How Far Have We Really Come with Civil Rights?

Take athletics. It took a black man named Jackie Robinson to ignore the hate of “white” baseball fans to overcome the notion that Major League Baseball should stay a white only league. It was just as important that a white man named Branch Rickey hired Robinson to play for his Brooklyn Dodgers. He also drafted Roberto Clemente to open the door for Latino players to enter the MLB.

If we take that as an outline, those men did not see the color or the ethnicity they saw baseball players and baseball executives. Even with that there were those who fiercely objected. Those objections had to be silenced.

Then the question is again how far have we really come in the last 50 years say? Let’s examine the school system to help us answer.

With 43% percent of American school students being non-white you might assume that the quality of education has improved. According to a recent Washington Post story (Report: Segregation in U.S. Schools is Increasing By Matthew BiggReuters Wednesday, August 29, 2007) the The United States risks becoming a nation in which a new majority of non-white young people will attend “separate and inferior” schools, the report said.”Resegregation … is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated — the South,” it said.

Other media sources and educational studies have revealed that over the recent decades non – white students have been subjected to inferior schools lacking in adequate supplies and less desirable quality of teaching.

No one is going to fault a parent for finding the best school for there kids but not everyone has many choices. Why? Good question. Studies have shown that throughout the United States, the whiter the school student body the more funds and higher paying teachers there are. Non-white schools are more run down and the funds are only a fraction of the white schools. Some say we have gone backwards.

I can hear the people saying “it’s those kids ruining the schools”. Yes that’s true. Kids ruin things. But the the richer schools get things fixed. Simple as that. If the better schools were handled the same way they would be ruined too.

So let’s remember the efforts that those before us have made and build on it. Stop looking at eachother by separate race. The fact is there is but one race. The human race.