From Freedom Schools to Freedom: A New Vision of Desegregation

Authors

Joseph Kim

Abstract

(Excerpt)

I begin with Part I, where I hone in on the school integration movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I start at Brown v. Board of Education. When asked about Brown, most if not all people associate it with the racial integration of segregated public schools and the demise of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate-but-equal doctrine. However, importantly, I argue that racial integration was not necessarily required by Brown. Rather than mandating racial integration of segregated schools, Brown mandated desegregation of segregated schools. The distinction between “desegregation” and “racial integration” is an important one. While “desegregation” encompasses a wide variety of approaches to challenge Jim Crow segregation, “racial integration” presents one possible interpretation of desegregation. To see Brown as requiring racial integration is to narrow the scope of Brown from the start.

I continue in Part I to demonstrate how civil rights attorneys were at least partially misguided in their approach to and application of Brown. Civil rights attorneys coalesced around physical racial integration as the singular and only possible response to Brown’s desegregation mandate. In furtherance of that end, civil rights attorneys often usurped alternative understandings of desegregation in favor of a narrower racial integrationist view. But putting all their eggs in one basket proved a risky strategy.

When Richard Nixon became president, he nominated four moderate-to-conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Because civil rights activists had prioritized litigation and racial integration as their method to challenge segregation, the political upheaval of the Supreme Court meant that the racial integrationist strategy was tremendously vulnerable. And with good reason. I describe how the Supreme Court took an incrementalist approach to put an end to racial integration. First, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Court shut down innovative and alternative interpretations of Brown’s desegregation mandate, which looked past race-as-skin-color in order to challenge and eliminate the spirit and intent of Jim Crow. By disqualifying a novel understanding of Brown’s desegregation mandate, the Court signaled to the general public that the only cognizable approach to racial justice in schools would be physical racial integration. And once physical racial integration became the only judicially cognizable approach to desegregation, the Court could focus on weakening and eliminating it. And the Court did so in Milliken v. Bradley, where the Court overlooked white flight (and the white supremacy and anti-Blackness it represented) and prohibited racial integration across school districts. Thus, in its two-step incrementalist strategy, the Court put an end to any real implementation of Brown’s desegregation mandate in public schools.

In Part II of this Article, I critique the racial integration movement more deeply. I explain the harmful effects that employing a racial-integration-only approach to desegregation had on Black schools, Black teachers, Black administrators, and Black children. Black schools closed, Black teachers and administrators were fired or demoted, and Black children were forced to attend white schools and encounter severe anti-Black racism. Viewing literal physical racial integration as the only way forward often led to traumatic racial harm. I pointed out how racial integrationists viewed race as merely about skin color, devoid of any other meaning. This superficial meaning deprioritized the political, social, and material salience of race. Instead of adhering to such a reductive view of race, I propose an alternative race consciousness—not a race-consciousness of skin color, but a race-consciousness of ideology. I believe this ideological race-consciousness as method allows us to imagine a new way of implementing Brown’s desegregation mandate today in the present.

In Part III, I look at one application of this ideological race consciousness. I focus on the school curriculum and the Supreme Court’s broad definition of the curriculum. I argue that a curriculum which practices ideological race-consciousness provides a potentially fruitful path forward to desegregating public schools today. Rather than employing a superficial understanding of race as merely about phenotype, a curriculum that engages ideological race-consciousness recognizes the historical, social, and political salience of race. It recognizes how race has been socially constructed and made relevant by histories of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. A curriculum shaped by ideological race-consciousness would reimagine public education. It would not be about incorporating Black history into a substantive curriculum that is white by default. It would not embody a politics of inclusion or assimilation in that way. Rather, it would be about the reimagining of a new curriculum, with different ways of teaching and engaging students and distilling history. It would be a curriculum that invokes legacies of Black resistance and Black freedom politics. In the era of colorblindness, a curriculum shaped by ideological race-consciousness can chart a path forward for implementing a truer, antisubordination understanding of Brown’s desegregation mandate.

I conclude my Article in Part III by discussing the Freedom Schools. I argue that the Freedom Schools provide an example of curricular desegregation in action. By engaging in an ideological race-consciousness to shape their curriculum, the Freedom Schools embodied a new, innovative understanding of Brown’s desegregation mandate and opened up the field of what desegregation could look like. I argue that the ideological race-consciousness of the present must look to the past. The Freedom Schools can help us imagine what novel approaches to desegregation might look like today.