ski with the very latest on that. the pentagon s playing catch up after the supreme court knocked down a key provision of the defense of marriage act which then opened the door for same-sex couples working for the federal government to get those same governments that are afforded to heterosexual couples. so after the pentagon action today, same-sex couples in the uniform military services will now be eligible to take advantage of military housing, health care benefits and death benefits for those soldiers, marriages, sailor, who are killed in combat overseas or who die of any cause actually. they had been prohibited from collecting those death benefits. now, interestingly enough, those involve in the process say they looked at the way the u.s. military was integrated, desegregated in terms of race, and when women were more widely
teacher right now. and it s not necessarily the career you strive for anymore. but one thing that s great about d.c., i will say, is that you re seeing so much diversity in the schools now. and not just, you know, african-american students, but hispanic students, spanish-speaking schools. and you re seeing so much of that. that s helping for a vibrant city and really, your building a comeback in a way for the city. but it does create a lot of difficulty when you talk about the politics of it. tell me, what is the lesson we should, on the question of education reform, take away from what s happened, both in the decline and then the resurgence of dunbar. i think, it s one, you said human capital. it s all about and that s all the way around. that s about the parents, about the communities, about the teacher. other thing, we should also point out, dunbar never desegregated. it was, i think, washington legally desegregated. it never integrated. and that s another lesson we should lea
in the government today, is the kumbaya moment. they love what they ve seen. they re excited and they re happy. as we should be. with a little bit more of justice before us. but there is not enough of the followthrough that i think the military does better than our civilian people do, and i think that is a responsibility of the people in the white house to get it started and the cabinet secretaries to continue it and the agency heads to continue it as well. and i think it is the responsibility of the media to check on it every day. not just your program, as you do, but the rest of the media. including fox. i ll send them a memo and see if they listen. would you? let me ask you about previous experience with the military being in advance of parts of the rest of the country on civil rights matters. we have had experience with that as a nation where the military was desegregated, for example, or there were things that were being offered in a meritocratic way that were not reflected
not just your program, as you do, but the rest of the media. including fox. i ll send them a memo and see if they listen. would you? let me ask you about previous experience with the military being in advance of parts of the rest of the country on civil rights matters. we have had experience with that as a nation where the military was desegregated, for example, or there were things that were being offered in a merocratic way that were not reflected where u.s. bases are located in the states. are there lessons from that history we should be thinking about moving forward? my wife is a wonderful historian and wrote a book called homelands and waterways. in that book, during the civil war, navy people were integrated in their service, integrated. then there was a period after that in the 20s when black people could not hold positions in the u.s. navy. more recently with the truman order and in some of the other
may to remember. 58 years ago today, the supreme court s decision, brown verses the board of education, ended legal segregation in america s public schools. it began with linda brown, who in 1951 had to walk past the school in her neighborhood, clear across down to the black school she was forced to attend. at the time, federal law mandated that schools be separate but equal, and school boards continually. they said enough and took their case to the supreme court which ruled, on this day, that separate but equal could never be equal. even after the brown decision, it took nearly 30 years, protests and more lawsuits, for some schools to be desegregated.