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Daniel Keel knew he was getting a good education when he was a pupil at Grahamwood Primary School and White Station High School in the 1980s and 1990s.
What he didn't know was whether most of the black students at the school were receiving the same thing.
“I was in the choice program at those schools, but it was a school within a school, which means it existed alongside the traditional program,” he said, now at the University of Memphis. said Keel, a professor of constitutional law.
“Grahamwood and White Station were very diverse compared to many schools in Memphis at the time, but my classroom was not. My classroom was 80% to 90% white students. That means the other classes are also 80% to 90% black.”
That experience, and many others, has led Keel to explore why classrooms are the way they are, the history behind them, and a system that continues to grapple with how to provide a quality education to all students. Now I have a mission.
This mission led him to attend Harvard Law School, a private law firm in Boston, and a Fulbright scholarship to become a professor at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. His academic research focuses on race and education, which led to the production of his 2011 documentary “Memphis 13.” This documentary chronicles the stories of the first black students to enroll in an all-white public elementary school in Memphis in 1961.
That was seven years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declared forced school segregation unconstitutional.
This month marks the 70th anniversary of that decision. To commemorate this milestone, Chalkbeat spoke to Keel about how this ruling influenced his interest in educational equity, the current state of school desegregation, and new laws and interpretations of racial justice. talked about how they are trying to undermine it.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did the Brown decision influence your life and your decision to pursue constitutional law?
By the time I graduated from college and entered law school, I had become a huge admirer of Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Defense Fund, and the idea that lawyers would force the country to fight injustice. So that idea brought me to law school.
When I was in law school, it was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, so there were some interesting classes that I was able to take. We studied Little Rock, Charlotte, Detroit…. I knew I had a connection to Memphis, and I knew from my own experience that there was no educational justice in Memphis.
At that point, I started looking more closely at Memphis schools as part of a curiosity project about why my schools look the way they do.
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Describe what happened in the seven years between 1954, when Brown outlawed legal segregation, and 1961, when the first black children enrolled in all-white elementary schools in Memphis.
For the first few years, not only in Tennessee, there was a feeling (in Southern states) that there was no need to follow the ruling. Later, the (Tennessee) legislature desegregated school assignments with freedom of choice (a plan in which schools still had the discretion to deny black students' requests to enroll in all-white schools). However, local schools were still allowed to maintain racial segregation.
This spurred the North Cross v. Memphis City Schools case in Memphis in 1960, which led to black students being allowed to attend white elementary schools for the first time in 1961. This process accelerated after courts ordered increased desegregation efforts in the late 1960s.
Yet, in the 1970s, most students still operated in segregated settings.
How do students respond to a lesson about school segregation and how it was the law of the land before Brown?
they are surprised. My students have a variety of knowledge about the story, so I'm certainly not surprised that some of them are familiar with the story and know what happens next, but when the Supreme Court decided, Some students think. , that's all, and suddenly racism is gone.
Some of my students have to forget a lot of things before they can learn. In a particular course that I teach called Education and Civil Rights, I use Brown's story and story as a case study to highlight the challenges to educational justice that have occurred in the United States, whether based on poverty or immigration status. Set type of promotion. , disability, or gender. This is a touchstone case that students will work on systematically while having fun.
Recently, the Tennessee General Assembly tried to pass a voucher law that would allow anyone, regardless of income, to pay for private school for their children with public funds. What do you think about this universal voucher bill? Governor Bill Lee has vowed to reintroduce it next year – will segregation in schools get worse?
It's hard to talk about vouchers because the theory behind them is an appealing one: giving all students a chance regardless of their circumstances. But there are risks in eliminating schools that are likely to serve large numbers of disadvantaged students, particularly in Shelby County and the broader state.
But I think about history and the way things recur in different forms. In the 1950s, one of Virginia's first responses to Brown, and one of the ways it resisted court orders, was to close down its school system. And they can no longer receive public education. That seemed horribly short-sighted, but even worse was offering vouchers to students who wanted to attend private schools. But, of course, private schools were openly discriminatory and exclusive, so vouchers in that case were a mechanism to maintain segregation.
Vouchers, in their 21st century form, are not exactly such things, but they do align with the idea that education is personalized, not us, people, or communities, who are responsible for it. I am. Giving individuals control over these things creates an uneven playing field. Because the way these laws are passed and the way vouchers are typically issued doesn't mean that every school is required to accept them. This is an issue of access, as students and families often pay for their own transportation, and events that occur inside the school after they have been to school can be hateful, hurtful, and stigmatizing. , the voucher program has no support for that.
I think the theory behind vouchers is an attractive one. It kind of draws me to work that promotes educational equity more broadly, but I've never really achieved that goal.
What other developments do you think could undermine Brown's promise?
If you look at the context in which we educate, it is not difficult to find disparities similar to those of 70 years ago. Although they are not the same in that they are not specifically required by law, such differences are easy to spot and discourage.
My field of expertise focuses specifically on how the U.S. Supreme Court turned the Brown decision into a decision about colorblindness and government race neutrality rather than a decision about redressing historical injustices. I feel like neutrality couldn't accomplish that in 1955, and I don't think it's likely that neutrality can accomplish that today either.
This legislation moves in a direction that makes it a little harder to see where we can drive the kind of education investments that are needed today to create equal educational opportunities. That's one thing. But I think part of the reason the disparity still exists is a widespread lack of will among all of us to do something.
It is easy to say that equal opportunity should exist, but it is difficult to translate that into actions, policies and results. It's not impossible, but one thing I think is important is to push this every day and lift up the teachers, families, community groups and advocates who are successful.
So how should we view the Brown decision through today's lens?
The way most people want to talk about Brown is one of missed opportunities, and I think that makes sense. However, in our society he has significantly improved his educational attainment since 1954.
When you look at the numbers for high school graduation, college admissions, and employment, achievements that were unthinkable in the black community are now commonplace. Much progress has been made.
I try not to lose sight of the fact that a lot has changed since 1954 and that a lot of people are still working on it.
Director Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee's education coverage.please contact her tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education.