Bell Calls for a Reassessment Of Separate But Equal Schools

Derrick A. Bell Jr., professor of Law, told a Center for Urban Studies forum yesterday that civil-rights groups' total commitment to school integration in all cases has shown itself "wasteful, dangerous and demeaning."

Bell said that 20 years of attempts to force compliance with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education have relegated black children "to a status that all too frequently is 'integrated and unequal.'"

"Two decades of desegregation progress have not ended the society's prediliction to favor schools where whites attend," Bell said, conceding that largely as a result, integrated schools sometimes educate black children better than all-black schools do.

But he said, "The long-delayed implementation of the decision, the continuing hostility of the society to its implementation, and the less-than-impressive statistics attributed to black students in desegregated settings" should prompt "much more work in developing the old 'separate but equal' concept of Plessy v. Ferguson," which he said failed largely because it was never meaningfully enforced.

"Black schools are not inferior simply because they are black," Bell said, citing "inherent, educational advantages in black schools, particularly for poor, ghetto blacks."

Bell said such advantages include not needing to "consume an inordinate amount of energy assuring and reassuring whites that the presence of blacks in their schools will not lower school quality."