WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling that desegregated schools was about more than just race in education, President Joe Biden said Friday as he commemorated the 70th anniversary of the decision. It was about America’s promise, he said — that it is “big enough for everyone to succeed.”
“The work of building a democracy … worthy of our dreams begins with opening the doors of opportunity for all, without exception,” Biden told Black leaders at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. “Education is linked to freedom.”
In the case of Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. Board of Education, it was found that segregating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. While progress has been made, much more needs to be done, Biden said. And he claimed that Donald Trump and his allies are trying to roll back that progress.
Biden’s speech was part of an intensified effort to highlight his administration’s commitment to racial equality and to Black voters in general in the midst of the 2024 election campaign. Later Friday, he was scheduled to host leaders of the “Divine Nine,” historically black sororities and fraternities.
He met with Brown lawsuit plaintiffs in the Oval Office on Thursday and wooed voters in Atlanta and Milwaukee this week with a pair of Black radio interviews. On Sunday, he will deliver the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
The president, facing declining polls, is trying to shore up his support within a critical bloc that helped deliver his 2020 victory. According to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in March, 55 percent of Black adults approve of the way he handled his job as president, a figure well below that seen earlier in his presidency.
Biden told the museum audience that his administration has invested $16 billion in HBCUs, forgiven $160 billion in student loans and the Department of Education spent $50 million on teacher diversity. He said he knew there was more to do, but that Trump and his allies wanted to undermine his administration’s progress and go further by “taking away other fundamental freedoms, from the freedom to vote and the freedom to choose .”
“It’s very important to continue,” Biden said. “There’s a whole group of people trying to rewrite history, trying to erase history.”
In the decades since the Brown decision, American schools have been resegregating. The country is more diverse than ever. Yet about four in 10 black and Hispanic students attend schools where virtually all of their classmates are also students of color.
