JBB's DRP for 3/29/23: Linda Carol Brown

You might have heard of the Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Board of Education, that brought about the end of racial segregation in public schools, but have you heard the story of the elementary school girl named in the case? How have things gotten better and how have things stay the same? Why do you think education is so important?

Source: Linda Brown: The Schoolgirl who changed Ameria By Untold History, https://youtu.be/VQTMNGo3_Cw

Because my response to today’s prompt is so long, I decide to include it in the post instead of adding as a comment after the post. Please feel free to respond to this post in the comments.

It’s easy for some to look around and assume that whatever good or bad that they experience is the way it’s always been and that things never change. Maybe they feel that way because they think it protects them from disappointment when they feel like they just can’t get a break. I can understand that frustration. But I grew up hearing that you can be anything you want to be if you just try harder. Reality is somewhere in between.

But the story of Linda Carol Brown is about how something that “always was” got questioned by the standards of our constitution and those things that “always was” didn’t pass the test. One hundred and twenty years earlier it was illegal to teach a Black person to read ¹ and while that had superficially changed, law-makers had crafted a means to keep full education from former slaves and their families. Brown v. Board of Education knocked down one of the obstacles to full education and mandated equal access to the same schools and facilities available to any local child.

In the 69-years since the decision, again things on the surface changed in that school districts were forced to make sure that all students, regardless of race, had equal access to the same schools. But as before, by controlling who could live in which neighborhoods, which dictates the funding local schools receive, American public school education has remained far from equal , often between schools within the same school district.

Personally, education was the key to me experiencing a life that my grandfathers or my father could never have imagined. Both of them provided a stable home in good neighborhoods (as far as they were permitted before Brown v. BOE). This made it so that my four siblings and I got through public school without incident and enable all of us to go to college and earn degrees. Four of us earned credentials and/or degrees beyond a bachelors degree. For my grandfathers or dad, going to college wasn’t even part of their expectations. But the thing to remember, something that I learned as I was working on my masters degree: “It’s all about the journey and not the destination.” The idea is that getting an education isn’t about a piece of paper, but an experience that expands ones understanding of the world, ones opportunity to work with and learn from people you would never have worked with, and experiment or test everything that you grew up believing. But none of this happens without Linda Brown standing up against laws that put obstacles in the way of people of color having the same access to quality education that everyone would want for their own children. And work is clearly not done yet.