lists core beliefs, backed by research.

Among the core beliefs of MSAN are the following:

• Because achievement is not innately determined, children will achieve when they are effectively taught how to learn.
• All children come to school with a variety of individual strengths; our responsibility as educators is to discover and build upon these strengths.
• Schools that concentrate on how their practices affect students will be more productive than those that blame students, families, or poverty for underachievement.
• Each individual staff member must examine his or her beliefs and change practices to counteract the contemporary and historical impacts of racism and discrimination.
• Schools should be considered excellent only when students of all racial and ethnic groups are achieving at high levels.

The MSAN member districts are using the statement of core beliefs to encourage in each of them a process of discussion, reflection, and distillation of research that is ultimately directed at raising teachers' expectations for their students and for themselves. It is a process that takes time. One member of the Research Practitioner Council said, "We needed to get to the point where we trusted each other."

If a network of districts dedicated to eliminating race as a determining factor in student achievement needs lots of time and honest discussion to come to a consensus, then the justices of the Warren Court seem to have been more optimistic than realistic about what it would take to end segregation throughout the nation. On the one hand, Americans think, talk, and act under the influence of high national morals. On the other hand, as the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal said many years before the Brown decision, many forces, including "group prejudice against particular types of persons or types of people . . . dominate [their] outlook." We are still living through this American dilemma.

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