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Elizabeth Eckford, with Ernie Green and the others in Little Rock, with the people in Plaquemine Parish in Louisiana, and with the people in Clinton, Tennessee, all facing that resistance. So it seems to me that all of the tinder for the 1960s was built up in the late 1950s.

If Thurgood Marshall had lost Brown v. Board in 1954 blacks would have been devastated, but he won, and the blacks felt empowered. Black lawyers accomplished that. Of course they had help from fine white lawyers, but black lawyers accomplished that; the NAACP accomplished that; and black people were relieved of some of the impotence the society had imposed upon us.

[sidebar: We didn't know then...that racism was at the core of American culture. We didn't understand how deeply white skin privilege was ingrained in the culture and the power structure of the country.]

But then, you might ask, if I've lived through all that history and if I believe deeply in integration, why am I on the school board and not talking about desegregation?

It's because we know more now than Thurgood or Bob Carter or Kenneth Clark or I did back in the early 1950s. We were really naive. Most of us thought that racial meanness was an individual thing. We talked about it as prejudice. We even had our particular demons -- Senator Bilbo of Mississippi and the Talmadges of George were prime examples -- but the black movement was a middle class movement. The few white people we knew were liberal white people who would join the NAACP, so we thought white people were pretty good people. We thought that the more that white people were exposed to people like us, the sooner they would conclude that gee, these people aren't what we thought they were, they are regular people, they're Americans, and we'll hang around with them and let our kids go to school with them. As Richard Kluger quoted Bob Carter as saying, "We really had the feeling then that segregation itself was evil -- and not a symptom of the deeper evil of racism. . . The box we thought we were in was segregation itself."² What we didn't know then was that racism was at the core of American culture. We didn't understand how deeply white skin privilege was ingrained in the culture and the power structure of the country.

And so here we are in this residentially divided city, where race, class and geography are so important. That has an impact on schools. What we have to do is improve the schools where the poor black kids live. It is not a given that you get a terrible education in an all-black school; you simply get an incomplete education, just as you get an incomplete education in an all white school. But given the distribution of resources, we can't emphasize desegregation; we have to emphasize the best education.

NOTES

1. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

2. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (Knopf, 1975), p. 534.

16 African-American Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center