Student Bill of Rights

Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to begin the Congressional Black Caucus Special Order to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Mr. Speaker, the Brown v. Board of Education decision is one of the greatest decisions of the United States Supreme Court. That decision eliminated the ``separate but equal'' doctrine in our public school systems and ended what was one of the most abhorrent policies ever put in place in the United States.

``Today, education is perhaps the most important function of State and local governments. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the Armed Forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today, it is a principal instrument in awakening a child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity when the State has undertaken to provide it is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.''

Mr. Speaker, these are the words that former Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered in his opinion of the Brown v. Board of Education case on May 17, 1954. These words still ring true today.

This Saturday will mark the 49th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and sadly, Mr. Speaker, 49 years later, the promise of Brown v. Board of Education still has not been realized.

The State of our public education system is extremely fragile. Not only are we living in a society where our public schools are unequal, but we are living in a society, 49 years after the death of Jim Crow, where our students are still learning in separate environments.

In the 2000/2001 school year, at least half of the black students in the State of Maryland attended intensely segregated minority schools. A report released by the Harvard Civil Rights Project last year found that the city of Baltimore has the most segregated school system in the entire Nation; the

most segregated school system in the entire Nation, Mr. Speaker.

I have the privilege of representing an economically diverse district, and I also have the privilege of visiting many of those public schools in my district. It always troubles me when I visit these schools and I am able to witness firsthand the disparities that exist. In affluent areas of my district, the students have a computer on every desk, while in the less affluent areas of my district, children seldom get to use a computer.

Let me be clear. I am in no way saying that the children in affluent areas do not deserve the highest-quality educational resources that can be afforded them. But what I am saying, Mr. Speaker, is that all children deserve these same educational tools, regardless of the color of their skin or the size of their parents' paycheck.

Not only do the schools in my district have an unequal distribution of resources, but they also have an unequal distribution of funding. In the 2000 school year, Maryland districts with the highest child poverty rates had $911.95 fewer State and local dollars to spend per student compared with the lowest poverty districts. Therefore, a public school teacher with 25 students in a low-income district had to find a way to prepare her students to succeed academically with almost $22,800 less than a public school teacher of the same subject in a more affluent neighborhood.

Mr. Speaker, when are we going to stop punishing our children for being born into a socioeconomic environment that is out of their control? When is our character as a Nation going to mature to the point where we recognize that our future is decided by the investments we make in all of our children and generations yet unborn?

Mr. Speaker, when presented with these disparities, some raise the question of whether or not an increase in school funding for schools with majority African American students or schools with majority low- income students would really make a difference. Are these children capable of achieving, some may ask? I submit to my colleagues that the question is not whether or not our kids can achieve, because not only can they achieve, but they are achieving despite the inequities.

For example, Mount Royal Elementary School in Baltimore, with a 99 percent African American population, the fifth graders outperformed all students in the State of Maryland on the State math assessment test for 2 years in a row.

Although the previous example illustrates that our children can achieve despite unequal funding and resources, we should not force our children to survive on crumbs from the table. It is robbery to deny our children the tools needed to learn. It is an offense of the highest degree, for not only are we stealing their future, but we are stealing ours as well.

Mr. Speaker, this discussion of separate and unequal is not only about buildings and dollars; it is also about having challenging curriculums, quality teachers, and real assessments that provide teachers with usable feedback in a timely manner. This discussion of separate and unequal is about not only ending discrimination by law, but about ending discrimination by practice in our country.

When we leave our Nation's Capitol this evening and walk on to the Washington streets, we will be walking into a tale of two cities, and this is probably true in many of the major cities in America. One part of our city is going to bed this evening filled with all of the material things in life. In the other, children will go to bed hungry. One city will live long and prosper due to the most advanced medical technology in the history of humanity. The other city, Mr. Speaker, will sicken and die before its time. One city is enjoying the fruits of educational opportunity. The other city seeks to educate its children with overcrowded classrooms and outdated books.

That reality is why we must seize this moment to remember the struggle that culminated in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. That is why we must use this position of trust given to us by the people of the United States of America to reaffirm the vision and values that remain the foundation of that decision. An America that is separate is inherently unequal, and we must never accept that as a way of life.

