PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

In the 1950s and 1960s, major protests ensued as the United States Government sought to legally eradicate the segregation laws that did not allow Black students to attend white schools. Countless initiatives on behalf of counties and state governors extended and postponed the process and even built private schools for white students. This is seen in Robin Talley's novel, Lies We Tell Ourselves. This type of oppression not only disallows empowerment for Black students, it also endangers their lives as people became aggressive and expressed racist remarks freely. These anti-segregation movements were the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, which led to more laws in support of equal access, but did not eradicate racism.

The 21st century has come with more media coverage of police violence against the Black community, but also with 9/11 resulting in an raise in Islamophobic and xenophobic attacks. Movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have raised awareness and made waves among victims of sexual assault and Black people respectively. The New York Times article "Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality" shows the graph to the left which indicates recent trends in racial distribution among schools in the United States.

Nobody knows what the future holds, but we hope to see a continued battle against inhibitors of equal empowerment among students globally, and to continue supporting #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo as we shape what comes next