Teacher Phyllis Murray speaks from experience when she describes for students the lessons to be learned from the  Brown decision and the civil rights movement. Murray’s family roots are in Farmville, in Prince Edward County, Va., where
one of the five cases in Brown originated. Brought up in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., Murray was keenly aware, in childhood visits to Farmville, of the very different lives African-Americans lived in the segregated South. A United Federation of Teachers/AFT member, Murray currently teaches at P.S. 75 in the South Bronx and has written civil rights curricula for the AFT and the UFT.

My students often come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I use the civil rights unit to stress possibilities.

I tell students to look at a person like Harriet Tubman [a former slave who became a hero of the Underground Railroad]. Tubman and other African-American civil rights leaders had to move somehow from point A to point B, inventing it as they went along. Like them, my students have to create a plan for their futures, often with no one in their families who can help them. I point out that knowing that leaders like Harriet Tubman and those who filed the Brown  cases could move and think and take so many people with them means that you have the power to move yourself.

No matter what your color is, you can use models within history to go around obstacles. That’s what I try to impart to students.

Fifty years after Brown, the New York public schools are still virtually segregated, through the economics of school funding and housing patterns. I’m proud that UFT [has fought for school funding equity and] is an advocate for children in communities where parents are struggling to survive. Brown was only a beginning. We must press on.