By Sydney Trent
Sunday, August 26, 2007

Several years ago in this magazine, I wrote an essay about my cousin, the late Barbara Rose Johns, who in 1951 led a student strike to protest the inferior conditions at her all-black high school in Farmville, Va. Armed with a sense of self-worth that was remarkable given the racism of that era, Barbara understood that she and her peers deserved much more than the cold, leaky tar-paper "classrooms" and poorly equipped science labs they'd been given. And so, together, she and her classmates at R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County raised their voices in protest, risking the kind of harm many of us today can barely imagine.

But what a result: The Moton case became one of five included in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of the nation's public schools.

Fifty-three years later, it goes without saying that we've made real progress toward equality, although it's hard to argue we've arrived. Of course, today's school disparities are said to be based on class, not race, however inexorably the two are intertwined. But putting aside the source of the problem, don't you find it outrageous that so many children are consigned to inferior educations -- and lesser lives -- just because their parents can't afford to raise them in a good public school district? And I, for one, wonder: Where are the Barbaras? Do these students not understand that they also deserve much better? Why don't they raise their voices?

After reading today's cover story by Baltimore writer Karen Houppert, which begins on Page 12, it occurs to me that you have to find your voice before you can raise it. And that's what's so promising about Urban Debate Leagues, programs that teach disadvantaged students the power of argument -- not only to win tournaments but to change their lives. Listen to Iggy Evans, who used his debate skills to lead a sit-down strike after school officials abruptly replaced a beloved principal at his Baltimore high school:

"Now I can just go out and say, 'This is wrong. What they're doing -- or not doing, really -- in our schools is wrong,' and people listen, because I'm a debater. It's like a qualification, like you're somebody, like you've got your ideas and your proof . . . and what you say matters.

"You can persuade people to fix things."

Just imagine what the nation's public schools would look like if more students felt like "somebody."

Sydney Trent, the Magazine's deputy editor, can be reached at trents@washpost.com.