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A leader in the fight for equality in education

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published May 12, 2006

There's a name in my address book without an address or telephone number.

Over the years as I relocated from one southern state to the next, the missing information represented a lapsed friendship. Now it also represents a lost friend.

Recently I learned that Denise Morgan, a New York law professor, had died after a three-month illness. She was 41.

The name Denise Morgan won't mean much to most folks, but it should. She was one of the best young legal minds in the field of civil rights. She believed that black and Hispanic inner city students deserved public schools that were as well financed as the schools in the suburbs and she fought for that. She was an adviser in the drafting of a constitution for Eritrea, a nation in the horn of Africa. She made a difference.

I first met her in the Bronx in the late '80s. But in the way immigrants' paths cross, our ties went further back - decades, thousands of miles. Her grandmother and my grandmother were lifelong friends. They lived on the same street on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

I grew up hearing my grandmother talk about how well Morgan's mom did in school and how that education had opened opportunities for her to become a successful nurse in America. Those constant reminders were designed to inspire me, an inconsistent student, to do better in school. Clearly, Morgan's mom passed that message on.

During a 2001 interview that was posted on New York Law School's Web site, Morgan said her parents, Coralee and John Morgan, a nurse and a dentist, instilled in her a deep sense of the value of education.

"My parents are immigrants from the West Indies who arrived in this country without a great deal of money, but very good educations," said Morgan, who is survived by her husband and 2-year-old daughter. "I believe in the power of a strong public education system to create social, political and economic mobility. I also understand that our public education system has never lived up to its full potential - that's what drives my work."

She left an enviable body of work.

After she graduated from Yale Law School in 1990, Morgan taught law at Florida State University and later clerked for a federal judge in San Francisco. Later, while employed by a New York corporate law firm, she became involved in the legal struggle to increase state funding for the troubled New York City public schools.

Beginning in 1995, Morgan, a product of an elite all-girls Manhattan private school, represented the New York state Legislature's black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic caucus in a lawsuit against the state to equalize educational opportunity for inner city and suburban children.

Earlier this year, an appellate court ruled that New York state shortchanges city public schools by $4.7-billion to $5.6-billion a year and ordered the Legislature to end the practice.

That's making a difference.

"She saw the power of education and believed that significantly more students, especially students of color, could thrive if given the opportunity," said Robert Hughes, who was engaged in the funding equity fight.

In addition to her work as a litigator, Morgan was a woman of ideas. She was the principal editor of Awakening from the Dream: Civil Rights Under Siege and the New Struggle for Equal Justice, a collection of essays, which she hoped would serve as a "call to arms" to revive the civil rights movement. The fight for civil rights was boosted by Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 school desegregation case. But Morgan believed that the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to fulfill the promise of Brown. "Equal educational opportunity is essential to democracy," she wrote.

It's also essential to have people who are willing to fight for equal educational opportunity. Denise Morgan certainly did.

Andrew Skerritt can be reached at 813 909-4602 or toll free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 12, 2006, 00:55:11]