Lunch Hour

Visited a temporary exhibit at American History on the school desegregation battle. It's a pretty emotional place, and they do a good job at mixing facts, text, pictures, and artifacts. White contributors to the struggle get short play, but a few interesting facts I found were:

- Thurgood Marshall argued against one of the top lawyers in the U.S., named Davis, before the Supreme Court, a lawyer whom he'd skipped class to see as a law student at Howard.
- South Carolina spent over $11 million on education in 1930, and (despite almost equal numbers of students) just $1.4 million of that went to black schools.
- Massachusetts was the first state to outlaw segregation (by law in 1855) after an 1840's court case found that segregation was not unconstitutional.
- Howard University, which was the engine behind the legal struggle for civil rights, was founded in 1867 and named for a less-than-successful Union General, O. O. Howard, who commanded the ill-fated 11th Corps at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. His position at the head of the Freedman's Bureau in the Johnson administration (the first pro-civil rights Johnson administration) apparently was enough to overcome his wartime reputation for Howard University's founders.

The lesson of the segregated school struggle is that no matter what politicians say, separate is never equal. Even if equality is attained in spending or output, true equality won't be realized apart from unity. Today, both blacks and whites need to embrace that truth and step outside of comfort zones in the areas of life where our habits and fears keep us apart - leisure, music, travel, and above all church.