Contributed
Because Black students continue to face significant academic and financial challenges in their attempt to receive higher education in America, Dr. John E. Fleming felt that there was a pressing need to re-publish the 1976 edition of his book, The Lengthening Shadow of Slavery: A Historical Justification for Affirmative Action for Blacks in Higher Education (published in 1976) with a new 2023 edition titled The Lengthening Shadow of Slavery: Fifty-Year Reprise of the Historical Justification for Affirmative Action for African Americans in U.S. Higher Education. Dr. Fleming strongly felt that it was necessary to explore, yet again, why the U.S.’s own African American students receive the worst educational outcomes at all levels of the American education pipeline while foreign students who major in STEM fields at U.S. colleges and universities get the best education money can buy. On the face of it this is not an easy question to answer; but it is certainly a question that deserves an answer, e.g., an answer that looks across the landscape of the many issues that have confronted Black families in the U.S. since their Emancipation from slavery as they have persevered in their struggles to educate their children; but have often failed to do so through no fault of their own.
Based on the issues explored in the original 1976 edition of the Lengthening Shadow of Slavery, it is clear that despite the extraordinary and often dangerous efforts of Black freedmen to secure quality education for themselves and their children after their emancipation in 1865, African Americans still confront an appalling lack of quality in the education their children receive at the elementary and secondary levels in high poverty urban schools, which all too frequently fail to meet the quality standards which are common in suburban schools in America in 2023, one hundred and fifty years after emancipation, resulting in lower college enrollment and graduation for Black students in America.
Despite the landmark 1954 Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education which outlawed segregation in public education in America, it is clear that in 2023 the U.S. is still operating two national school systems—one for wealthy suburban students who are predominantly White and one for poor students who are predominantly Black and minority; and that to use the Supreme Court’s language in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, these schools systems are “inherently unequal” in both their educational procedures and outcomes.
Dr. Fleming’s book is available at www.amazon.com.