Donald Trump's Education Plan Has Shameful History

With president-elect Donald Trump's pick of billionaire heiress and Republican donor Betsy de Vos as Education Secretary, Americans who fought for equality in our public school system are concerned that the harm that the de Vos family has caused to public education in Detroit and other urban areas of Michigan will spread throughout the country.

TYT founder Michael Shure ( ) visited the historic site of the student walkout that helped to spark the Civil Rights movement. On April 23, 1951 Barbara Johns led a walkout by 456 students at the allblack Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, VA in protest of school segregation. Shure and filmmaker Eric Byler ( )spoke to historians and activists who participated in the epic battle to integrate Virginia, and America's public schools.

"The Moton School Walk-out is considered by many historians to signal the start of the desegregation movement in America and resulted in a court case that was later bundled with other, similar cases into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown by mandating public-school desegregation, and Virginia state leaders responded with an official policy of Massive Resistance. When, on January 19, 1959, both a federal and a state court simultaneously ruled the state's actions unconstitutional, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors closed its public schools rather than integrate them. They stayed shuttered for five years. Another U.S. Supreme Court decision—Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward—finally forced the county's schools to reopen in 1964." — Ronald L. Heinemann, Encyclopedia Virginia