Equal education, not segregation: Marchers tell high court to uphold school integration

Ted Shaw, chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told reporters gathered on the court building’s steps that a favorable ruling on the lawsuits by a few disgruntled parents in Louisville and Seattle would dangerously undermine the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. “We will be witnessing a reversal of historic proportions,” he said.

Marching on the picket line was Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “This is a day for all of us, Black and white, to stand up against segregation,” she told the World. “The residents and educators in these districts sought to create a school system where girls and boys of all races learn together.”

Will the Supreme Court “turn back the clock on decades of progress?” Gandy asked.

Tanya Nahman, a Harvard University graduate student, came with a busload of fellow students from Cambridge, Mass. “They have been chipping away at the Brown ruling for years,” she told the World. “A decision in favor of these two lawsuits will be the last nail in the coffin.”

A good quality education, Nahman added, “is a racially integrated education. Students who go to integrated schools have more compassion for other races and cultures. We need a more tolerant society.”

The protesters’ anger was directed at the new ultra-right Supreme Court bloc that includes Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito — both appointed by President George W. Bush — and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Civil rights defenders had feared the court would veer sharply to the right after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement.

In the questions from the bench, the ultra-right justices hid their racism beneath a “color blind” veneer, insinuating that the remedies in the Seattle and Louisville plans are unconstitutional because they are race conscious. The Justice Department’s solicitor general argued for the Bush administration in favor of overturning the desegregation plans.

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