That is why, Mr. Speaker, the Congressional Black Caucus has made H.R. 236, the ``Student Bill of Rights,'' the centerpiece of our education legislative agenda. The legislation of the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah) would move beyond theory and make equity in our K through 12 system a reality. It would require States to have a plan of action to eliminate the unequal funding of our public schools.

Mr. Speaker, I urge the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate to pass this legislation. We must get on with the business of helping our public schools and securing our children's future. We do not have a day to spare.

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great honor to yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald), who has fought continuously over many, many years in the State legislature and here in this House for children.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Clay), who too has worked hard in the area of making sure that these living messages that we send to a future we will never see are well educated and who are treated fairly and allowed to be all that God meant for them to be.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for his statement. The gentleman talked about his grandfather. I could not help but think about my father and many of the Congressional Black Caucus members who will come here tonight are descendants of former sharecroppers and, of course, slaves, but I will never forget as I was just about to introduce the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) when my father, who was denied an education living in Manning, South Carolina, only got to first grade because he was made to plow the fields and plant the cotton.

I will never forget on the day that I was sworn in standing where the gentleman is standing right there, my father came down and met me out here in the hallway after the swearing in, and the only time I had ever seen my father cry, tears were rolling down his face. I said, Dad, what is wrong? He said, now I see what I could have been if I had been given the opportunity to have an education.

So that is just a perfect segue to our colleague, the former chairman, but first I will yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman, and it certainly gives me great pleasure, Mr. Speaker, to yield to my colleague from South Carolina, who has just dedicated his life to tearing down barriers that are separating people from opportunity and has given so much over the years and not even worrying about his own convenience. And he is, of course, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and vice chairman of our Democratic Caucus from the great State of South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn).

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman.

And may I inquire, please, as to how much time I have left.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his wonderful statement, and I yield now to the distinguished gentleman from the great State of Illinois (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my hour to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters), former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight because I am a little bit concerned about where we are and how we got here. Over the next year, in fact, if I may, next May 17, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That means that come Saturday we will celebrate the 49th anniversary. Over the next year we will hear a lot about Brown, and, in fact, on May 17, 50 years to the day of that decision, there will be a new park opened in Topeka, Kansas, to honor the case.

I do not begrudge the people of Topeka, Kansas, for their new park, but I do have a real problem as a former history teacher with revisionism because Brown took on the name for some very unusual reasons. If we were to go by tradition and name cases based upon the alphabet, this case would have been called Belton, because the case coming out of Delaware, one of the five that led to Brown, was Belton against Gebhart. If the case had taken on the name of the first to file, it would have been called Briggs because Briggs v. Elliot, which started in South Carolina, was first filed on May 16, 1950. Nine months later, the Brown case was filed, February 28, 1951, and 3 months later, May 23, the Davis case in Virginia was filed, and somewhere between January and April of 1951, Bolling against Sharpe, the D.C. case, was filed.

Mr. Speaker, I point this out tonight because the people of Clarendon County, South Carolina, that I am proud to represent here in this body, the birthplace of our current Chair's parents, both his mother and father were born in Clarendon County School District No. 1, where this case originated.

So tonight I wanted to come to the floor to put on the record the exact history of Brown because so much is being said about this case, and very little of it is accurate.

In a 1947 meeting on the campus of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, Reverend J.A. DeLaine heard a speech challenging the ministers who were independent from the system to get involved in helping to right some of the wrongs that existed in our society. Reverend DeLaine left that campus that day and went back home to Summerton, South Carolina, where he began to meet with his church members, and in 1947, he asked the parents to petition the superintendent of schools to ask for a school bus.

At that time parents were sending their kids to school having to walk 9 and 10 miles one way. They were denied a school bus, and so they pooled their resources and raised money to buy a used bus to transport their kids to school. Gas was expensive, and the bus was old, and it kept breaking down. So they went to a local farmer, Levi Pearson, and in 1948, Levi Pearson filed a lawsuit asking for his children, who at that time were walking 9 miles one way to school, to be provided transportation.

We have got to understand that all the white kids in that county were riding school buses, but black kids were denied a school bus.

