By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. president Joe Biden met Thursday with family members of the plaintiffs in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which banned racial segregation in U.S. public schools.
Biden, a Democrat who is running for re-election in November, commemorated the 70th anniversary of the ruling during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House.
Despite the landmark ruling, racial segregation in schools across the country effectively continues, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office says educational inequality continues to impact children of color.
Schools “remain divided along racial, ethnic, and economic lines,” with about 18.5 million children attending schools where 75 percent or more of students “were of one race or ethnicity,” according to a 2022 report from the GAO.
Biden has made racial equality a priority of his administration. He chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black and Asian American woman to serve as vice president. He nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, and sought to create a Cabinet that reflects America’s diversity.
“Every day there is an acknowledgment from our president that we are not where we should be, but we are certainly not where we used to be,” said Stephen Benjamin, a senior adviser to Biden and former mayor of Columbia, South Carolina. told reporters. “There is still a lot of work to be done.”
Brown v. Board of Education was consolidated with four other cases from the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.
Biden met with Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father, Oliver Brown, was the lead prosecutor in Brown v. Board, plaintiff Victoria Benson, Adrienne Jennings Bennett, a plaintiff in one of the consolidated cases, Boiling v. Sharpe, and John Stokes, a plaintiff in another of the consolidated cases, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
“We’re still in the middle of the battle over whose children we invest in. Any time we can talk about failing, underfunded public schools, there’s a problem,” Henderson said after the meeting.
“We must continue to fight on all fronts,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP civil rights group, who also attended the meeting.
Biden, who is running against former President Donald Trump, a Republican, in the 2024 race for the White House, has seen his approval slip among some Black voters, especially Black men, and his campaign is trying to shore up their support.
Trump said in a recent Time magazine interview that “there is a clear anti-white sentiment” in the United States and that his allies support dismantling corporate and government programs to combat racism and increase diversity.
The Supreme Court heard Brown v. Board twice: once in June 1953 and again in December 1954, with Earl Warren as chief justice.
In a unanimous decision dated May 14, 1954, the court ruled that racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“In the field of public education, there is no place for the doctrine of ‘separate but equal,’” Warren wrote.
Biden will hold a series of events related to the Brown v. Board anniversary, including remarks at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington on Friday and a commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s liberal arts college, in Atlanta. on Sunday.
Benjamin, the president’s senior adviser, said Thursday that the Biden administration had invested more than $16 billion in historically black colleges and universities.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Steve Gorman and Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Tom Hogue and Alistair Bell)
