[Chat] Talk on Brown v. Board of Education, 54 years later

[Emil Volcheck]

Hello, neighbors,

This Sunday morning, the Baltimore Ethical Society will
host an address by a University of Baltimore professor
on school desegregation.

The history behind Brown v. Board of Education is truly
amazing.  I recently learned about one example that
helps demonstrate how Thurgood Marshall and
NAACP colleagues laid the groundwork for Brown v. Board
of Education very carefully.  For instance, they used
Plessy v. Ferguson ("separate but equal") to win
the admission of black students to Poly by arguing that
Baltimore had only one elite engineering high school
and that the city could afford only one.  Therefore,
in the absence of an equal alternative, blacks must
be admitted to Poly.  That was one of the cases
that led to Brown v. Board of Education.

This Sunday's talk should be a good one.  I've
appended the description below, and you can find
descriptions of other talks here:

    http://baltimoreethicalsociety.org/Calendar.php  .

Thanks,

--Emil

---

Brown at 54: New Challenges of the Hardening of the Categories

by Lenneal J. Henderson, Professor of Government and Public
Administration, University of Baltimore

A trail of cases led to Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court
Decision and to today's controversies in educational equity,
especially the recent Supreme Court school decisions in Louisville and
Seattle in 2007 that are radically redefining the Brown
landscape. This platform discusses the shift in demographic,
socioeconomic, and educational context and content of school
segregation; the shift from rights to resources and the problem of
equitable public school financing; and battles over curriculum and
tracking, including the disproportionate number of non-white students
in special education and learning disability tracks and the quality of
education about issues of multiculturalism and diversity.

Speaker bio:

Lenneal J. Henderson is Distinguished Professor of Government and
Public Administration and Senior Fellow at the William Donald Schaefer
Center for Public Policy and a Senior Fellow in the Hoffberger Center
for Professional Ethics at the University of Baltimore where he was
formerly a Henry C. Welcome Fellow. Dr. Henderson has been a
consultant to federal, state, and local government, the corporate
sector, and the nonprofit sector for more than thirty years in the
areas of housing, education policy, energy management, environmental
policy, and public management. He recently completed service as
Interim Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs at North
Carolina Central University in Durham. He is the author or editor of
four books and forty-two articles. He received his A.B., M.A., and
Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

When:
10:30 AM, Sunday, November 30th

Where:
Baltimore Ethical Society,
306 W. Franklin St.
(The Old Congress Hotel)