Current Issues
After dealing with much struggle with segregation, one would think that it has finally come to an end. However, there are many concepts of segregation that that still exist in our country today.
Throughout the personal stories Hughes shows in his book, struggle was something that too many rural black families experienced daily. As of the present day, school desegregation is still a strong issue. For a few, the struggle they endured can be looked upon as a pyrrhic victory (a hard-fought win at to great of a cost), yet most describe more gains that losses for their families with the advent of Brown. The nuanced NBFP moved family members across generations to maintain the struggle for hope in education, because each generation’s nuanced black family pedagogy of struggle and of hope was enhanced by the notion that education could ultimately increase the options of their posterity.
Unfortunately, we learn from Dr. Hughes that racial issues and segregation are still around today because Brown seems to have been implemented with limited support and encouragement for critical educational preparation. It also seems to have been implemented disproportionately to do the least harm to most white families irrespective of the experiences of their black counterparts. Evidence to support his assertion today may be seen in places like Little Rock, Arkansas (as we write this web page), which has a desegregated school, although there is much worry that people are not approving and things may change. Apparently, the school leaders in Little Rock only hope that things can be resolved and the school does not change anymore than it already has. See Little Rock, Arkansas and Resegregation. Similarly in 2003, Wake County, NC, had a desegregation plan that had become a national model for the constitutionality of such plans with 94% approval from the local community, only to be broken by new policies of NC’s extremely right wing conservative elected officials before the plan could reach its tenth birthday. In many states including North Carolina and Arkansas, “white flight” has continued post-Brown with white families leaving urban and rural neighborhoods and schools where whites dip below the majority; and with more “privileged” white students transferring to private schools. Yet, another story broke as we wrote this portion of the text for the website involving desegregation in Omaha, Nebraska. The NAACP has sued Nebraska with this redistricting issue. The public school districts are thinking about redistricting into three separate districts. They would include one for mostly blacks, one for Latin@s, and one for whites. Their goal is to give students of color a chance to have control over their own school board. See Redistricting in Omaha. Although, if the schools stay the same, there will be a great mixture of ethnic groups that (with the right adult facilitation and collaboration) could increase the potential of desegregation as something positive in the community.