“The Way We Learn”Separate and Unequal in

Metropolitan Detroit Schools

Brown v. Board of Education

May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Excerpts from Brown v. Board of Education

Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

……We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Metro Detroit is the greatest center of school segregation in the nation.

Segregation in Metro Detroit

The Detroit school district is 91% black and 3.7% white (2003).

Metro Detroit by Race

% white % black % other

Detroit 12.3 81.6 6.2Grosse Pointe Township 93.9 0.6 5.5West Bloomfield Township 84.2 5.2 10.6Bloomfield Hills 90.7 1.6 7.7Farmington Hills 82.9 6.9 10.1Birmingham 96.1 0.9 3.0

“The schools that say separate but equal is the most extensive social experiment in the United States history. We’ve tried it in thousands of places for many generations. It never worked anywhere as far as I can tell…There never was a separate but equal school system…

…a suburban teacher would call me and say, you know, we’ve read your study, we decided to actually go in and see what the same exact class looked [like] in a counter-part school in Chicago…it was like a different planet, a different society.”

From the testimony of Gary Orfield, witness for United for Equality and Affirmative Action (UEAA) in Grutter v. Bollinger

Exteriors

Northern High School, Detroit, MI

Marquette Middle SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High School Detroit, MI

Grosse Pointe South High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Farmington High SchoolFarmington, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Interiors/Halls

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Marquette Middle SchoolDetroit, MI

Northern High School, Detroit, MI

Northern High SchoolDetroit, MI

Northern High SchoolDetroit, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Classrooms

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Martin Luther King, Jr. Senior High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Harrison High SchoolFarmington Hills, MI

Libraries

Northern High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Roeper High SchoolBirmingham, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Point, MI

Cafeterias

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High School Detroit, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Pointe, MI

Bathrooms

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Cass Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Northern High SchoolDetroit, MI

Northern High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Roeper High SchoolBirmingham, MI

Athletic Facilities

Marquette Middle SchoolDetroit, MI

Crockett Technical High SchoolDetroit, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Point, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Point, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Point, MI

Grosse Pointe North High SchoolGrosse Point, MI

Metro Detroit is the greatest center of school segregation in the nation.

Over one quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest attend 99-100% minority schools. (2003)

62.5% of black students in Michigan go to schools that are 90-100% minority. This is the highest rate in the nation. (2003)

25% of Latino students in the Midwest are in schools that are 90-100% minority. (2003)

Nationally, almost half of all schools have less than 10% black and Latino students; by contrast, one-tenth of all schools were 90-100% black and Latino. (2003)

115 of the 185 cities and townships in the six-county Detroit region are more than 95% white. (Detroit News 1/14/02)

Segregated Magnet SchoolsExcerpt from Testimony of Gary Orfield, witness for United for Equality and Affirmative Action (UEAA) in Grutter v. Bollinger

Q. Let me ask you about a slightly different category of schools, a school that’s somewhat more privileged but it’s still a segregated school, maybe like Cass Tech or like a segregated suburban school with an overwhelmingly black or Latino population?

R. Yes.

Q. What are the implications for college, first access, and second achievement GPA for students from schools like that?

R. Well, I have a special interest in magnet schools, magnet from out of desegregation plans and I have studied them in Chicago and all other places.

Magnet schools give you a chance, but even though it may look like a very elite school inside the city, it really looks like a very average or low average school in suburban terms.

So, my own children went to a school that was a magnet school in Chicago Public Schools which was predominately African American, and had some wonderful teachers and programs in it.

And that school was recruited, the colleges do recruit from schools like that pretty intensively. There are students who do make it, but they’re not nearly as well prepared as they should be.

Basically that school as best I could tell, was equivalent to a lower level of suburban school. That school had the only debate team that was left out of 65 Chicago high schools at that time.

When the debate team went off to a suburban school, they would see paid staff person working with them, hey would see a library, and they see kids going to debate camp, they see this and that and the other thing. And this school had none of those things there.

They had a volunteer, they had no materials, they had no room, they didn’t have a media center to support them, they had nothing. And they were the only ones in the city who could even amount a debate team at that point.

So you have these inequalities even in the elite schools. We found that magnet schools really on average offered a lot better set of opportunities and teachers and background and so forth than the non-magnet schools. But they were not competitive with good suburban schools in terms of the offerings. They had a lot of remarkable and talented young people in them though. […]

2000-2001 School Statistics (Detroit News)

Drop Out ACT Student/ $ PerRate Score Teacher Ratio

Student

Detroit 18.4 16.6 19.6 6.584

Grosse Pointe 1.0 23.3 17.9 9,394

Farmington 2.7 22.7 18.4 9,568

West Bloomfield 2.3 23.6 18.4 8,386

Birmingham 1.2 23.9 16.5 11,378

Realize the promise of Brown v. Board of

Education!

Integration Now!

April 1st, 2003 Supreme Court hearing of Grutter v. Bollinger

Shanta Driver, BAMN National Spokesperson Speaking at 40 year anniversary of the 1963 March on

Washington

Join the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)

www.bamn.com

Photographers:Maricruz Lopez, Edward Cole, Liana Mulholland, Attie Pollard, Ebony Ross (L-R)