An Elusive Dream in the Promised Land

By David E. Thigpen Sunday, May 02, 2004
    • In the springtime of 1954, when news of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board ruling rippled out like an earthquake, one of those who felt the world shifting was Robert McFrazier. Then a 10-year-old student in an all-black school in Muskogee, Okla., 250 miles away from Topeka, whose school board was the name defendant in the case, McFrazier still recalls the hopefulness of that day: "When the principal announced the decision, a spontaneous roaring cheer came up. We were caught up in the excitement of thinking that things were going to be better, that we were going to have a shot at this American Dream." The promise of fulfilling that dream lured McFrazier to Topeka in 1967, first as a young junior high teacher, then as a principal and later as superintendent of schools.

    Fifty years after Brown, the city's storied past as the epicenter of school desegregation remains evident. Still standing is the tidy brick schoolhouse of the once segregated Monroe Elementary, which Linda Brown attended when her father Oliver sued to gain admission for his daughter to an all-white school closer to their home. Now a national historic site, Monroe is also the future home of the educational Brown Foundation, run by Linda and her younger sister Cheryl, which awards scholarships and publishes literature commemorating the case. Not far away is the Thurgood Marshall Bridge, namesake of the N.A.A.C.P. special counsel who won the case and later served as a Supreme Court Justice. But other vestiges of that time have been wiped away. Although blacks and whites still live largely apart on opposite sides of town, the city recently elected its first black mayor, James McClinton, and the schools are fully integrated.


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    The old all-black institutions, from elementary schools to East Topeka High, have been closed up or torn down, and their students dispersed throughout the district. Behind the Gothic facade of Topeka High, the city's largest high school, a racially diverse blend of students (at 61% white, 20% black, 14% Latino and 5% other, it approximates the district's ethnic breakdown) intermingles on the football field, in the cafeteria and on the broad plaza outside the school. This year, it so happens, all four class presidents are Latino. Small victories like these have led black and white Topekans to declare the integration of the school system a success.

    But critics say if you look beneath the surface, Brown hasn't totally delivered on its promise. McFrazier, who retired from the schools' top job last year, argues that while Brown may be a social triumph, it is an educational failure. "Brown accomplished what it set out to accomplish — to integrate schools," he says. "But has it done anything to improve academic success? No. It's failed miserably." Black students now have access to newer books in nicer facilities alongside their white peers, but as a group they still perform below white students, an achievement gap that has bedeviled two generations of Topeka educators. On the latest state-administered reading test, for example, 34% of black juniors scored "unsatisfactory," compared to just 13% of whites. Why? Ironically, McFrazier blames the end of desegregation. He argues that the closing of black neighborhood schools — with their traditions, yearbooks, mottoes, fight songs and halls of fame — ripped the centerpiece out of those communities. "It removed support systems," McFrazier says. Black role models — doctors and educators — left the neighborhood and moved to suburban communities, taking their achievement ethic with them. "That lowered expectations," says McFrazier. And even though the races now sit side by side, Brown did little to alter the subtle but powerful prejudices within classrooms that lead teachers to expect more from white students than they do from minority students.

    Although McFrazier agrees that Brown was necessary and right for its time, he says that "we need to recognize what's changed in 50 years, and look beyond integration." For Brown to fulfill the promise of educational parity, he says, schools must involve parents more closely in monitoring children's progress, and remedial methods such as tutoring and study groups must be instituted. That's not always easy: a few years ago, McFrazier tried to make summer school a requirement for underachieving students but met resistance from parents who complained that it disrupted vacations and family schedules. What minority students need now is not more integration, says McFrazier, but more education.