The unjustifiable death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis has caused mass demonstrations around the country. Much of the focus is properly on how to prevent such outrageous police misconduct and whether the role of the police needs to be restructured.

We suggest much of the focus also should be on the root cause of the race problem in American Society. When we turn our focus there, police misconduct is more of a symptom than a cause. If we are going to solve the problem of race in our society, we must strive for the integration of the races throughout all aspects of society—in housing, in schools, and in work.

One of those three, schools, is particularly susceptible to solution under state constitutions. Every state, ironically unlike the United States itself, has a provision in its constitution making education through high school a fundamental right. In Connecticut, that fundamental right led the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1996 in Sheff v. O'Neill to declare de facto as well as de jure segregation by race to be unconstitutional under the State Constitution. Numerous initiatives taken by the state in response to Sheff have raised the percentage of Hartford students receiving an integrated education from about 10% in 1989, when the suit was brought, to almost 50% today.