Breaking Thurgood Marshall's promise - declining minority enrollment in higher education

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 5, 1998 by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.

In December 1996, a few months after Hopwood was decided, I underwent the first of three open-heart surgeries. Late each evening, after my family and friends had left, I would slip in and out of consciousness and dream of a sign that I saw long ago on the bumper of a rickety cab in Lagos, Nigeria. The sign said, in big, bold letters: NO MORE TIME FOR FOOLISHNESS. The long winter ended, the spring rains came, and I got better. But still that sign haunted my dreams. As I returned to the work to which I had dedicated my career, I began to understand -- slowly and then clearly -- the meaning that sign held for me.

At times, this country seems intent on returning to the foolishness of the past. Donald M. Stewart, president of the College Board, has said that in the wake of court decisions like Hopwood, "we're looking at a potential wipeout that could take away an entire generation" of Black and Hispanic students. When I think about this potential wipeout, I wonder whether I am still in intensive care, drifting on anesthesia. I ponder: is it a hallucination that in public law schools in California and Texas, the two most populous states in the country, minority enrollment is shrinking almost to the vanishing point? Is the lone Black first-year student at Berkeley representative of a dying breed, a tragic echo of James Meredith, who desegregated the University of Mississippi in 1962? How will Texas and California, which are more than a third African American and Latino, survive with the future shortage of trained minority leadership?

There is a curve of time that separates Heman Sweatt and Cheryl Hopwood. It has been a long while since that spring afternoon in 1950 when, as a first-year Yale law student, I heard the promise of freedom in the voice of Thurgood Marshall. Since then, I have observed commendable progress, lately some tragic retrogression, and now I see even more clearly that, in the long, bloody history of race relations in America, there is no more time for foolishness.

RELATED ARTICLE: Present Enrollment

The University of Texas at Austin, School of Law Student Enrollment Demographics for the 1997 Entering Class

Black                     (1%)
Mexican American          (6%)
Other Minority            (10%)
White                     (83%)

SOURCE: [C] A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Jeff Ross, and Linda Yush. Compiled by Judge Higginbotham and associates, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.

RELATED ARTICLE: Past Enrollment

The University of Texas at Austin, School of Law Student Enrollment Demographics for the 1998 Entering Class

Black                    (8%)
Mexican American        (11%)
Other Minority           (2%)
White                   (79%)

SOURCE: [C] A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Jeff Ross, and Linda Yush. Compiled by Judge Higginbotham and associates, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. is a retired chief judge emeritus of the United States Court of Appeals, the Public Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Counsel to the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in their New York and Washington offices, and the author of In the Matter of Color and Shades of Freedom (Oxford University Press).