The case was thrown out because Levi Pearson's farm was in both school districts, both the Manning school district and the Summerton school district, and on a technicality they decided that Levi Pearson's house was in the Manning school district and not the Summerton school district. So the case was thrown out.

In 1949, Reverend DeLaine met with the NAACP and petitioned the all- white county school board to provide equality of education for their children. It, of course, was denied. So in October of that year, they all met in the home of Harry Briggs and his wife Eliza.

Anybody that comes into my office today will see on my wall a great picture of Eliza Briggs. For as long as I serve in this august body, Mrs. Briggs' picture will have a prominent place on the wall of my office.

Mr. Harry Briggs was an attendant at a filling station. He was fired from his job for signing the petition. They eventually moved to Florida where they lived out their productive lives, moving back to Clarendon County when they were no longer able to be productive.

In 1950, the school board refused to respond to the petition, and then in February 1951, the State of South Carolina entered the case on behalf of the school board. So not only were these people denied by their county school board, but now they were being fought by their entire State mechanism.

In 1951, the State of South Carolina decided that it would use all of its resources to preserve a separate but equal, inherently unequal, school district.

In 1953, the Supreme Court heard arguments, and on May 17, 1954, 4 years and 1 day from the time the case was first filed in Summerton, South Carolina, these people got what they sought, and that was a decision by the United States Supreme Court that separate but equal was inherently unequal.

I want to share with the folks who are looking in tonight a couple of statements from three descendants of these, I would call, brave, heroic people. They are all here in Washington today, and on yesterday here in Washington, here is what Harold Gibson had to say. He said that ``my mother and father was faced with a choice. Take your name off of the petition or be evicted from your home. They were evicted on Christmas Eve.''

Ms. Annie Gibson, Harold Gibson's mother, her picture is on the wall of

my office, and it, too, will always be there for as long as I am here.

Listen to what the DeLaine brothers had to say about their dad, J.A. DeLaine, whose father spearheaded the case: Our house was burned to the ground. Shots were fired into the new home into which we had moved. When my father fired back, local authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. For their safety, the family fled in 1955 to Buffalo, New York, and it was not until the year 2000, 25 years later, that the State of South Carolina dropped the charges against Reverend DeLaine. Now, it was 45 years later from the time of the charges, but 25 years after his death.

I bring this out tonight because when I went to work for John West in 1971, John West, the Governor of South Carolina, received a letter from Reverend DeLaine. Reverend DeLaine wrote Governor West and said that he was getting up in years, his health was beginning to fail, and he wanted to come home to South Carolina to die. John West asked me to look into the case and to plan a homecoming for Reverend DeLaine. He wanted us to have a ceremony that would mark an end to this episode and to be a new beginning for the State of South Carolina.

We could not bring Reverend DeLaine back home because there living in Clarendon County was one of the original people who swore out the warrant, and in spite of the Governor's pleadings, the law enforcement officers' pleadings, he refused to drop the case.

So Reverend DeLaine came back as far as Charlotte, North Carolina, where he eventually died and is buried.

Now, the case of Briggs. Listen to what Nathaniel Briggs, says: ``My father worked at a gas station. It was owned by the mayor of Summerton. He lost his job and my mother lost her job at the local hotel.''

Mr. Speaker, I want to close my comments by thanking our Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus for organizing this Special Order tonight, and to close on this note. As historic as this is, the fact of the matter is we have not gotten there yet. In fact, come August, the State of South Carolina will be hearing a case in the same courtroom where the Brown case started as Briggs against Elliott. In that courtroom, we will be listening to arguments over whether or not it is constitutional to still underfund school districts with high populations of black students.

In South Carolina today, the law is that we in the State are required to provide a public education, but we are not required to provide an adequate education. And, therefore, schoolchildren in school districts with high black populations are not being funded to the same level as school kids in other districts. And I want to point out, as I close, the inequity. Today, in South Carolina, school districts with higher percentages of African American students have 313 fewer State and local dollars, fewer than students with school districts of low levels of African Americans. This inequity translates into a gap of $8,000 a year per classroom and more than $1 million a year per school. That tells the story.

