The Black Freedom Struggle and the Enduring Dilemma of Brown

Abstract

statistics are all too familiar, revealing an equally distressing sense of normality and resignation, even fatalism. A Wednesday March 10, 2004 headline in the Oakland Τήbune bemoaned Low marks again for city schools. Students of color, mostly African Americans and Latino Americans, constitute the vast majority of Oakland's school population. In 2000, 41 percent of Oakland schools were ranked in the lowest 10 percent of schools statewide. In 2004, 43 percent of Oakland's schools received a rank of 1, the lowest mark on the state's 10-point ranking system, ... the Academic Performance Index.1