Apartheid. USA 1988

March 24, 1987:

In Dearborn Park, near Chicago, a bitter class conflict has broken out over whose children should be allowed to attend a new school in a brand new housing project. The immediate surroundings represent a prospering, racially integrated neighborhood. But the school, under construction, is also a short walk from a dilapidated and sometimes dangerous housing project for the poor, called Hilliard Homes. Parents there contend that their children have as much right to attend the new school as the middle-class children. The Board of Education, which has yet to draw the boundaries, faces a philosophical problem that seems to pit the issue of fairness to the poorer children against the practical need to retain middle-class families in the city and to keep their children in public schools. And as more young, urban professionals become parents of children of school age, the problem is likely to be repeated in Chicago and other urban centers around the nation, education experts said. The Hilliard Homes parents contend that children from both housing areas should be allowed to attend the new school. They charge that any gerrymandering of school boundaries to segregate according to class would be as discriminatory as racial segregation.^72.

72. The New York Times, from a report by Dirk Johnson