It’s really a remarkable life journey that touched on some key moments that were unique. Only about 10 percent of schools actually became desegregated. While I’m still reflecting on this myself, one thing I’ve misunderstood is that Supreme Court only says that laws that were made by the legislature were not in compliance with the Constitution. The Brown decision didn’t actually make any law but merely undid them. In particular, it was a decision not against all the “Jim Crow” South and desegregation at all. It was against the the 1859 state of Kansas constitution where the legislature had embedded the separate school idea into it. However, new constitutions and new laws need to be made to be come in compliance.
The nationalized law of compliance to desegregate the schools wasn’t passed until 1964 under Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act. That was passed by the national legislature, Congress and signed by the president. The integration it forced schools to be in compliance with was stopped in the late 1970s with an amendment finalized and passed as an amendment pushed through by Senator Helms of NC, a bigot and homophobe if there ever was one. However, decades later, in the 2000’s, studies found that in those schools the were integrated, like your school, students grades were not lowered, all were raised, and racial tensions over a lifetime were deemed to be lower in both ethnicities. It appears you a part of that “experiment” that stopped.
I sort of view Affirmative Action as a type of reparations, a mild attempt to right a profound wrong of the segregated school system, and the de facto segregated schooling set up by the 1934 FHA mortgage “give away” to the whites that massively expanded the middle class by giving cheap mortgages and unprecedented rates to white home buyers for the next 34 years, deliberately excluding black Americans by labelling them under federal law as “high risk”, preventing or disincentivizing banks if they took black American borrowers. Additionally, redlines also “prevented” whites getting loans from living in “high risk” redlined areas, or black areas of cities. This “double walled” system of separation—preventing banks for giving the “cheap” loans to black Americans and the redline drawn around an already black zoned area created in the 1890s -1930, where blacks “migrated” into, stopped whites from buying homes in “redlined” areas, which they most likely had no interest in and were the new stock of housing was not located anyway. In a sense, it reinforced housing choices already made in black zoned areas.
Affirmative Action was one on the few positive things done to try to ameliorate the white imposed legal barriers it created since Bacon’s Rebellion starting creating explicit law segregating blacks out of white male spheres of political power, or the areas of life that provided access to skills that would provide upward mobility to reach that power: freedom of movement need to assemble; freedom of education needed for literacy to make laws; freedom to marry the person one wanted, which meant for black men in particular marrying white women who had power and wealth to inherit (like Washington who married up as Martha owned the wealth and slaves); and freedom to engage in labor contracts or wage negotiations, to earn more wealth to earn economic power associated with saving money. All those areas previously allowed to be engage in, where black indentured servants could be come freed and buy land, which did happen, were not restricted in explicit laws. Those restrictions were kept in place for until a brief time after the Civil War when they were lifted in the South to give freed blacks access to the rights of engagement in those spheres, but then closed down again by laws, and lifted again after the Civil Rights bills, which again were fought against and closed down again.
We appear to still be in a time when those rights given are being clawed back. The 1980 amendment by Helms stopped school integration; the 2013 SCOTUS decision took back monitoring over the votes in southern states; Affirmative Action is eliminated to “stop” black Americans from entering the top schools through discouragement; Roe has put the government in control over women’s bodies, which affects black Americans disproportionately as well as latinos; and Public Accommodations was ruled against by conservatives, that was a key right Martin King pushed as it allowed access to publicly and private business segregation. Rights effecting black Americans are certainly under attack, and the results are now obvious, showing the fruits of the labor of white conservatives determined to prevent black Americans in particular from rights afforded to themselves.
Well, you’ve been a part of history and that stimulated my thoughts about these key times.