Author: Booker Evans

In this video Wildaliz and Eva Bermudez recall their earliest memories of activism for school integration in Greater Hartford through their involvement as young plaintiffs in the 1989 Sheff v O’Neill lawsuit, and how the case shaped their lives as politically active adults today. The sisters describe why their parents (Pedro and Carmen Wilda Bermudez) supported the integration movement, and reflect on their personal experiences as Puerto Rican youth growing up in Hartford’s South End neighborhoods, attending Hartford Public Schools and bilingual education programs, and eventually (for Eva) an interdistrict magnet school.

These two women talk about their experiences in an out of court and how it has affected their lives in the long run. The bilingual program in Hartford schools were a real factor in their personal successes in Hartford schools.

The women also talked about the transition to Kennelly which was a school with a majority of caucasian students. Kennelly was one of the last places in the South End of Hartford where white flight had not occurred yet.

In this exercise we manipulated statistics by altering chart settings in order to make the data lie for our purposes. In the first chart we show the data in its original range. It looks like there is a large positive correlation between the percentage and the year because as each year increases by 10 the percentage also goes up. When we change the range on the y axis for example if we make the minimum 0 and the maximum 800 the correlation between x and y looks alot less significant. If I wanted to make it seem like the percent had changed over time I would use the first graph. If I wanted to prove the opposite than I would use the second graph.