CIVIL RIGHTS OFFICIAL SAYS SCHOOLS REMAIN `SEPARATE, UNEQUAL'

In choosing to send their daughter to a private school, Bill and Hillary Clinton gave her what all children in America deserve "attention to their individual needs," Mary Frances Berry told the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund Banquet Wednesday night.

Berry, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and professor of American social thought and history at the University of Pennsylvania, was the keynote speaker for the banquet. The event kicked off the schedule of activities culminating in Martin Luther King Day on Monday.

The nearly 200 students and adults who attended the banquet in the University Center Ballroom at Southeast Missouri State University heard Berry call for government to live up to its duty to American children.

Berry, who has doctorates in history and law from the University of Michigan, said rich people simply buy individual attention when they send their children to private schools, attention overburdened public schools can't provide.

"No amount of talking about choice and vouchers is going to solve this problem," she said.

"Forty years after the Brown decision (which desegregated the nation's schools) we still have separate and unequal schools in this country."

Discussing the need for multicultural education, Berry said, "There is no single culture into which we are assimilated (in the U.S.). There are enclaves of diversity."

She said she wants to "offer a vision of shared aspirations respecting that diversity and those differences."

At the banquet, Brandy Jenkins was named the recipient of the 1992-93 Dr. Martin Luther King Scholarship. Debra Mitchell-Braxton, assistant director of the Campus Assistance Center and an adviser to a number of groups on campus, received the Dr. Edward M. Spicer Excellence in Diversity Award.

Berry who was named to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission by Jimmy Carter, was fired by Ronald Reagan and successfully won her position back through the courts said she hopes the new administration will improve on the civil rights record of the Reagan-Bush years.

"I'm hoping in the Clinton and Gore years we will stop pretending discrimination is gone," she said.