Black Leaders Brace For Adverse School Ruling

“The Supreme Court is likely to issue a devastating opinion in the Seattle cases [this] year and it will possibly set back the premise of Brown v. Board of Education to provide quality education for all children,” says Harvard University law professor Charles Ogletree. “And I think that it will unsettle plans by conscientious school districts, surveyors and educators.”

The two cases heard by the Supreme Court recently, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education (Kentucky), could end voluntary programs that use race in order to maintain racial integration in public schools.

“I was at the argument and I heard the questions,” Ogletree says. “And there was little enthusiasm among the majority of the justices to support a voluntary integration plan that both Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Wash. had devised to protect the interest of children.”

Successful campaigns to end affirmative action in Michigan, California and Washington state will likely spread, civil rights advocates say. Conservative activist Ward Connerly is researching possible ballot initiatives against affirmative action in at least nine more states.

From academia to activism, Black leaders fear 2007 could bring an end to affirmative action, causing a reversal in decades-old policies established for racial and economic justice.

If it happens, activist Al Sharpton says the same way that Blacks got equal justice programs, they will have to fight for it again.

“We got it through mass mobilization and putting pressure on the Senate and the Congress to enact legislation that would offset it. And that’s the only way we’re going to do it this time,” Sharpton says. “The minute we start deluding ourselves that we don’t need a movement, Whites will use that as a license to stop dealing with us in ways that are adverse to our progress because they feel that they can.”

What the new Democratic-majority Congress will do on behalf of Black people is yet another major issue facing Black America, political observers say.

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