The people of Montgomery sat down to talk
It was decided all God’s children should walk
“Sister Rosa,” The Neville Brothers
Education is the civil rights issue of our time. Everyone says so: the President, the Secretary of Education, even John McCain and George W. Bush.
Now that we are all agreed about that, we might remember the lesson of the civil rights movement of their time: Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. The lesson is that civil rights cannot be won, wrested from the grasp of hatred, without organization, legal action and the mobilization of both those deprived of their civil rights and those others, in spite of their relative privilege, who believe in justice.
Education is the civil rights issue of our time because laws block access to good education for most Black children and many others—Latinos, Chinese, Filipino and Southeast Asian-Americans, American Indians as well as White children living in poverty. Just as the laws segregating buses in Montgomery and schools in Little Rock were changed by a combination of the legal actions of Thurgood Marshall and his associates and the marches and sit-ins of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, so the laws blocking access to good education must fall if dealt with by similar methods.
Legal action is underway with the leadership of the NAACP LDF, the Education Law Center and other groups.
Most areas of concentrated educational poverty are surrounded by better-resourced school districts. This educational poverty in the midst of educational affluence is caused by laws that make the funding of schools dependent on family wealth. As America is increasingly segregated by income, the division of schools into hundreds of school districts in many states, about 14,000 in the country, and the financing of those districts by property tax, ensures that children living in areas of concentrated poverty will be forced to attend schools of equally concentrated poverty of educational opportunity.
These school finance laws must be changed. School funding must become a state-wide responsibility, as is now the case in Vermont and Hawaii, and allocations of educational resources should be designed, as the allocations under the Abbott ruling in New Jersey are designed, to ensure that every child has those education opportunities required so that they leave school college and career ready.
Legal action is one path. Direct action is another. I suggest that the schools are the lunch counters and buses of our time.
Is it not time to begin the kind of effort symbolized by Rosa Parks?
What would happen if when school begins next August or September children condemned to attend failing schools, drop-out factories, refused to go to them, but went instead to the nearest successful school? If children from the Crenshaw District in Los Angeles showed up at the schools in Beverly Hills? If the children from the Bronx went in the front doors of schools in Scarsdale and sat at those desks? If children from South Chicago went with their parents and neighbors to Evanston and refused to leave until they were educated as well as the children of that community?
“A bus driver said, ‘Lady, you got to get up
’Cause a white person wants that seat’”
What would have happened if King had preached and not marched? If Rosa Parks had left the bus and not occupied that seat?
What will happen tomorrow if the children of the poor occupy the schools of the wealthy?