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From Brown to Brown: Sixty-Plus Years of Separately Unequal Public Education

Document Type

Book Section

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

Ferguson's Fault Lines: The Race Quake That Rocked a Nation

Abstract

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black teenager, was killed by police officer Darren Wilson. Brown had just graduated from a public high school in the Normandy School District (Normandy Schools) located in Normandy, Missouri. He was scheduled to attend a for-profit college in Missouri a few days after his death. For all of his life, Normandy Schools were predominately Black, poor, and in academic distress. Take away the year 2014 and leave the words Brown, education, and segregation, and one would immediately think of a different time: the 1950s. One of the most famous decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history, Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, outlawed segregated and unequal education. Over 60 years later, the battle for integrated, quality education continues. This chapter examines the school district Michael Brown graduated from and situates its place in the Brown legacy.

Keywords

Michael Brown, Police Violence, Racial Segregation, Education Inequality, Brown v. Board of Education, Segregated Schools, Racial Inequality, Civil Rights

Publication Citation

Kimberly Jade Norwood, From Brown to Brown: Sixty-Plus Years of Separately Unequal Public Education, in Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake That Rocked a Nation 93-120 (Kimberly Jade Norwood ed., 2016)

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