So though Brown is now 49 years old, equal educational opportunities have not come to Clarendon County or South Carolina yet. Hopefully, this case that will be heard in August will be decided before May 17, 2004, and decided by law and equity, so that, hopefully, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown, we can celebrate the beginning of equitable education for black people in Clarendon County, South Carolina, and our Nation. I thank the chairman for allowing me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, tonight we look back nearly a half century to the 1954 case to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the impact on this Nation.

The Supreme Court took a bold step at that time to right the wrongs and correct years of injustice. The court stepped out of the box to do what was right. Even so, in Missouri the city of St. Louis and county schools continued to defy the high Court as a large segment of children continued to attend segregated schools and receive an inferior education. Regrettably, it took a local court case in the 1970s to desegregate St. Louis city and county public schools.

On a personal note, my family was subjected to the sordid history of segregated schools. My grandmother, Luella Hyatt, was born in suburban Black Jack, Missouri, in the early 1900s and was denied access to schools there. She was forced to move to St. Louis City to attend school with other African Americans.

Segregated schools were tragic and the ramifications of children receiving an inferior education put them at an economic and social disadvantage, from their receiving outdated hand-me-down books from white children, to their lowly social standing overall.

It cannot be said enough that children of color suffer greatly. In that context Brown v. Board of Education was a remedy to right a grievous wrong.

Today as we look back and then turn again towards the future, I am dismayed. I am not dismayed at how Americans have continued to undo past wrongs. Nor am I dismayed at the shoulders on which I stand and what they tried to accomplish. Integration in the context of their times had its merits. What dismays me is that any lessons we can learn from the past appear to be lost on this generation of leaders. And for that I feel we must find a fix.

In retrospect, a lot of things have happened in education since the 1950s. The nobility of true integration was not accomplished and a new form of segregation has taken the place of the old. Yet, while Brown v. Board of Education was certainly about education, it was about much more. It was part of a long chain of events which each successive generation took a turn to right wrong and chip away at racism and segregation. Now it is our turn to try and attain that elusive ideal of one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I am a product of public school. I have always been in support of public education. A public education has served my wife, Ivy, and I, as well as my daughter, Carol, who also attends a public elementary school in the city of St. Louis; and, in fact, her school, Kennard Classical Junior Academy, was one of 15 schools in the State of Missouri recently given the distinction of a gold star status. So not all public education is problematic.

Both St. Louis and Missouri have a lot of relevant educational history. For example, the St. Louis public schools opened the Nation's first kindergarten. And in the 1840s it was illegal for African Americans to read and write. First Baptist Church Pastor John Berry Meachum took matters into his own hands. Mr. Meachum opened the Freedom School on a barge in the Mississippi River which was Federally owned and thus out of the reach of State law. And at the college level, a 1938 Missouri case, Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, found that the University of Missouri by denying a black student administrations to its law school, though it did create a separate black law school in a building housing a movie theater and a hotel, created an unfair privilege for white students that did not extend to similarly qualified African American students.

Mr. Speaker, like a strait jacket, segregation debilitated this Nation for generations. But the victory of Brown v. Board of Education was not happenstance. It was the result of a well-thought-out strategy by a progressive people trying to build a progressive Nation. Comprised of a combination of five lawsuits from around the Nation, Brown v. Board was argued using expert witnesses to show the psychological and sociological damage of inferiority done to black children as a result of segregation.

Convinced separate but equal violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the high Court would ban segregation in public schools. As we all know, desegregation was not immediate, easy, nor complete. In a separate decision known as Brown II in 1955, the Court set desegregation guidelines. But without deadlines, only the infamous ``with all deliberate speed'' in the opinion, segregation lingered and segregationist met integration with violence and hatred. With integration, some whites fled to the suburbs creating de facto segregation in urban schools. And as the urban core deteriorated by the outflow of population and businesses, the urban schools have essentially become second class schools, separate and unequal, despite the law.

In closing, I want to thank the leadership in the Congressional Black Caucus for scheduling this time to mark the anniversary of a major milestone. Certainly the shortcomings of the last half century were no fault of Brown v. Board of Education. Certainly it was not the children who dutifully woke up every morning and attended classes in schools provided by governments throughout this Nation. And most certainly it is not the poor and economically impoverished Americans trying to feed those children every day and trusting that one day their lives would be better for them and their children.

