The question of desegregation: lesson for our times.

On the courthouse lawn in the town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina--the seat of Berkeley County--there is no Confederate statue. It is the only Southern county where I know that to be true. I have always wondered what brave stories lay behind that fact, what fierce battles were waged by a proud black citizenry who were once in the majority here in these palmettoed plantation lands just north of Charleston. I will probably never know. Much of the knowledge of Berkeley County's black history--like much of the foundation and fabric of its African American community itself--has been quietly blowing away like sandy topsoil, scattered by the winds of integration. Yes, they have come to live with the white folks. But at what cost?

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In Moncks Corner, the people who ran the old segregated school system named the black high school Berkeley Training and the white high school, well, Berkeley High, presumably, on the theory that while white children needed to be taught, black children--like mules and goats--could only be trained. The black folk of Moncks Corner had a slightly different idea. Like most black high schools across the segregated south, Berkeley Training was the central institution of their community, and they were right proud of it. They considered education to have been the chariot ride out of slavery, and educators to be the shining black angels wielding the reigns and guiding the way. A Berkeley Training teacher was only one step below the status of a doctor, minister, or mortician--both in pay and prestige--and the school principal, always affectionately called "prof," stood above all. There were many denominations and churches, after all, but only one Berkeley Training. In the glass case in the hallway outside the school's administrative offices were enshrined the records of an entire people: yellowing photos of long-dead alumni, class lists with names of import circled, championship trophies, spelling bee ribbons and scholar's awards, sunken leather balls once clutched by now-withered hands on the way to a winning score. On football homecoming weekend, when the black Moncks Corner folk came back from Philly and Jersey and Harlem and the other far places to which they had gone to make new lives, they would bring their children to the trophy case in the hallway outside the Berkeley Training administrative offices and point to a name through the glass and say, "Here. That's where I am, and this is where you are from. This shows you ain't from nothing."

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I was living in Moncks Corner in the fall of 1970, in a motel room across the highway from Berkeley Training, when school desegregation ordered by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Court came, at last, to South Carolina. While Berkeley High School--the white high school--opened its doors to black students, Berkeley Training became no more. Over the summer, it was renamed Berkeley Middle School, with a new ... white ... principal, and a new purpose. "Prof," the black principal, moved over to Berkeley High. He and the white Berkeley High principal became "co-principals," but while the white principal's duties were education and administration, prof's duties were discipline and transportation. The man who had once commanded respect throughout the community--black and white--was reduced to running the detention hall and the buses.

And as for the items in the glass trophy case in the hallway outside the administration office at Berkeley Training? Sometime over the summer of 1970, someone came in and removed them, no one knew who, and no one knew to where. To my knowledge, they were never publicly displayed again. In the course of an afternoon, the archival history of an entire community was wiped out ... all but forgotten ... like the story of how the Confederate statue was blocked, as if such events and people had never been.

Fifteen years ago, I left South Carolina and brought my family to Oakland, California, where I was born. Where Moncks Corner was the most segregated town in which I had ever lived, Oakland is the most diverse and multicultural. Walking through some neighborhoods, it can seem like you have crossed several continents in a handful of blocks, with Sikhs and Southeast Asians and Ethiopians and Italians and Trinidadians and Puerto Ricans all blending in together. At Oakland High School, where one of my daughters graduated in 1999, the welcome was given in six languages: English, Cambodian, Cantonese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. A year later, Bosnian, Mandarin, Thai, Mien, Tagalog, and Lao had been added. To raise a child in Oakland is to expose them to the world. It would seem as if this were the ideal upon which Brown v. the Board of Education was founded.

But just as Oakland's diversity may be a prescient view of the Moncks Corners of the world when desegregation fully arrives in all aspects of those communities' lives, so the fate of Oakland's public school system may be a look into the future as well. Once it was a solid education system full of creative teachers, music, art, and foreign language electives, and counselors who regularly helped to funnel graduates into California's universities and state and community colleges. Today, many of Oakland's schools have degenerated into hollow shells, unable to pay its teaching corps a living wage, with only the most tenacious and best-connected students able to take away much of value. Almost all the schools long ago eliminated their music programs. In many areas, what is left of the counseling corps must concentrate more on discipline problems than student advancement. The chief problem is money--not the mismanagement of, but the flat--out lack of it. And the fact that the funds fled the Oakland public schools in the 1970s, at the same time that African Americans came into the majority both in student population and membership of the school board, ought to be considered less than coincidental.

This leads some observers to say that the integration promised by the Brown court has come both to Oakland and to Moncks Corner, and has failed the African American community. They counsel that to save the black community from complete disintegration, we must withdraw ourselves and turn our backs on integration ... form independent, all-black schools and embrace such devices as the conservatives' voucher program. Although I understand and sympathize with such views, I disagree with their conclusions. But disagree only to a point.

An integrated world--a world of interwoven cultures--a connected world--is the reality of our future, whether we wish it to be or not. Broken are the barriers of geography and technology that caused races and cultures to develop in millenniums of isolation, and this world will not pass that way again. And so those who wish to separate from others who are not their kind will find that there is no place to go.

But for integration to be a reality, it must be a coming together of relative equal cultures. Otherwise, it is only political and cultural subjugation, a wiping out of the lesser in the interests of the greater, and from at least the Roman times on down to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the world has certainly seen enough of that.

In the Brown decision, the Warren Court showed us government's proper role in the process of tackling racial injustices: unequivocal, unambiguous, a straight artillery shot into oppression's wall. "Separate is NOT equal," but only when it is the government that demands that separation. You cannot be much clearer than that. What is left, then, is for communities of color to march through the breech, cloaking ourselves, each, in our own cultures and history, while yet acknowledging that no longer can any of us live or learn in this world alone.

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is a journalist and columnist living in Oakland, California. He served in the Black Freedom Movement in the South during the 1970s and '80s.