Instead of learning from the past to solve today s problems, these politicians perpetuate the past by whitewashing it. This disingenuousness does more than distort commemoration; it s crippling our future.
The Brown decision was made up of five lawsuits, including one that originated in Virginia when, in 1951, students at Robert Russa Moton High School staged a walkout in protest.
Massive Resistance was a period in Virginia history when public schools closed rather than integrate Black students and white students. As a result, many students lost years of education. That's why Virginia created a special scholarship program 20 years ago.
This summer, Congress added the Moton Museum and other sites that played an important role in desegregating schools in South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, D.C. to the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park in Topeka, Kansas.
“We’ve been wanting to find a way to do a program like this,” Magill said. “In my own department, we have slowly been trying to diversify the curriculum and trying to get more voices of different authors from different racial backgrounds. The fact that this took fire now, of course, given everything that’s going on in the world, it’s even more essential.”
Larissa Smith, Longwood’s provost, said the program was a product of “student interest as well as faculty recognizing that there was a need.”
“Those of us who have been engaged in teaching those courses have for a long time felt we needed something in our curriculum that would allow students to explore more broadly race and ethnic studies,” said Smith, a scholar of African American and Virginia history.