ATLANTA — Quoting civil rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, LL.B. ’22, S.J.D. ’23, Jonathan Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, opened the latest Your Harvard event in Atlanta by saying, “Once again it bears repeating that this fight for equality of educational opportunity is not an isolated struggle. All of our struggles must tie in together, and they must support one another. … Maybe the next generation will be able to take time out to rest, but we have too far to go, and we have too much work to do. So you can shout in victory if you want, but don’t shout too soon.”
Speaking of Houston’s decades-long fight to dismantle the Jim Crow laws affirmed by Plessy v. Ferguson, Walton noted that “as the dean of Howard University School of Law, Houston did more than just train lawyers,” adding, “He trained social engineers.”
A few years after Hamilton’s death in 1950, one of those protégés, Thurgood Marshall, argued the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court, the case that overturned the practice of “separate but equal” public school systems. However, despite the great strides of these social engineers, inequality in public education continues.
Speaking to more than 350 local alumni and friends gathered at Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center earlier this month, two Harvard faculty members whose work examines inequality in education addressed the issue.
To date, the Your Harvard series — an effort of The Harvard Campaign to allow alumni to connect with each other and engage with some of the most exciting scholarship underway on campus — has attracted more than 3,500 alumni in nine cities.
Roland Fryer Jr., the Henry Lee Professor of Economics and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory, was not only the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard, but also the only African-American to be awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the best American economist under age 40. He was joined in the conversation on “education as a universal civil right” by Professor Meira Levinson, an award-winning scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose work explores the idea of civic education. Mary Louise Kelly ’93, an Atlanta native and former reporter for NPR, CNN, and the BBC, served as moderator.
Levinson acknowledged a fundamental lesson that gives her hope that the problem can be addressed. Having taught middle school students in both Atlanta and Boston school districts, she said, “I never met an eighth-grader who wasn’t eager to learn.” She also noted that we tend to take an aggregated view of the American education system. “If you disaggregate,” Levinson noted, “we are doing extremely well … in much of the U.S. system, and poorly in some of the rest of the U.S. system.”
