Our Generation’s Civil Rights Movement

On June 28, 2007, the United States Supreme Court rendered Brown v. Board of Education a dead letter. They barred any policy by which local communities could voluntarily integrate their public schools.

The Supreme Court’s absurd, dishonest decision flies in the face of democratic principles and the aspiration to integration and equality held by the immense majority of the American people. It is unviable and must be reversed by the new civil rights movement.

Both the Seattle and Louisville plans that the Court struck down were longstanding, tremendously popular, voluntary plans. Residents voted repeatedly to maintain these modest, effective plans that considered race in school assignments, to break down the racial divide within communities and promote equal education for black and other minority students. Eighty-three percent of Louisville residents, black and white, supported their integration plan.

The Court, in Orwellian fashion, used Brown as a supposed justification for this segregationist decision, equating plans designed to eliminate segregation to segregation itself. The Court, by dressing its actions in the language of equality, echoed the hypocrisy of 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, which claimed that separate can be equal.

Separate can never be equal. It was attempted in the 60 years that followed Plessy and failed utterly. It was not true then, and it is not true now.

The Court’s decision cannot stand and is far to the right of the American people. Integration, and the social benefit that flows from it, are too important for even George W. Bush's Supreme Court to sideline in permanence.

This ruling will be tested out in various cities, where many school districts will maintain their plans because resegregating is simply unviable. Already, legal battles over K-12 integration are under way in the Berkeley and Los Angeles school districts, and a new legal battle may open up in San Francisco.

What happens in the wake of the Seattle-Louisville decision is not a matter of legal argument, but of social struggle. The conservative judges who dominate the courts know full well that they are carving the life out of Brown. Making Brown's simple promise of integration in K-12 education a reality requires building the new civil rights movement.

When we stand up and fight, no court or governmental authority is stronger than our movement. In spring 2006, when HR 4437 threatened to classify undocumented immigrants as felons, the walkouts of high school and middle school students and the huge marches of the immigrant communities forced the government to retreat from the worst provisions of HR 4437 in a matter of days. The Latino communities declared for all oppressed people that the days of accepting racist, second-class treatment have come to an end.

We can reverse the Court's decision by building the power of this movement. UC Berkeley students can play a particularly important role because our campus is a chief battleground for the fight to save Brown.

The right wing’s current national offensive on integration started here, with the attack on affirmative action in the UC system in 1995 and the passage of the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in 1996. Affirmative action programs, as race-conscious desegregation programs for higher

education, were enacted to implement Brown at the college level. The loss of affirmative action has caused resegregation on the UC campuses—at UC Berkeley, black, Latino and Native American student enrollment has plummeted, creating more isolation and an increasingly hostile climate for underrepresented minority students.

Ward Connerly, the black Republican businessman and spokesperson for the attack on affirmative action, is currently using Prop 209 as the basis for his lawsuits to end integration in the Berkeley and Los Angeles school districts.

The national fight to defend affirmative action is also the fight to save Brown. BAMN’s federal lawsuit against Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment in Michigan, Proposal 2, is a new opportunity in this fight. A national victory in this case can reverse anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives across the country, including California's Proposition 209, and undermine Seattle-Louisville ruling.

If students succeed at winning an increase underrepresented minority student enrollment, we will strengthen the national movement supporting the federal lawsuit against Proposal 2, and strengthen the local communities resisting the Court's decision.

The Seattle-Louisville ruling, though important, is not the last word on this question. The only thing the Court has accomplished for certain is to present the seminal question of integration versus segregation before the American people once again.

What is decisive is the growth of our new civil rights movement. By waging the struggle for equality on our own campus and in local communities that stand up against the Court, and by advancing the movement for immigrant rights, we can revive the struggle to make real Martin Luther King’s dream of integration and equality for all.

We can put the Seattle-Louisville decision where it belongs: in the trash bin of history, next to Dred Scott and Plessy.

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