"One More River to Cross" Charles Lawrence

I'm not really certain about what Lawrence is arguing here. I think he's trying to say that while desegregation was a step, it was by no means the end to inequality that people who were anti segregation thought it would be.

From what I have gotten from this reading, Lawrence believes that just having black students learn in the same classrooms as white students do won't give them equal opportunities. More has to be done than just bringing students from different races together.

The problem of inequality, especially when it comes to in jobs and education, has a deep root. Segregation was just the stem of the problem. The root of it runs much deeper and it much harder to pin point.

“It is the thesis of this paper that the Brown decision fostered a way of thinking about segregation that has allowed both the judiciary and society at large to deny the reality of race in America, that the recognition of that reality is critical to the framing of any meaningful remedy-judicial or political-and that Brown may ultimately be labeled a success only insofar as we are able to make it stand for what it should have stood for in 1954.”

I think what Lawrence means by that is that desegregation made white people think that their responsibility to people of color was done with. Everyone was mixed together now, everything was “equal”, so racism must no longer exist. What Lawrence is saying, at least what I think he's saying, is that Brown Vs. Board might have done more harm than good because at the time it didn't stand for what it should have stood for. In other words, it was more about mixing races than it was about creating a real equality among them. This is a problem because now many people don't want to admit that there is still inequality. They think that just because society has been desegregated means that there is no longer barriers blocking students of color from getting the same quality of treatment, education, and then later on, jobs, that white students enjoy.

“The third is that the institution of segregation is organic and self-perpetuating. Once established it will not be eliminated by mere removal of public sanction but must be affirmatively destroyed.”

Here Lawrence shows that just by getting rid of segregation won't do the trick. The problem is that segregation labeled people of color as inferior. When the governement let black students attend an all white school, they weren't making the statement of “here are these black kids, they are now your equals!”

It was more along the lines of “They're here and there's nothing you can do about it so just tolerate them”.

That's definitely harmful because it teaches the idea of tolerance rather than believing that people are equal.

I really hate that word tolerance. Anyone else hate it too? I would hate to have someone say about me “Just tolerate her!”. How horrible, to be “tolerated” but not accepted. Not understood because people don't care to understand. Just tolerated because you're there and there's nothing that other people can do about it. I'd imagine that's how some of the first women in the armed forces must have felt. Hated but tolerated.

“The parent's immediate goal was largely fulfilled. The school was successful in engendering strong positive self-images among both children and parents, in creating an atmosphere in which children enjoyed learning, in expanding the school's role into a concern for the whole child and that child's family, and even in increasing scores on standardized tests. But there was little we could do to realize the parents' more long-range dreams. Even if we controlled the school we controlled little else. This became apparent as we began to talk about where our students would go when they left Highland Park. What were we preparing our children for? Would there be places for them to use what we were teaching them as fulfilled productive”

This part of the reading had confused me the first few times I read over it. At first I thought it had said that the students from the Highland Park school were all black, and that they did well because they were being taught by black teachers who they could look up and because they had access to the same materials that white kids had. But then I read it again and saw that this was a school that had white students in it too. And that the students did do better in school and had higher self esteem and test scores, but then parents were worried about what would become of them after school. Since the root of the problem runs much deeper than just a poor school system in city schools, but also prejudices when it comes to hiring people for jobs.


I'm still a little confused about this reading. I think I have the main idea of it, but I'm not positive. Right now I feel as if all I've written so far could be wrong. I think that talking about it in class will help me more.