still separate,still unequal

Joseph Palagonia

ENGW_1100_34

Professor Young

26 October 2015

      "One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. " I found this quote to be ironic, because both these individuals started movements on freedom, and making all individuals equal within the United States. If these individuals were alive today, they would be completely disheveled about the fact that there are school that take these individuals names, and are completely segregated with black and hispanic students. My second is a demonstration of how students feel about attending underprivileged schools such as the one in South Bronx,  "'Dear Mr. Kozol,' wrote the eight-year-old, 'we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?'". These school lack specific resources for students to feel comfortable in this specific learning environment, which can then lead to students lacking the will to succeed in school. My third quotation, "In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. 'This,' he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, 'would not happen to white children.' It is upsetting to think that white schools may gain more concetration or attention when it comes to helping with problems the school is facing. It is a form of segregation when thinking about it that all black schools do not receive the same sort of care that all whites do. This country is backwards, we should all be equal not separate but still unequal!