Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 8, 1991 TAG: 9102080337
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But the winter winds push hard across the Great Plains, so hard that when 7-year-old Linda Brown trudged through the railroad yard to get to her bus stop every morning, the winds first brought tears to her eyes, and then sometimes froze them on her face.
More than once, her father came home to find both his wife and daughter in tears. "My father pondered why should my child have to walk through a railroad yard when there was a school four blocks from my house?" his daughter now says.
But the all-white Sumner Elementary School turned Oliver Brown and his daughter away that September. So to earn a four-block walk to school, the family was forced on a four-year legal journey that took them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They were the Browns in Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark case that declared segregation unconstitutional. But when the decision was handed down in May 1954, the little girl who figured at the center of the lawsuit had no idea what was at stake.
"The thing that was utmost in my mind was I was so glad my sister wouldn't have so far to walk to school," Linda Brown Smith recalled during a visit to Roanoke Thursday.
In fact, she said, the full impact of the case didn't hit her until years later when her son came running home from school to announce: "We studied you today." And one of his friends quizzed him: "You didn't know that was your mom?"
Ironically, two of Oliver Brown's daughters wound up as teachers in the hometown whose school system they once challenged. Smith teaches in a Head Start program there; Cheryl Brown Henderson now works for the Kansas Department of Education.
And both are working to keep their father's legacy alive.
In a talk at Hollins College, they voiced concern about the resegregation of American schools, if not by law, then by housing patterns. Magnet schools, such as the ones Roanoke operates, are a way to make sure inner-city schools stay integrated, Smith said.
The sisters also are worried about the lack of black role models in schools - a problem that's increasing, they say.
"Blacks aren't going into education the way they once did, because other opportunities opened up," Henderson said. Now, 10 percent of the nation's teachers are black; by the end of the decade, as older teachers retire, only 5 percent will be, she said.
And many white teachers simply write off their black students, she said. "Educators have to stop looking at minority females as if they have a T-shirt that says, `Teen-age Pregnancy in Progress' or `Future Welfare Mother.' And they have to stop looking at young black males as if they are wearing a T-shirt that says, `I'm on my way to jail.'"
The problem is becoming more acute just as classrooms are becoming more ethnically diverse, Henderson noted. That's not just an educational challenge, she said, but an economic one, because demographics dictate that the American economy of the 21st century will rely more heavily on women and other minorities.
The trouble is, Henderson said, too many white teachers are "ethnic illiterates" who don't know anything about the contributions that minorities have made in American history.
To help change that, the sisters have established a non-profit foundation to award scholarships and encourage more blacks to choose education as a career.
by CNB