Charles Ogletree, author of a book on the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case, speaks to a group that includes a woman who testified in the desegregation case.
By Annette Espinoza -- The Denver Post

When Bobbie Knight was growing up in Topeka, Kan., she was refused entrance to a neighborhood school that was only two blocks away.
The nearest school she was allowed to attend required a 45-minute walk and had outdated books and equipment. "We could live in nicer neighborhoods, but none of us could go to school there," Knight said of growing up in the segregated 1950s.

The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case changed all that.
And on Wednesday, Knight, her mother and other relatives now living in Denver attended a Denver Forum luncheon to listen to a speech by a leading expert on that case.

Charles Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, spoke at the Oxford Hotel.

Ogletree discussed his national best seller, "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education," the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court school-desegregation case that made legal and civil rights history. "I'm a product of Brown, and I applaud those lawyers and people who sacrificed for me," Ogletree said.

He said the Brown decision was about more than blacks wanting their children to sit next to whites in school. It was also about wanting to send them to schools that had similar resources.

Bobbie Knight's mother, Vera, raised her family in Topeka but now lives in Denver. The 82-year-old helped the late Vivian Scales, who was one of 12 plaintiffs in the Brown case, which ended segregation in American public schools. "I was a witness for Vivian," Vera Knight said.

Ogletree also spoke about Charles Hamilton Houston, who speareaded Brown vs. Board of Education litigation, and U.S. Supreme Court justices and recent nominees.

Ogletree expressed deep concern over growing black and Latino dropout rates and resegregation that he said is the result of "white flight" and "black middle-class flight" that have families moving away from urban cities and into the suburbs.

"We've gone back," Ogletree said. "We have failed to meet the promise of Brown."

Staff writer Annette Espinoza can be reached at 303-820-1655 or aespinoza@denverpost.com.
|Published -- December 8, 2005