There is a lot going on right now in the news about the Supreme Court Justices ruling to limit the use of race in school plans for integration. Some are saying that this specifically overturns 1954\’s Brown v. Board of Education in its entirety, while others are saying that this updates the legislation to address the reality of our pluralistic society. Most of what I have heard and everything I have read have not come from anyone who participated in any of the programs developed by various Boards of Education to enforce integration in our public schools.

I think it would be more beneficial to all of us to be hearing from those people right about now. not just those from the first of the 53 years since the Brown versus Board but also from those from the last thirty years, twenty years — even ten years, since the racial divides in our country have changed so much over time.

Oddly, as a white person, I am one of those people: I was a racial minority at every school I attended after fourth grade except the private school (10th grade, for six weeks). An academic paper was written about several of these schools — the magnet school programs in my county that and I attended — by George Washington University professor Jeffrey Henig, called \’Race and Choice in Montgomery County, Maryland Magnet Schools.\’ (Those without access to an account can download the PDF of the document from my site.)

I couldn\’t find demographics for the schools I attended for the years 1985-1996 (when I left school), but my memories regarding race, school, and friendship are fairly clear. Every school I attended from kindergarten on was very racially diverse. I don\’t remember paying much attention to how many of the kids around me were one color or another until I was 10. My teacher that year was a hippie who began educating , me, and the rest of our class on racial politics. As a result, it was that year that I first noticed that the population of the new school I was attending was predominantly black, but I don\’t recall that ever bothering me. That year was my second year in the magnet program. At the time they didn\’t have a magnet school for sixth grade, so I went back to my home school for a year and then returned to the magnet program at a different school for seventh and eighth grades.

I don\’t really remember the demographics for my sixth grade year; in my (white girl) memory, it seemed to be pretty even between black and white, with maybe about 40% both ways and the other 20% going to various Asian, Hispanic, or Latino-descent groups. But my years at the magnet schools were definitely different demographics, and once in middle school it was a breakdown that caused social pressure among us, though I\’m not sure how many of us at the time realized how much of it was due to race, or all the politics behind the wall that we all created. There were three grades in our school of about seven hundred kids. Of those, two hundred were in the gifted and talented (GT) program (a magnet program) in grades seven and eight. If memory serves, no more than five of those kids were black or Latino in the two years I was there. One of the kids hung out strictly with the non-magnet kids, whom she knew before joining the GT program. Outside of the program there were maybe twenty other white kids in the whole school (, do you remember any better than I do? I can only remember about ten people for sure and then just the general impression that I remember from walking in the hallways between classes and stuff), a handful of Asian kids, and the rest of the population were black or Latino.

This generally created a bad vibe. Us GT kids were bussed in from all over the county. Some of us got on school buses at six in the morning — first class started at 7:55, last one ended at 2:45 — and didn\’t get home in the evening until

School Briggs Chaney MS
Enrollment 930
African American 45.27%
Asian 16.88%
Hispanic 10.54%
White 26.99%

School Eastern MS
Enrollment 883
African American 26.50%
Asian 14.16%
Hispanic 30.01%
White 29.11%

School Montgomery Blair HS
Enrollment 3292
African American 31.74%
Asian 14.76%
Hispanic 26.00%
White 27.19%

School Paint Branch HS
Enrollment 1805
African American 42.05%
Asian 18.95%
Hispanic 9.09%
White 29.58%