Higher mortality rates among individuals with inadequate education reflect a complex causal pathway and the influence of confounding variables. Formidable efforts at social change would be necessary to eliminate disparities, but the changes would save more lives than would society's current heavy investment in medical advances. Spending large sums of money on such advances at the expense of social change may be jeopardizing public health.
This article describes the cultural consequences of the local school closing in a predominantly black community (Centerville) as a result of desegregation policies. Based on oral accounts of community members, the author unearths the diverse functions the former all-black school used to have in the community. Furthermore, the possible reasons for the nostalgia with which the community remembers its "own" school are analyzed. It is shown why the predominantly white schools to which today's students are bused cannot possibly "pass the test" of comparison with the former community school.And finally, the article reminds us of two promises of Brown, only one of which has been fulfilled in the case of Centerville. While racial segregation of schooling was indeed abolished in Centerville, the second promise of Brown--providing equal educational opportunities for all children irrespective of race--remains elusive at best. And the very institution that would be central to fulfilling the second promise of Brown--a school for which the town feels a sense of ownership--was closed for the sake of desegregation.The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, is widely perceived to be the landmark decision on the road to educational equality in the United States. Ruling that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," the Supreme Court seemed determined to lay the legal groundwork for the struggle by African-Americans to gain equal educational opportunity. As Alan Peshkin (1992) points out, the Brown decision made clear that there are limits to local control: Ideals formulated at the national level--such as racial integration--began to be seen as taking priority over the interests of local communities, should communities-or influential community members--be opposed to desegregation.Much of the literature that has dealt with the aftermath of Brown focuses on the struggle of blacks to secure the promise of Brown against widespread efforts of whites to subvert, obscure, and prevent effective desegregation (e.g. ~Parts of this article have been the basis for an oral presentation at the South Atlantic
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