Please start a write in campaign. I find it unacceptable that the only person to fight for ADA compliance wont be around when they finally update the schools. Don’t do it for me or you or anybody. Do it for the kids who need a tireless fighter such as yourself.

Thanks. And, I sent you an email about this.

Are Our Schools Better Off Today?
Where Do We Go From Here?

By Carol A.O. Wolf

The late and great Oliver W. Hill, Esq. was my friend and mentor for the past 25 years and my most valued and vocal constituent for the past six.

Thanks to Mr. Hill’s inspiration, unyielding expectations of excellence, and the unfortunate fact of his blindness, I received a most special education as one of his privileged “readers.”

“We” read every word of Simple Justice, Richard Kluger’s 798-page legal history of the Brown vs. Board of Education case and subsequent legal decisions. Several times.

To be sure, over the years, we read many other books, including Mr. Hill’s autobiography, The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education, and countless legal and political articles. But, we always returned to Kluger’s Simple Justice.

On our third time or fourth time through, I asked why we were re-reading it. His answer was, as always, honest and direct: “Because we are not finished yet. We’ve barely begun.”

And, it was on that day, when I finally “got” what he meant, that he exacted the only promise he ever asked of me. “Do not ever engage in a discussion of the re-segregation of Richmond’s schools – they’ve never been de-segregated.”

Since Mr. Hill and I had ongoing discussions of whether our schools were better because of Brown and what he thought we needed to do to fix them, I feel safe proffering the following answers:
Short answer: No. Our schools are not better off.
Mr. Hill often stated that it was a “sad fact” that although the Warren Court used the Nine-to-Nuthin’ Brown Decision to open the front doors of the schoolhouses of k-12 education, Richard Nixon’s appointment of William H. Rehnquist and Richmond’s own Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the U.S. Supreme Court helped render the Five-to-Four Milliken Decision (July 25, 1974) which essentially gave those schoolhouses legal back doors for great masses of the white and black middle class to escape the problems of our nation’s cities in favor of life in the suburbs.

In his dissent to the Milliken Decision, Justice Thurgood Marshall noted that poor Negro children would continue to receive “the same inherently unequal education in the future as they have been unconstitutionally afforded in the past.” Justice Marshall further noted that “In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into cities — one white, the other black — but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.”

Those who knew Mr. Hill well know that he was not a man given to recriminations. He maintained a cordial “Virginia Gentleman” relationship with Justice Powell. Yet Mr. Hill dryly noted on many occasions that, even though Powell, as chairman of the Richmond School Board, had not supported Virginia’s “massive resistance” to school integration, the board under Powell’s leadership did nothing to integrate Richmond’s schools. In 1961 when Powell stepped down as school board chairman, “precisely two black children” attended school with white students in the city.

Ironically, compared to what it didn’t do for public k-12 education, Brown actually flung open the doors of higher education for African-Americans and for women as evidenced by ever increasing numbers of accomplished and successful attorneys, doctors, business leaders, educators, scientists, authors, journalists and, yes, politicians. Still, we have far more African-American males in our prisons than in our colleges and universities.

Richmond’s problems are not unique. All one has to do is read the newspaper of any major city in this nation to see that we all share the same urgent and sad challenges.

Despite dramatic academic progress and the real and hard-won achievements of dedicated teachers, students and families, we still have a shameful graduation rate, an abysmal dropout rate, sky-rocketing out-of-school suspension rates, and virtual total non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus denying “simple access” to our one in six citizens with disabilities.

Where do we go from here?

Before anyone goes crazy enacting NCLB sanctions and dismantling public education as we know it and the good people of our nation intend it, I suggest we revisit the Milliken decision and reconsider not only what Richmond and the region, but what the rest of our nation’s cities, might be like today had that decision gone the other way. Can we find a way to recapture that missed opportunity for equality?

We can all begin by re-reading Simple Justice. Why?

As Mr. Hill said: “Because we are not finished yet. We’ve barely begun.”

No, it’s not OK.

But I’m going to that unveiling ceremony to applaud the bravery behind the story of what progress there has been.

Here are some economic and racial stats: http://www.richmond.k12.va.us/indexnew/sub/statistics/freelunches05_06.cfm and http://www.richmond.k12.va.us/indexnew/sub/statistics/ethnicstats06_07.cfm .

Can anyone guess which school has one broken computer in a class or a computer lab with around 24 working ones? Guess which school’s PTA makes $80,000 in a night and which one has under $1,200 in it’s entire account. Which schools have a yearly mass exodus of teachers and which one has the most Board Certified ones? The list is long.

Is it okay that a child in the east end receives a lesser education at his neighborhood school than a child living in the west end?

While I have no doubt that’s true, much has changed for the better over the years.

This scribbler is old enough to remember when the first black kids attended Thomas Jefferson here in Richmond. While my ideas about politics were still forming, then, I can certainly remember thinking how brave they were.

Yes, when it comes to providing equal educational opportunities to one and all, considerably more change is still needed. But the progress that’s been made in the decades since the historic walk those Moton students took tells us change is possible, even in Richmond.

Thanks. The Maggie Walker story is new to me, but I had heard about the streetcar boycott. I believe there were other streetcar/bus boycotts before the Rosa Parks incident, but as they say — timing is everything.

Don’t remember the Bleifeld piece you mention, at all. I hope it’s still around. Was it in bronze?

With the Civil Rights monument’s dedication coming, somebody ought to dust that baby off and put it on display.

Good piece, and this recognition is long overdue, and young Eliza could be forgiven if she didn’t realize Ms.Parks wasn’t from Virginia–thing is, we had some quite courageous civil rights pioneers of our own.

Maggie Walker held a boycott of the graduation exercises for Richmond Normal School in 1886. Authorities refused the request of 10 students, chief of whom was the then Maggie Mitchell, to have the event like the white students at the Richmond Theatre, 7th and Broad Streets. Black graduations were most often held at FIrst (African) Baptist, because the sanctuary could hold close to two thousand people.
At the risk of getting their graduation credential denied, which would’ve been a huge blow in a community that valued education as a way up, the group of 10 held the proceedings at the inadequate Normal School assembly room.
This was the first black student-led walk out in the nation’s history and 65 years ahead of those also courageous Prince Edward County students. The event also presaged Maggie Walker’s enormous leadership contributions here in Richmond, and throughout the nation.
The latter day choice is nonetheless an excellent one, for many reasons, but it just wasn’t “the” first in Virginia.

Then, in 1904, firebrand editor of the weekly “Richmond Planet,” John Mitchell, Jr. (perhaps related through cousinage to Walker), called a boycott of the segregated streetcars that lasted about six to nine months — “Let us walk!” he declared. This boycott was a half century ahead of Dr. King in Montgomery, Ala.
The traction company, weakened by a bloody labor strike the year earlier, suffered and staggered into receivership.
But the Jim Crow laws stayed in force, and Mitchell never rode a trolley again. He didn’t need to. By then, the publisher and banker owned an automobile.

Finally, by way of complete tangent, if you ever went out to Regency Square in the early 1980s there was a sculpture there of some hippie-esque parents playing with their kids.
This piece was the exuberant “Family At Play” and portrays parents enjoying a spring day outdoors with their children. The bronze sculpture caused a tremor of criticism because the family was dressed in jeans, shorts and t-shirts and seemed reminiscent of hippies.
It was on a motor so it slowly rotated. The mother wore a tank top and this fascinated me and was a source of some controversy at the time, due to the woman’s apparent lack of upper torso undergarments.
The sculptor? Stanley Bleifeld. The piece is now “in storage” last I heard, since Regency’s most recent makeover.

–HEK