Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, I rise to discuss--along with my friends and colleagues on the Senate floor--what is a momentous anniversary for our country, the 62nd anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, its legacy, and the work that still remains before us.

I thank my colleagues for standing and speaking on this anniversary and understanding that it was 62 years ago today the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that separate could never be equal, that under the law--at the very least--every child born in America, regardless of the color of their skin, had the right to pursue a quality education.

The Court found that separate schooling of children based on their race was in direct violation of the 14th amendment of the Constitution. The Court's finding is perhaps best summarized by this excerpt from Justice Warren's opinion when he said:

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ``tangible'' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

Those were historical words. This not only made clear at the time that the deep and profound illegality of segregation was real, but it set a legal standard for generations in posterity that reflects our deepest held American values, that we as a nation believe in equality. We as a nation believe in our interdependency to one another.

In the decades since the Brown ruling, the implementation of the Court's decision has contributed to a lot of progress. Frankly, I stand here today because of the progress and momentum that was exhibited by that decision.

Right before Brown v. Board of Education, only about one in seven African Americans, then compared with more than one in three Whites, held a high school degree.

Today we have come so far the Census Bureau reports that 87 percent of Black adults have a high school degree, nearly equal to that of Whites, which are at 89 percent. Before Brown, only about 1 in 40 Blacks earned a college degree. Now, more than one in five Black students are going to college. This is extraordinary progress we have seen in our country, something we should all celebrate.

Under the law, at the very least, the Supreme Court clearly affirmed all Americans' right to a quality education and in doing so affirmed equal value, dignity, and worth of our kids.

However, it is also worth reflecting on the anniversary of Brown that our Nation has struggled to live up to these standards in full. Brown advanced a civil rights movement that helped desegregate many parts of American society, but we still have work to do. Let us take this anniversary to recognize not just our progress, to celebrate not just that milestone, but to understand that the work of equality, the work of recognizing the value, the worth, and how much we need each other as a community still goes on.

In fact, just yesterday, six decades after the Supreme Court in Brown struck down the doctrine of ``separate but equal,'' a Federal judge ruled that a school district in Mississippi was continuing to operate a segregated, dual secondary school system: one set of schools for Whites and one set of schools for Blacks.

Across the country right now, about 40 percent of Black and Latino students attend intensely segregated schools--meaning more than 90 percent minority student body--and White students are similarly segregated from their peers of color. Only 14 percent of Whites attend schools that one would consider multicultural, multiracial, and reflecting the diversity of our country, and too many of our schools continue to fall short of our low-income and minority students. In other words, too many of our students of color and of low-income students are concentrated in poor-performing schools.

More than 1.1 million American students are attending over 1,200 high schools in our Nation that fail to graduate one-third of their students. To me, this is an outrage. It is an immoral affront to whom we are. We still have work to do.

Our Nation is still struggling to live up to the ideals and, indeed, the judicial standards set by Brown in the realm of education in many ways because of our failure to live up to this standard in so many other areas of our American life.

There still exists, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, that ``Other America.'' Dr. King spoke of this in the year before I was born--in 1968--about the ``Other America.'' He spoke of the duality that persisted, the disparities in housing, education, employment, and in income. He spoke of what he referred to very pointedly as the myth of time, the misguided idea that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice, the idea that things will work out for themselves.

As happy as I am about the progress we have made as a country, I have to say that we still have so much work to do almost 50 years after King spoke those words. Time has not solved the problem. There remain challenges in our country. This duality is more subtle in some ways than it was in 1954, but there still exists injustice in America. From housing to education, de facto segregation along socioeconomic and racial lines has blended together, in many ways replacing what was then de jure segregation.

Census data has shown that residential segregation by race has declined very slowly but that Whites still live largely in neighborhoods with low minority density. People of color still live in neighborhoods with high minority density. Many of these neighborhoods were designed through policies that were discriminatory against minorities. We still are seeing the legacies of those policies from redlining to FHA policies, to HUD policies that were designed to create segregation. The legacy of that still exists in segregated neighborhoods today.

While poverty rates among African Americans has fallen over the past half century--something we should be proud of--Black poverty rates are still more than double that of Whites. That means the same for kids today. Children of color are often twice as likely to be poor as White children.

In fact, one out of the three Hispanic children growing up today are growing up in poverty. One in six African-American children live in what is called extreme poverty on less than $8 a day.

This is not who we are as a nation. Our children are our greatest natural resource. In a global, knowledge-based economy, when we are competing against other nations from Germany to Japan, in this kind of economy, the most valuable natural resource a nation has is not oil or coal or gas, it is the genius of our children.

Many people think Brown was about achieving greater justice for Black people, but what we really understand--especially in retrospect--as we see African Americans now contributing in every area of life, the reality is this was about bringing justice to all of America.

