OK so here goes this thing. Today, April 17th 2004, is the 50th anniversary of the landmark court case, Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This courtcase, actually a series of cases, was a milestone in race relations and civil rights in the United States. As a result of this important anniversary, many schools, universities, and civic centers held a commemorative forum to reflect on the events of 50 years ago. I had the honor of volunteering at just such an event today and, well, it was interesting, but probably not for the reasons they meant.

I reported for "training" at 8:00 am. Training consisted of me getting a name tag, on which, my name was spelled wrong, and basic instructions on what I was to be doing that day. My morning job was being an assistant to the midday lunch program coordinator. Why she needed an assistant, I will never know.

I will never know, because my main duty as assistant was to eat a sandwich with the speakers. If you ask me, they should not have fed these people sandwiches like these, because, well, they were very shitty sandwiches and these people were taking time out of their busy lives to come and give lectures to the less than capacity crowd, but I digress. Besides, the $10,000 or whatever they were paid most likely made up for the crap sandwich. Either way, this was my job as a "volunteer;" to eat a sandwich. I had no real problems with that.

My afternoon, however, was a different story. In the afternoon, my job was "audio recording engineer" for a break out session. Which basically means that I had to flip the tape, and press record. Sure, I know that they needed a microphone for the recorder to work. Did I give a shit? No, that wasn't my job. Either way, this break out session was a very interesting experience. The break out sessions were "mini-lectures" given by respected members of the community. The guy I was recording for, it seems, thought he was Louis Farrakhan or something and one of the most interesting parts of his speech was where he made a Freudian slip and instead of saying 'racism' he said 'Reaganism' which I found interesting, even if no one else did. He was a very passionate speaker, although he did have a tendency to stray from his topic at hand. Some of the things he did say, which I won't repeat here, were a bit over the line, and was mainly inaccurate historically and sociologically. One of the less, possibly offensive things he said was he called American history an "elaborate fabrication." Which, as an American history major, and future teacher, I was a bit pissed off because for one, I hate it when people bad mouth my discipline and second, his bias was obvious to the fact that the only kind of history he thought was important was African American history. It *is* important but it's not the only important part of history, because it is the history of everyone that shapes society, not just one or two. However, I could also see where he was going with that, but his wording left something to be desired.

One thing that kind of got to me about this session was that there was a young, African American girl in there. She looked as if she was high school age and you could tell by the look on her face that what this man was saying made her excited and happy. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I think this is a very important thing today, that African Americans are taught and know their history as a way to empower them and give them insight on where they should be going by seeing where they came from and, after all, African American history is everyone's history as well because it was not only the white man that shaped the face of this nation today. Either way, he had captivated this girl's attention, and gave her self-esteem and knowledge which will go with her for the rest of her life. This one act here was, to me, the reason Brown v. Board was so important.

In short, from my day of volunteering at the conference, I really didn't get that much from the speakers. Sure, they were interesting and informative but the real meaning of the importance of this court case that was decided 50 years ago was shown through a little girl who loved the knowledge she was being given and the meaning that it could have on the rest of her life. It seems that we, as a nation, still have a long way to go to foster true equality in our society, but for one little girl this afternoon, it was that much closer to being achieved.