So, MLK day just passed, a historic inauguration just passed–people are shouting from the hilltops that MLK has finally seen his dream come true…and then this news came across my google reader:

According the report although large progress was made during the civil rights era, it is slipping away year by year. Since the Supreme Court reversed course in 1991 and authorized return to segregated neighborhood schools, there has been an increase in segregation every year, particularly for black and Latino students — 40% of Latinos and 39% of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools. The average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60% of students from families who are near or below the poverty line.

Residential segregation continues to play a large role and increasingly determines the racial composition in schools in the absence of measures by education authorities to create and maintain integrated schools. And more than 40 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, there continues to be almost no serious enforcement against widespread housing discrimination which is making it difficult to maintain integration in suburbia.

Seeing as school integration was an intervention site specifically chosen by the Civil Rights community–it makes me wonder why those who are interested in declaring that MLK’s dreams have been achieved aren’t more aware of this shocking news. School integration is a goal the Civil Rights movement worked *specifically* on–the fought for it, trained for it, planned rallies around it, prepared children for it, held massive community discussions about it–it was *central* to their fight for equality and justice.

How on earth did we all decide that electing one black man as a president was *really* the dream MLK had? Are we that distanced from our own history?