School desegregation: It’s not just a Mississippi problem

62 years after Brown vs. Board, the Supreme court has decided that perhaps outstanding consent decrees from the 70s should be enforced in Cleveland, MS.  I have a memoir, TEACHER, forthcoming this fall about the rural black public schools of the Delta , and so I already knew that the order was no victory.   National coverage has reduced the issue to a narrative about ‘backwards, still-segregated Mississippi’—as if issues of race and class and achievement don’t exist throughout the nation.

The Mississippi Delta does remain immensely segregated, and that those divisions manifest most obviously in the schools. In 1971, when the ruling came that Mississippi actually had to enforce Brown, church-associated private white Academies ensured integration didn’t occur.  Ten years ago, in the community near Cleveland where I taught, only black children attended the public elementary school.  About the town, blacks and whites mixed at businesses like Wal-mart and at banks and gas stations, but socially they remained worlds apart.  The white country club had no black members, and when I toured the facilities, I was startled to find that the black doorman, bartender, cleaning staff, groundscrew, and servers wore the starched uniforms of another era.  When I saw a girl named Talika’s mother wiping down tables, and she met my eyes and did not greet me, I knew that even if every white patron hadn’t been openly staring because of my Asian-American background, I could never join this club.  And when we did a writing assignment about nightmares, Talika’s dream was: 

“I sawed a mean white man with a knife, and he come in the night and stab me and my family and blood is everywhere and I scream but no-one does nothing to help.”

“Talika, do you actually know any white people?” I asked.

“Naw, Mr. Copperman,” she said.  “You the first not-black person I ever talked to in my life.  It just that I know how white people do!”

On her paper, she’d drawn a fanged ghoul, features blurred by over-application of white crayon; all about lay figures with x’s for eyes and open mouths, while over everything were great strokes of red crayon for blood. Lynching in adjacent counties was in the memory of her parents and grandparents.  There at the school, black children were fenced in with barbed wire, while at the Academy football field, hoops of razor wire kept them out.  I could not tell her she was wrong.

Yet in the ensuing decade I’ve spent teaching low-income, first-generation students of color beyond the Delta, I’ve realized that while the divisions in Mississippi are starker, the rest of the country is little different.  Today a poor student is an average of four grade levels behind their upper-income peers by the eighth grade—and a black student is three grades behind.  Educational opportunity is reserved for those with resources, given an intense cultivation of academic excellence by the wealthy, including some minority students. Yet in many communities, because of the legacy of history, to be black is to be poor and to attend under-resourced schools.  What is so easily condemnable in Mississippi exists in Chicago, Baltimore, D.C., Charlotte, Milwaukee, Oakland, Los Angeles—and even in the nearby progressive mecca of Portland, Oregon.  

And so the ruling on Cleveland is not so simple.  It turns out Cleveland H.S. is the MOST integrated public high school in the Delta.  Cleveland is the home of Delta State University, and so Cleveland H.S. is relatively affluent, tending to serve black and white students whose parents have education and means.  For many reasons, some based in pride in community, nearby Eastside H.S. is almost exclusively black and less affluent.  The court order is likely to mandate a ratio of 75-25 black (the Delta is the blackest part of the blackest state in the nation) for BOTH schools, which could lead to white flight.  While the court order concerns ‘segregated’ Mississippi, this more complicated (and similarly damaging) socio-economic inequality can be seen by most Americans in their own communities.

This ruling says less about the Delta than it does about how far America still has to go to make our education system just. 

Michael Copperman works in diversity-retention and writing instruction at the University of Oregon.  His memoir of teaching in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, TEACHER, is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in September 2016.