Race Relations in Schools and the Effects
             "Meanwhile, back at school, I feared my grades would suffer horribly because I couldn't concentrate. Every moment of every day was filled with awful surprises that began early each morning. I hoped and prayed I wouldn't get ejected before the end of school. I took heart because I could see signs of the kind of student activities that only come near the end of the school year"(Pattillo Beals 270).
             Throughout the course of our country's tarnished history, prejudice and racism have played an enormous role in the quality of education attained by our children. Until the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown vs. the Board of Education case in 1954, which stated that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, minorities, specifically blacks, and whites did not attend the same schools in the south. Rather, the Jim Crow reality existed in which "separate but equal" was the mindset held by the majority of the population. However, with the onset of the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, the educational atmosphere in our schools has changed somewhat. No longer is it simply racist whites attacking blacks. No, today, the target of students' criticism and hatred has branched out. Homosexuals, whites, blacks, Asians, athletes.... and the list goes on. The reality of the situation is that despite the tireless efforts of those people that came before us, discri!
             mination and hatred still exist in our schools today, only in a slightly different context.
             Riots, lynchings, protests, and years of litigation are what followed the move for equal treatment for all people beginning in the early 1950's. It seems ironic that such great lengths have to be reached in order for minority citizens to receive that which they are guaranteed under federal law. Melba Pattillo Beals' Warriors Don't Cry gives a searing in...