What Is Segregation?

The issue of segregation has been a prominent topic bringing up pre-existence discourse such as the case of Brown v. Board of Education where the Supreme Court declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional 60 years ago. Brown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Alex McBride, 2016) This landmark marked the end of separate but equal in all schools where children could be integrated as a whole. Although the topic of segregation is not as exposed in daily conversation it is highly prevalent within the U.S. public educational
. Since the trial of tears, the Civil War and the Holocaust, minority groups have been prosecuted for being “different”. These events have all contributed to the long path of suppression that has enable the existence of a culture in the United States in which superiority has been awarded to “white individuals”. Even if the civil rights of the minority groups being prosecuted have improved, as is the example of our current African American President being in office, racism continues to be a growing presence in our country. Whites are less likely to go to school with students of other races and most of the time it is because of their parents. The parents of most of the children today went to segregated schools or grew up learning from society the idea of racism so many times parents isolate their kids from other races. Also Nikole Hannah- Jones says that white students in this country, get the better teachers, the better textbooks, the better curriculum and up to today that is still the case, and we have not eliminated that kind of connection between resources and
(FRONTLINE, 2016) Integration was created to desegregate schools, and to bring students of different races together. By integration students had access to better schools and in a study by Rucker Johnson he found that for every year a black student attended an integrated school, their likelihood of graduating went up two percentage points. However, Mrs. Obama in a speech addressed that many districts are actually pulling back on efforts to integrate their schools and many communities have become less diverse. “And too often,” Mrs. Obama said, “those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color which too often lag behind.” Districts often have the vast power to keep integration alive but their lack in doing so has cause an arose in segregation where minorities are have become more segregated than ever as if the case of Brown V. Board of Education never