Photo by Brandon Dill
Dorsey Hopson
Growing up, Dorsey Hopson says he doesn’t remember thinking much about race. That’s largely because he was brought up around people who looked like him. Hopson’s neighbors, his classmates, his friends, and his parents’ friends were predominantly Black.
His 1990 Whitehaven High School’s graduating class of 2000 students was almost exclusively African American, he recalls.
There were, however, occasional instances of integration, he says. Traveling to white schools across the city for extracurricular activities and sports competitions, Hopson was brought face-to-face with racial tension.
“I can recall times when white kids would call me the n-word,” he recounts. “When stuff like that happened, you certainly have to remember, ‘Wow, this is real.’”However, those moments were rare, he admits. “There wasn’t a lot of focus on that.”
Hopson was growing up 25 years after the turbulent 1960s, and from where he stood, people were starting to become a lot less race-conscious. But Hopson’s parents grew up in the midst of the fight for civil rights — at a time when it was nearly impossible not to think about race.
“I think because of the fruits of my parents’ era, we started to see more tangible signs of progress,” he says. “So for me growing up, race was not the focus because you started to feel some equality.”
Though he received a quality education (a bachelor’s degree from the University of Memphis and a law degree from Georgia State) and hardly ever felt like he was on the wrong end of inequality, Hopson did grow up in a Memphis that was largely segregated. Now in charge of 207 public schools as the superintendent of the Shelby County Schools system, Hopson says he sees the same segregation he saw almost 30 years ago.
“You look at that today — same thing,” he continues. “And you look at that in the 1960s, I’m sure it’s the same thing. We aren’t seeing the progress that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pushed for.”
Hopson believes segregation in the school system is a reflection of Memphis’ segregated neighborhoods. When a federal court ordered Memphis to integrate schools using busing in 1973, history shows a large number of white families moved from the inner city to the suburbs.
The black families stayed in the city, as their neighborhoods and schools lost diversity. The results defined Hopson’s school days and are still evident today. “Given the way school zones work,” he says, “if you have a community full of black and brown folks, then the schools are going to reflect the community makeup.”
Hopson says that until there is change in the composition of communities, schools won’t see integration or true diversity. During his tenure as superintendent, he’s noted that the city’s few diverse schools have consistently been the highest achieving.
Though the majority of public schools here are still divided along racial and socioeconomic lines, Hopson says equal education for people of color has become significantly more accessible since the Civil Rights movement.
“There have been some huge strides made in terms of equity and access for all students,” Hopson says. “I think there’s also been a huge focus on, you know, equality and accountability for all schools.”
At a minimum, funding and access to materials and technology has improved, he says. “It used to be the schools with the white kids would use up the books then send them to the Black kids,” he says. “So you were just in a perpetual state of having secondhand and inferior materials.”
That’s not the case now though, he feels. “Things are improving, but not fast enough.”
The impact of the inequity and lack of resources that plagued schools in communities of color for years is still at work. “You can say that now we are going to treat everybody equally, but we can’t ignore the impact of the years of inequality,” he continues. “I think that’s always going to be tough.”
Hopson believes economic segregation is a prevalent problem today in Memphis and around the country. “It just so happens that most people on the short end of the economic stick in Memphis are black and brown, he says.”
As the country’s economy rebounds, Hopson notes that the poverty rate in Memphis has gone up. Because of the wealth gap in the city, the high-poverty rate disproportionately affects people of color, their communities, and schools. “Economic segregation” is what he calls this.
“A big piece of it has to be a continued awareness of what happened in the past and a focused effort to learn from it,” Hopson says. “When you see visible changes like having a Black president, people can get lax and say, ‘We don’t need to talk about that anymore; things are all good now.’”
Hopson says there has to be intentionality about addressing socioeconomic disparities. “People aren’t overtly racist and institutions are not overtly discriminatory, because we have all these great laws,” Hopson says. “But because of some of those policies in the past, you [still] have big economic disparities. Dr. King was in the midst of declaring a war on poverty, and now together the nation needs to pick up where he left off. That needs to be the next fight.”
