In an article in the Washington Post, educator and author Jonathan Kozol comments that even as we congratulate ourselves on the legislation created by the Brown v. Board decision, it’s more and more apparent that school segregation is back “with a vengeance.”
Kozol said in an interview that “the reason I wrote “The Shame of the Nation”, which he was autographing at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC, “is to inspire Americans to look very hard at the virtually complete apartheid in increasing numbers of our school districts and to address it courageously. They should ask themselves honestly: Is this the kind of country they want to live in?”
Resegregation
Resegregation in many of the Southern and Border states has been explored in “New Faces, Old Patterns? Segregation in the Multiracial South.” Posted at the Harvard Civil rights Project site.
Re:Resegregation
One of the points that Kozol made in Savage Inequalities was that segregation was never limited to the South. He makes a compelling case by spending a large portion of that book in profiling the school system in East St. Louis, Illinois. In fact, although the headline makes the point that segregation is back, Kozol usually makes the point that it never left. On a personal level, this is all completely alien to me: I grew up in the south, but in a relatively rural county where I began school in 1972. Our schools were completely integrated then and continue to be to this day. I have always thought a study on the difference intergration patterns between urban and rural areas would be worth pursuing.