Q&A: Detroit's Rev. Larry Simmons on the "fundamental American fight"

He spoke with Axios on Wednesday about the legacy of Brown v. Board, and his perspective on the city's changing education landscape.

• The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Axios: Can you discuss how you've been involved in education advocacy in the past?

Simmons: I got involved in education advocacy as a teenager, actually. I'm a graduate of Central High School in Detroit and when I was in my sophomore or junior year, the students had been complaining about the quality of the food at lunchtime. A group of us decided that we were going to have a walkout, and we did. I was one of the organizers.

• Education has always been a high priority in my family and the need to have people of color in decision-making positions was the early focus of my activism.
• As a college student, I was part of the Black Power era of activism and there were very few African Americans in authority positions in college.

I got involved in the Urban League and came to the attention of Mayor [Coleman Young], and so I started working for him. The last five years I was with him, I was his political director.

• It was really instructive for me to see how politics, how power is processed among very powerful people.
• It has served me well over the rest of my life to try to effect education change, because education has all these power centers. The school system itself, the central office, the building leaders, parents, students.
• I think the fight for justice around what Brown v. Board meant to achieve is the most fundamental American fight any of us are ever going to wage.

From your perspective, over the decades in Detroit, what has been the impact of Brown v. Board and other similar efforts?

• Well if the goal is integration, it's a failure. We're nearly as segregated today. In 1954, I was 7 years old and I lived near Pershing High School. Seven Mile was the dividing line. White people lived north of Seven Mile and Black people lived south of Seven Mile.
• My one encounter with blatant segregationism was a friend of mine and I rode our bikes to Derby Hill, which is on Outer Drive and Mound Road, and our intent was to ride down the hill. The police stopped us in the park, asked us what we were doing there. We told them. They said, "You don't belong here, you have your own park, get out of here."
• I think Brown succeeded in liberating the Black wealthy to integrate with their income equals in the white community. It left, for the most part, many poor whites to live with less poor, equally poor Blacks. Because they didn't have the resources to leave.
• So I think Brown has had the effect today of segregating poor Black children. Pre-Brown, you had wealthy people in school with poor people. Schools are far more economically homogeneous.

So it facilitated that by changing where people live?

• Yes. I've been in Brightmoor for these 24 years and I've seen people who were here and who have done better economically and they moved.

A lot of the conversation now seems to be around resource allocation and equity in schools.

• When we talk about schools, and money, it's so hard to disentangle race from class because they're so closely intertwined in America.
• When you pair Brown with housing desegregation laws, what you get is this economic dispersion that isolates the poor, even though people are more geographically spread out now.
• We have failed to appreciate what [Brown's] consequences are and to create policies to adequately address it.
• Just saying more money, I think, misleads us and we have to have a more holistic view of the problem. Absolutely we need money, and probably we need more money in low-achieving environments like Brightmoor than, maybe, Taylor.
• My point is we are making a mistake to only talk about money; it's not just money. We need ideas, we need processes, policies and practices different from the ones we've used over these last many years.

What are the most pressing issues in Detroit education today?

• We have to make education as ubiquitous as gas stations. When [Americans] make up our minds to do something at scale, we do it at scale. I'm saying we need that same commitment to making the access to education as easily accessible as getting your electric vehicle charged is going to be in five years.
• I'm banging the drum for a more ecological approach to education. If there's one single thing, it's to change our view of education so schools will be recognized as a part of a larger context and that the troubles in the schools can't be solved inside them alone.
• There's a concept called "community schools," in which you take external partners, like the Brightmoor Alliance, and you connect them to the school.
• Pretending that external problems [and trauma in students' lives] don't have in-school consequences, like they stop at the doorway, is a perception for failure. How can we as a community help address that, since we know we can't raise their income alone.

Go deeper: Inequities remain across Michigan long after Brown v. Board