Biden says 1954 high court ruling on school desegregation was about more than education
WASHINGTON — The landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools was about more than just race in education, President Biden said as he commemorated the 70th anniversary of the decision. It was about the promise of America being “big enough for everyone to succeed.”
“The work of building a democracy ... worthy of our dreams starts with opening the doors of opportunity for everyone, without exception,” Biden told Black leaders at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington on Friday. “Education is linked to freedom.”
The Topeka, Kan., case, Brown vs. Board of Education, determined that separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. Though progress has been made, much more needs to be done, Biden said, contending that former President Trump and his allies are seeking to roll back that progress.
Biden’s speech was part of a stepped-up effort to highlight his administration’s commitment to racial equity and to Black voters more generally in the midst of the 2024 election campaign. Later Friday, he was to host leaders of the “Divine Nine” historically Black sororities and fraternities.
Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional.
Biden met with plaintiffs from the Brown court case Thursday in the Oval Office and he courted voters in Atlanta and Milwaukee via a pair of radio interviews. On Sunday, he’ll give the commencement speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
The president, facing sagging poll numbers, is seeking to shore up his support within a critical bloc that helped deliver his 2020 victory. In an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March, 55% of Black adults approved of the way he was handling his job as president — well below approval ratings from earlier in his term.
The president at the school’s commencement Sunday will have his most direct engagement with college students since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Biden told the museum crowd to cheers that his administration has invested $16 billion in HBCUs, that he has forgiven $160 billion in student loan debt and that the Department of Education has spent $50 million on teacher diversity. He said he knows there is more to do, but Trump and his allies want to gut his administration’s progress and go further by “taking away other fundamental freedoms, from the freedom to vote and the freedom to choose.”
“It’s a really important thing to continue,” Biden said. “We have a whole group of people out there trying to rewrite history, trying to erase history.”
In the decades since the Brown decision, American schools have been segregating again. The country is more diverse than it ever has been. Still, about 4 in 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.
Kim and Long write for the Associated Press.
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