As the decades have rolled by, most people rarely remember one of the most controversial decisions made by the Supreme Court, “Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” in 1954 that state sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This decision is still reverberating through our society today under different code words.
Few people are alive to remember how segregation worked in the South with separate eating places, waiting rooms, water fountains and riding on public transportations. Arzo Burnim used to tell the story of riding the bus from Nacogdoches to Prairie View College where there was no room left in the black people section and rather than be allowed a vacant seat in the white section, he had to stand up the whole way. Black schools in the South were underfunded with poor facilities and out of date textbooks. Since most black people could not vote, there was nothing they could do to rectify the situation and the white power structure representing propertied individuals did not want to pay taxes to educate nonwhite kids.
The Brown decision outraged the South and they refused to comply with several states closing their public schools and letting white children go to private schools. In Virginia black children went three years without any education. If you sit quietly and think about Texas voucher pro-gram, where taxpayers will subsidize private schools, you will get a faint echo of the effects of the long ago Supreme Court decision of 1954.
