It took another seven years, until 2003, for the state to settle with the plaintiffs, 14 years after he first filed the suit. John Brittain and his team won on an appeal to the state Supreme Court in 1996. They see themselves as apart and separate because of the language they speak, because of the color of their skin, the origin of their parents." And that's what segregation does to children. That is like a damned spot in their being and their self-image. But what they cannot overcome is the stigma of separation. I think children can overcome the stigma of their ethnicity. One teacher testified, "I think that children can overcome the stigma of poverty. They talked about what they were not getting, what it meant for their students to go to school so close to kids who had great teachers, beautiful classrooms with solid ceilings, kids whose parents had cars and college degrees and ran insurance companies in town. The people John Brittain chose to testify did not just talk about the bleak education Hartford students were getting.
A public reckoning seems to be a required step, some sort of long process by which the gap between two unequal systems is made very clear to the people who are not paying attention. And in each case, something like this right here has occurred. There are only a few places in the country that have seriously committed to school integration over a long period of time. Of course, those who could testify most credibly about the conditions in the schools were employed by the schools.
They'd have to give legal testimony and also talk to the people of Connecticut. The people he'd be bringing into court would have to do double duty. So in addition to battling in the courts, he was preparing a second front, a battle that would happen for the newspapers and TV. He needed to create what the report called for- a sense of collective responsibility. By the time he won, if he won, John Brittain needed the public to want to integrate. He would get the courts on his side, but he needed the public even more. Desegregation would only stick if people chose it. He'd studied countless examples of legal victories that led to busing, which led to riots and white flight.Īnd he knew how easily people could call the whole thing a disaster and walk away. But John Brittain believed even if he won in court, they still might not actually get desegregation. Connecticut was a good candidate for this kind of case because of its constitution and legal precedent there. Soon after the report came out, John Brittain, with other lawyers and 17 plaintiffs, sued the state. Chana has the story of how that happened and what this rare, rare thing looks like today. In Hartford, they went from 11% of their students in integrated schools to nearly half. This is not a time of collective responsibility.Īnd then, even more remarkable, in at least one city in Connecticut, it happened. Around the country, cities were giving up on integration. This is the same year, the same exact year, that Boston began to walk away from busing after a decade of riots and basically civil war there over school integration. And then the commissioner said that the state, in the overwhelmingly white suburbs, should promote collective responsibility for integrating the public schools.
This is the kind of routine annual report sort of thing they put out, but the commissioner must have woken up feeling bold and literary the morning that he wrote this particular one, because he spoke of the tale of two Connecticuts, one wealthier, majority white Connecticut with great schools, another poor, majority black and Latino Connecticut with awful schools. I want to read to you a report from the state commissioner of education from the state of Connecticut written in 1987.
I don't even know what that means, but it just seems like something you say. We have the story today of an entire city trying, I mean actively trying, to integrate the schools. The governor and state legislator are actually right now trying to undo it- this is in Missouri- even though, as we said last week, integrating public schools has proven to be this incredibly effective way to improve education, to close the achievement gap between minority students and white students.Īnd today, we wanted to see what happens when integration is a plan that everybody is embracing, when people do not run away, or move, or resist, when they do what Kiana did and they seek it out, thinking that it will give them something valuable. And the white schools in that story, they did not want integration. Last week on our program, we did the first of two episodes on school desegregation, and we heard about a place that integrated schools by accident, really by accident.
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