The children have not failed. Those in government who build, staff and fund this Nation's schools have collectively failed the children. When government officials spend more to incarcerate than to educate, it sends the wrong message to our youths. When government blames the victims of racism, economic oppression, and cultural bias and punishes them through denial, sanctions and promises left unfilled, then there is no wonder the youth of this Nation have rebelled en masse against education, a law-abiding life-style, and unfulfilled promises. Such reality today is as important as Brown v. Board of Education was to this Nation then.

The abiding purpose of government is to promote stability in our communities and to care for those who cannot care for themselves. The rich will always take care of themselves and many send their children to private schools run by people they have a voice in choosing and in facilities they help build. The common everyday citizen lacks that luxury. With many of our public school systems in disarray, teachers spending more time trying to maintain order and not teach, for millions of American children the future is

not bright. Again, it is not because of Brown v. Board of Education; rather, it is systemic failure of government to care about educating our children.

God forbid that another generation of Americans indigenous to this Nation remain undereducated, underserved and in poverty. That was the real point, the real goal of Brown v. Board of Education. And that age- old dream of future generations of equally educated American children building a Nation capable of overcoming the burden of a segregated divisive America has yet to come true.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, of course, it reminds me of an article I read yesterday about the gentleman my colleague is about to introduce that his staff shared with us about his father, and I do not want to take his thunder, but it talked about how his father was denied a college degree from a divinity college in South Carolina because he could not obtain a high school diploma because the State law in South Carolina in the 1940s was that no African American children could go beyond the seventh grade, and that tells me something about the ramifications which I never lived through full-blown segregation, but it certainly tells me about the ramifications of segregation and about how we are to address righting that wrong. So it brought tears to my eyes.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and I am honored today to praise the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for inaugurating the Red, White, Blue and Brown Campaign to commemorate next year's 50th anniversary of the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education and to help ensure that the spirit of Brown is fully understood and realized.

The decision is special to me because when the case was decided I was an elementary school student in a segregated public school. My father was a member of the local school board and was on the short end of many four-to-one votes as the decision was being implemented.

I served in the Virginia legislature with several members who had actually voted for and against so-called ``massive resistance.'' Massive resistance was Virginia's sad reaction to the Brown decision. Virginia took advantage of the language in the Brown decision which referred to the right to education with the phrase ``Such an opportunity where the State has undertaken to provide it is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.'' Under massive resistance, Virginia decided not to provide any public education at all rather than to integrate. As a result, schools in Prince Edward County were closed from 1959 to 1964.

In Prince Edward County, 117 African American students chose to strike rather than attend all black Moton High, which was badly in need of repair. Moton had no gymnasium, cafeteria, infirmary, or teacher restrooms. The overflow of students was housed in an old school bus and three buildings covered with tar paper. Local parents had repeatedly sought improvements from the local school board without success. Students initially wanted a new school building with indoor plumbing to replace the old school.

Strike leader, Barbara Johns, enlisted the assistance of NAACP attorneys. The lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, was filed in 1951 on behalf of the students by the Virginia NAACP attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. The United States District Court ordered equal facilities to be provided for black students but denied the plaintiffs the admission to the white schools during the equalization program. Attorneys for the NAACP filed an appeal, which ultimately became consolidated with other cases, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Because of the deplorable conditions in virtually every black segregated school, many suggest that segregated schools are illegal because they are always inferior and that that was the decision in Brown. In fact, the lesson of Brown is that segregation in and of itself denies equal educational opportunities. The court wrote in the Brown decision: ``We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other `tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities? We believe that it does.''

A philosopher once noted that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So I am delighted the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is instituting this initiative to remind people what Brown was all about and that the fight for equal educational opportunity did not end with Brown. The lesson of Brown still applies today.

