#shameofthenation

“We have a gym but it is for lining up.” - Student in the Bronx

we do not have things you have. You have clean things. We do not have...You have parks and we do not have parks...can you help us?” - Alliyah, age 8, the Bronx

“Self-help programs don’t work. Some work stunningly well [but] effective solutions to ghetto pathologies cannot be crafted by blacks walled off from a larger America.” - Ellis Cose

“If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel? I think they’d by relieved.” - Isabel, age 15. 

“It’s like we’re being hidden. It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t supposed to throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.” - Isabel, age 15

“If you want to see a really segregated school in the United States today, start by looking for a school that’s named for Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.” -A schoolteacher

“Thurgood Marshall must be turning over in his grave” - A teacher to their Principal. Page 23

“A school in New York state claimed a “rich variation of ethnic backgrounds” but only 4 children of 2800 were not black or Hispanic.”