Racial Segregation

An education, no matter what a child decides to do with it, is the most vital ingredient to growth. A proper education can result in an increase of knowledge, success, and confidence; it builds personality, improves a child’s social skills and most importantly, it prepares them for the future. Now despite this being essential to any young child’s life, there are too many children to count that are deprived of such the crucial, basic right, of a proper education. The reason for this is the racial segregation that still exists in America today. Many tend to falsely assume that such a thing ended during the Civil Rights Movement and these few would be incorrect because segregation in education is very much alive and increasingly becoming worse

Board was initially met with a lot of refusals, mainly from narrow-minded white groups considered to be part of something called Massive Resistance. This was a term coined by Virginian senator Harry F. Byrd in 1954 and its purpose was to thwart off or against any efforts to desegregate schools; there was even a group of laws that passed that did such a thing in 56’. To combat this, there were several court orders enacted that required schools, by law, to desegregate. Among these orders, were cases such as Green v. County School Board and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. Cases such as these implicated busing plans in which minority students were transported to largely white schools and white students to mostly minority schools. Now one would think with such efforts, segregation could be long gone today, but this is far from the truth because in the 80s and 90s, cases such as these faded into obscurity. One of the main reasons being that the Supreme Court concluded that these systems were discriminatory to white students and now because the orders are unfortunately expired, school districts are not held accountable for the lack of less segregated

An education is one of the most vital aspects of a child’s upbringing. The desegregation of schools has not only proved to universally better the lives of many, but there is a significant societal value to diversity and inclusion. Yet, it is unjust to think that our country should be changing for both races; our country should change on the sole negative consequences of those of color. Director of the Civil Rights Project Gary Orfield sums it up best. Using clear, concise sentence formatting and strong, dignifying language, Orfield states that “it is time to stop celebrating a version of history that ignores our last quarter century of retreat and begin to make new history by finding ways to apply the vision of Brown in a transformed, multiracial society in another century” (Epperly, Jessica). There needs to be more forces of change, working to create a transformed multiracial society, unlike the one we live in