Let us look at the issues we are debating as we speak: minority enrollment in State universities, not only affirmative action at the University of Michigan but also issues involving the vestiges of dual higher education systems in most Southern States; vouchers, the very scheme used in Virginia to fund segregated academies while public schools were closed; disparate funding of education, inner city schools spend significantly less per student than suburban schools; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, whether a free and appropriate public education can be denied to individuals with disabilities; resegregation of schools, forty percent of black students in 2000 attended schools which were over 90 percent black; High stakes testing, we know that poor students, non-English speaking students, students with disabilities, as well as many minority students receive an education of lesser quality than their counterparts. The use of high stakes testing in educational decisions only exacerbates these inequalities, especially since many of those tests have been found to be racially biased. Even the President's

own faith based initiative, which for the first time since 1965 allows sponsors of federally funded programs to discriminate in hiring based on religion and, de facto, race, since 11 o'clock on Sunday is still the most segregated hour of the week.

So I am delighted that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is instituting this initiative to remind people that the fight for equal education did not end with Brown. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was there with the filing of Brown and remains vigilant and on the case today with this commemoration of the spirit of Brown to once again fight to have all children properly educated. While the legal defense fund may be best known for its work in Brown v. Board of Education, its historic involvement began in 1935, when the legal defense fund lawyers Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall won the legal battle to admit a student to the University of Maryland.

Education has been the cornerstone of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's push for social justice. The legal defense fund knows the truth of the language in the Brown decision, which states: ``It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.''

So I am pleased that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, under the distinguished leadership of Elaine Jones, is continuing its long tradition of legal action in the education area. America is better because of that tradition.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings), our distinguished chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, so much, and I am happy to stand with him tonight as we embark upon the 50th anniversary of that extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

Today I would like to add my voice to those of my fellow colleagues as we stand here to pay homage to the momentous Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Our Nation's history and, indeed, the history of African Americans and other traditionally underrepresented minorities was forever altered by this decision made on May 17, 1954. A group of 13 courageous parents took part in a class action suit filed against the Board of Education of Topeka Public Schools, and in doing so pledged to seek better educational opportunities for their children.

Parents today are still seeking those opportunities for their children. During this time in our Nation's history, public education was not as extensive as it is today in terms of curriculum content or even the length of the school year. Further, schooling for African- American children living in the South was particularly nonexistent and was even prohibited by law in some States. That is why the Brown decision reverberates so deeply throughout the South and, indeed, throughout the entire Nation. We must remember that the Brown decision finally moved away from Plessy v. Ferguson where the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in schools and public places including schools as long as it was separate but equal. Those facilities were there and this is what happened given the Brown decision.

However, although the Brown decision was certainly one of the most critical Supreme Court decisions of the last century, it did not abolish school desegregation on its own. It took the dogged persistence of committed individuals and civil rights organizations to pressure school officials with the support of the Federal Government to force them to comply with the law. About 15 years passed after the Brown decision in 1954, before Southern schools were truly desegregated. And in my home State of California, the segregated educational system also remained for some time after the 1954 decision.

Following the Brown decision, many schools in the Upper South began the process of desegregating their schools, but in the Deep South resistance to change was strong. An opinion poll taken at the time showed that up to 80 percent of the Southern whites opposed desegregation efforts. The lack of a clear deadline for enforcing the desegregation of schools was an issue. And the Supreme Court mandated on May 31 of 1955 that school desegregation should proceed with all deliberate speed. However, such language was unclear, and it continued to frustrate African Americans and other civil rights supporters and caused opponents of desegregation to emerge in the form of the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan.

The resulting increase in violent attacks against African Americans was not enough to deter the young African-

American students like the Little Rock Nine from seeking access to a better education for themselves. We can look back on the struggles of these determined African-American students as a turning point, not only in expanding educational access for all but also as a defining moment in this Nation's civil rights movement, a moment that we do not wish to have turned away or taken off of the radar screen, Mr. Speaker.

We have made progress in terms of dismantling desegregation in our Nation, but we continue to face new challenges in terms of meeting the educational needs of our ever-changing population where minority students are still receiving unequal education.

I am gratified to have lived through the changes brought on by the Brown decision to our Nation's schools and, indeed, our way of life. But I am still dedicated and committed to ensuring that African- American students have quality education in our schools. I am deeply committed to ensuring that this peace that was brought on by the Supreme Court does not become a dismantled or even an eradicated piece of civil rights legislation and movement that this country certainly deserved to keep.

As we embark upon the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Congressional Black Caucus will be looking with great interest as to what this Supreme Court and, indeed, this deliberative body does for the African-American children of this country.