There is a high road and a low road to education in America.  Travelers on the first are largely suburban, white, and middle class.  Those who trudge the second are urban, usually black, and most often poor.  Superficially, the two roads are well-paved routes to the good life.  But they are not, in fact the same.  The high road leads from well-kept homes, through bright, well-financed schools to colleges and universities, then on to a lucrative life in the suburbs.  The low road leads out of the ghettos, through dark and aging classrooms and oftentimes returns to the dismal slums from which its travelers come.

   The two roads have been running through American history since its beginning.  During the more than two hundred years of slavery it was a crime to teach slaves to read or write.  Consequently, many people who have been around blacks all their lives and who had never seen one who was literate, concluded that they were not capable of being educated, that they did not have good minds.  The scholarly slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, expounded the equality of all men, but excluded blacks who he said had “a very strong and disagreeable odor” and were “inferior to… whites in the endowment of body and mind.”
 

    The generally low regard for black people and a desire to continue exploiting them after slavery made it easy to justify third-rate black education in the segregated schools of the South and in the North’s so-called ghettos.  One of the major institutions for transmitting and perpetuating racism was the school system which, contrary to American myth, was neither “public,” in the sense of being responsive to blacks and other nonwhite minorities, nor able to educate, in the sense of meeting the needs of all the students and reflecting their diverse cultures, values, and histories.

   For fifty-eight years a Supreme Court-sanctioned public policy of separate but equal facilities for the races prevailed in the nation’s schools.  Upheld by law and official policy in Southern cities until 1954, this policy also had widespread legal support in the North.  Separate public schools were legal in New York until 1938, in Indiana until 1949, and in New Mexico and Wyoming until 1954.  While not backed by law in other states, separate schools were maintained for blacks in some communities in New Jersey, Illinois, and Ohio as late as the 1940s and 1950s.

   During the 1950s a series of court cases culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that public school segregation was unconstitutional, destroyed the legal underpinnings of the caste system.  But the decision prompted not only evasive tactics and delay, but also outright defiance….