ABSTRACT
Although our nation has made significant strides in the area of civil rights, the United States remains a society where racial segregation is the norm. The desegregation of schools was a landmark in the movement toward racial justice. And fifty or more years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, public schools in our nation are increasingly segregated by race and class. Surveys report that a large percentage of white Americans continue to believe the racist assumption that black people are academically and intellectually inferior. The persistence of racist thinking and action is the social backdrop undermining efforts to end discrimination in education on all levels. Large numbers of black students from various class backgrounds attended predominantly white colleges and universities in the wake of the civil rights movement, but that is no longer the case today. Since the public school system fails to educate a huge majority of black students from poor and working-class backgrounds, 96this group is ill-prepared to complete high school and will probably never seek higher education.