Brown was saying that, hey, we as a country cannot stand if we are apart because a house divided does fall. Brown was saying the truth is, we do better when we are together, like the old African saying that says: If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together--because we as a country need each other. It is like those words on the Jefferson Memorial, written in our Declaration of Independence, when we knew--to make this country work--we needed one another, so much so that those Founders pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

In this competitive nature, we cannot afford to waste things. Worse than the gulf coast oilspill, we are wasting the potential of our children when we leave so many floundering in poverty and lack of educational opportunities. Children growing up in poverty right now have dramatically negative life outcomes compared to people who are not growing up in poverty. In fact, right now in America, where 20 percent of children live in poverty, only 9 out of every 100 kids born in poverty will make it to college, often an index of being able to be successful, manifesting your genius, finding greater ways to contribute to the whole.

We have work to do. In particular, we have work to do in an area that drives so much of the injustice in our country. One of the great ways we are seeing injustice in my generation that was not the case in my parents' generation, that was not a reality in the 1950s, has been the criminal justice system. Something has happened and exploded. Injustice in our country is growing like a cancer on the soul of our country.

The same Supreme Court where that great case was decided, where written above the wall is ``Equal Justice Under Law,'' we now see a nation that has a criminal justice system that is not affording equal justice to all Americans.

Unfortunately, we see that often falling among racial lines. We have this explosive drug war, which has not been a War on Drugs, but it has been a war on people, particularly the most vulnerable people in our society, from people who are addicted to substances, from people who have mental illnesses, from people who are poor, and, yes, disproportionately directed toward minorities.

We now see a criminal justice system where we know, based upon data analysis, there is no difference between Blacks and Whites in usage of drugs. In fact, there is no difference in selling drugs between Blacks and Whites, but the reality is, if you are African American in this country, you are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for those drug crimes.

If you are churned into the criminal justice system as a result of those arrests, just one arrest for a nonviolent drug offense--something that the last two Presidents have admitted to doing--and you are arrested for that, then you find yourself in a world where, as the American Bar Association says, you have literally 40,000-plus collateral consequences, where you find it exceptionally difficult to find employment when you finish with your sentence. You find it incredibly difficult to get a loan to perhaps start a business, to even attempt to get a business license or a Pell grant. If you can't feed yourself, in many cases, you find it hard to even get food stamps or to find public housing assistance.

We now live in a nation where we have so overincarcerated disproportionately some areas of our country, that today 1 in 13 Africa Americans are prevented by law from even voting. They have lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction. In some States, the overincarceration for drug crimes is so great that we see, in places such as Florida, that one out of every five African Americans has lost their right to vote.

This isn't just affecting those people who are churned into the system, it is affecting their children as well.

Today in America, one in nine Black kids are growing up with a parent behind bars, which means it affects their financial well-being and it affects their ability to rise up out of poverty because they are being thrust down into it. In fact, a recent study has shown that we as a country--as a whole--would have 20 percent less poverty if we had incarceration rates similar to those in other industrial nations.

So here we celebrate the anniversary of this momentous decision that took a huge step for our Nation in the march toward justice and equality, but because of staggering injustices like we see in our broken criminal justice system, kids often struggle more in school and are poorer and have fewer opportunities for success.

So 62 years after Brown, we know our schools don't exist in vacuums. They exist because of the communities around them. When communities of privilege have the same amount of violations of drug crimes as communities of poverty, yet the communities of poverty experience a criminal justice system that has so much more incarceration, we are often condemning children to having greater hills to climb and greater mountains of injustice in front of them.

I stand here on this day to celebrate so much this great decision but also to remind us that we have work to do in this country until we can begin to live up to this ideal of patriotism, which is love of country and which to me necessitates that we love each other. We don't always have to agree with one other. We don't always have to get along. But we have to recognize that every one of us in this Nation has value, has worth. We need each other, and we need our children to do well because if my neighbor's child loses, I lose. If they go to prison, I pay. But if they succeed--if they become a teacher, an artist, a biologist, an inventor, a businesswoman--then they contribute to this country and my children benefit because your children succeeded. That is the story of America.

We cannot afford to leave people behind as we, as a nation, strive for excellence and greatness. We cannot be a nation that is truly reaching its potential if we are wasting so much of that potential on the sidelines.

I would be remiss if I did not also speak to a process issue. While we are still working to fulfill the vision of Brown, it is more urgent now than ever that we have a fully functioning Supreme Court. We were fortunate to have had a functioning Supreme Court in 1954. There were nine Justices doing their job, a President willing to do his job, and a Senate--all working in a time of great tumultuous change in our Nation. People were focused and steadfast--in both parties--toward creating greater justice. With people in their seats, in their jobs, I have faith in America and in our ability to get it right.

We need to make sure that today we give every opportunity to get the job done, to do the work that is necessary. It is important that we fill positions and vacancies, and the one on the Supreme Court now is clearly needed.

So today is an important day of remembrance, but history shows that we cannot simply get stuck applauding our past. The glory and greatness of ancestry is truly worthy of our reverence. But if we are to honor those who struggled before, if we are to honor those milestones, if we are to celebrate the history that shows us at our best when we came together--Black American, White American, Latino American, Indian American, Asian American--if we are to celebrate those great days of the past, we must celebrate them not just with cheers and remembrances but by redoubling our work in accordance with those values.

We must have a sense of urgency. Time is not neutral. We must use it. We cannot just count the great days of the past. We must make this day count as we continue the work of our Nation, as we continue to be the country that we say we are--a nation of liberty and justice for all.

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