How are children assigned to schools? By their address. Our public schools are segregated because of the lines that are drawn, showing who gets into good public schools and who gets kept out. These lines often exclude many middle-class and lower-income families, especially immigrants and minorities.

They’re not given the same curriculum [in segregated schools] that they get in a white school. I try and push forward to make sure that these schools that are segregated are getting the same critical thinking classes and AP classes so they can proceed to go on to a college and proceed to get their education.

The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions. ... Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race. ... Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire. Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference. These rights are inherent in the Constitution of the United States and in the American system of government, both state and national, to promote and protect this right.

As well as tackling isolation, there is one other area we must look at if we are to build a truly cohesive society – and that is segregation. It cannot be right, for example, that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths. That doesn’t foster a sense of shared belonging and understanding – it can drive people apart.

The government needs to start asking searching questions about social housing, to promote integration, to avoid segregated social housing estates where people living there are from the same single minority ethnic background. Similarly in education, while overall segregation in schooling is declining, in our most divided communities, the education that our young people receive is actually even more segregated than the neighbourhoods they live in.

"Of course, our school was segregated, but the teachers took more of an interest in our lives because they lived in our world, in the same neighborhoods. They knew what we were up against and what we would be facing as adults, and they tried to protect us as much as they could... I'm not saying segregation was a good system. Our schools were inferior. The books were used and torn, handed down from white schools. We received only a fraction of the money allotted to white schools, and the conditions under which many Black children received an education can only be described as horrible. But, Black children encountered support and understanding and encouragement instead of the hostile indifference they often met in the "integrated" schools."

I grew up in a village of 500 people in Delaware in the 1950s, and attended a segregated elementary school. At an early age I wondered why the black students who lived near my school did not attend it.

The principle of segregation of the White and Negro races in the South is so well known that it requires no definition. Briefly and plainly stated, the object of this policy is to prevent the two races from meeting on terms of social equality. By established practice, each race maintains its own institutions and promotes its own social life.

We are more segregated now than we were in 1945, with de facto segregation. As you well are aware, Mendez and Brown found that de jure, by law, we cannot be segregated. Now we have de facto segregation

One of the prices we pay in the segregation of education by age is the self-referential reality that each class year and generation makes for itself. There is nothing more conservative and repressive in this world than the peer pressure of teenagers determined to enforce the unwritten codes of their world.

Historically, the most coveted public schools in America use government-drawn maps to discriminate against students who live in "less desirable" parts of town.

The fact is that there seems to be virtually no chance of arresting the trend toward the integration of all sexually segregated schools. Young people are being immersed, if that is the word, in the shallow currents of reciprocal sex at an ever earlier age. It seems that by denying the Holy Ghost his six inches in the schools, one dooms most of society to just that measure of sexual fulfillment.

Segregation is a cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our democratic health can be realized. The underlying philosophy of segregation is diametrically opposed to the underlying philosophy of democracy and Christianity and all the sophisms of the logicians cannot make them lie down together. We must make it clear that in our struggle to end this thing called segregation, we are not struggling for ourselves alone. We are not struggling only to free seventeen million Negroes. The festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are struggling to save the soul of America. We are struggling to save America in this very important decisive hour of her history

Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation.