Phyllis McClure died earlier this week, She was a steadfast advocate for educational quality and equity, one who was willing and able, perhaps like no one else before or since, to blow the whistle on policies that worked against disadvantaged children, no matter how uncomfortable it made people. She was a lesson in political courage, passion, persistence, and integrity. She will be sorely missed. The statement below was posted by Kati Haycock of the Education Trust. We couldn’t have said it better.
On the 56th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a lioness of the movement passed on.
Phyllis McClure dedicated half a century to the fight for equal educational opportunity–and quality–for low-income students and students of color. One of the early champions and first conscientious critics of Title I, Phyllis used her perch at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to demand that the nation’s leaders make good on the promise of equal educational opportunity. And even as she celebrated the potential of Title I to drive change for poor children, she was never shy about pointing out its flaws.
“Our hopes that the Nation would finally begin to rectify the injustices and inequities which poor children suffer from being deprived of an equal educational opportunity have been sorely disappointed,” McClure wrote in a 1969 report issued by the NAACP that would shape the debate for the next decade. “We hope that by bringing to light some of the more flagrant misuses of Title I funds that a concerted and continuing effort will ensue to help poor children to get what the nation promised them when the act was signed.”
Even after leaving the NAACP in 1994, she dedicated her smarts and her grit to making Title I matter not just in the annals of history, but in the lives of the young people it was intended to serve. Her work took her from the halls of congress, into tiny hollers towns that others had forgotten, and big cities where “all deliberate speed” was, as Phyllis would have said, too damn slow.
Described lovingly by a long-time friend as a “pit bull without the lipstick”, Phyllis was an irascible, passionate advocate who never backed down from a fight where the lives of poor children were at stake.
Though Phyllis McClure has passed on, her legacy will not soon pass away.
In Memory of Phyllis McClure