By Joe C. Hopkins

May 17, 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education decision that was the alleged end of separate but equal policies in American schools and impliedly elsewhere in this Country.

I have basically ignored the great celebrations of Brown vs. Board of Education on this 50th anniversary because there doesn’t seem to be anything much to celebrate. In a nutshell the schools were integrated and a number of whites started a system of all-white private schools to avoid their white kids having to attend school with Black kids. Then the white administrations of the newly integrated schools segregated the classes by race, i.e., the white kids getting the best of the educational resources, classes and teachers and lowered expectations of Black kids, which promoted the self fulfilling prophecy of whites that integration won’t work. This set the stage for what we have today, thus, the schools are worse than they were 50 years ago.

There was an old joke that says "some people go under water as a dry devil and come up a wet devil." The water did nothing to change the soul. The same rang true for white racists who had maintained a racist system of segregated schools. Brown vs. Board of Education did nothing to change their hearts or souls. One day they were openly segregated racists, and the day after Brown vs. Board of Education, they were, theoretically, integrated racists, and they spent their days and nights trying to figure ways to maintain the basis of racism and white superiority in America. Today that work has developed things like Vouchers to help maintain segregated schools at the expense of public schools.

The purpose of Brown vs Board of Education was very simple. Black America knew that the best educational resources were allocated and placed in the schools where the white kids were. To get these resources for Black kids we needed to get the Black kids into those better equipped schools.

Today nothing has changed. The Pasadena Unified School District is dedicated to making things better so the white children will return and the District will get more money for their attendance. Instead, if they were dedicated to better education for all kids they would have the best schools in the nation, and then black parents would join with them in developing better schools in the neighborhoods. But a better education system is not here yet and the no child left behind program of George Bush and Rod Paige won’t get us there.

On Saturday May 15, 2004 I found myself glued to the Television watching Tavis Smiley on C-Span hosting a room full of great, accomplished people discussing Brown vs. Board of Education and where we are today. I was first of all pleased to see Black folks from around the country saying what I and others who have analyzed the present situation come to some of the same conclusions and some of the same proposed remedies. It was clear that Black America must first return to the models that are being used by other races to keep their kids on track, such as a system of Saturday Schools and day camps to make sure that we educate them in who they are and other things they don’t learn in the Public Schools. The fact that the Black Male Forum is working on the same idea tells me that we are not only on the right track but that this is the beginning of a new movement that will make the next anniversary of Brown significant.

One of the speakers on the Tavis panel made the observation that "we as a people have always risen to the occasion to solve our problems when we finally commit to do something about it." Quoting A Philip Randolph, Wade Henderson said, "There are no free seats. You get what you can take and you keep what you can hold." Black America fought to get out of slavery and reduce the effects of discrimination, but we can’t forget that there is a fight to hold onto it.

America’s conservatives are fighting to take all the advances of Black America away by doing away with Affirmative Action, by trying to write laws and promote color blindness which they say will solve the problem by ignoring it. They also want to solve the problem of race by taking away all programs that help people survive, then when these people commit crimes, lock them up.

What the conservatives are not thinking about is, as one person on Tavis’ panel said, in effect, that, there is a ticking time bomb in America greater than Al Quaida and it is the ticking time bomb of when the millions of Black and Brown kids, they are locking up and throwing away the key, are released from our prisons. With no jobs, no education, no skills what will they do?

The Tavis panel was ended by a statement from a Black Federal Judge who had worked with Thurgood Marshal in the Civil Rights days who said, "When we unite for a righteous purpose and work hard, we will win because we all know that the race is not won by the swift, it is not won by the strong, but it is won by those who hold on and endure till the end."