I have a dream...

On 28 August 1963, US civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King spoke before a vast Washington audience and delivered his magnificent and inspiring speech which has become known as the "I have a dream" speech. Every sentence, every phrase and every word spoke of his hope – no, even his certainty – that America was changing and changing for the better and that racial segregation in all of its forms would be abolished.

On May 17, 1954, the US Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the historic Brown v Board of Education decision and he wrote, "In the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" adding that segregated schools were "inherently unequal".

It was a long, difficult and even painful road for the USA before equality was achieved. It required much legislation – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was fundamental – but what is the situation today? Has full integration happened? Is there still a distance to go?

Well, while there are no longer any legal impediments for all races in the USA to achieve anything that individual talent, aspiration and hard work can achieve, there has been a reaction against what has been achieved over the past half century or so and that reaction is not just from diehard far-right whites still desperately clinging to discredited and disgraced notions from the past.

Some, perhaps amazingly, have come from blacks themselves.

Dr King's words, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" have only narrowly avoided being erased recently from the entrance to a university and not some university in the Deep South from which black students were barred for decades but Oregon University in the far north-west.

Oregon University goes out of its way to be, in the words of its President and Professor of Law Michal H Schill, "welcoming to people of all races and ethnicities, all nationalities and religions, all sexual orientations and gender identities and abilities" but that is sometimes not quite enough. When renovations were being undertaking at a major campus building, its students and faculty members were asked if Dr King's words should be restored when renovations were completed.

Many said an emphatic "no".

It seems that many students – including black students - believed that Dr King's call for all people to be treated equally was not inclusive enough. One leading student protester told the student newspaper that, "Diversity is much more than race. Obviously race still plays a big role but there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that."

It was a close-run thing but Dr King's words have survived. They had adorned the entrance since 1986 when an inspirational quote by a former University President from the 1960s praising the university was erased because it only mentioned "men". That misogynistic outrage just couldn't be allowed to last.

Meanwhile, Oregon University is sympathetically and positively considering a long list of "demands" (their word) from the Black Student Task Force. Needless to say, these "demands" are generally for more money, more black students, more courses on black culture and history and a far more sympathetic (meaning easier) system of marking black students' exam papers especially if the examiner isn't black. The university has already given the nod to the initial six "demands" including a review of the names affixed to campus buildings just in case the person so honoured doesn't meet the necessary 2018 politically correct criteria. You can bet that many luminaries from the past will also be erased from buildings as they have across the USA.

What is happening at one of the largest university in the USA, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) reflects this developing trend.

It seems that Earl Warren's 1954 words striking down the doctrine of "separate but equal" were, at least in principle, wrong. Of course, in the past, educational facilities for black students were certainly separate but not even remotely equal – that was a fiction created by white racists principally in the southern states of the old Confederacy.

UCLA's Afrikan (their word) Students Association (ASU) has made its own long list of demands which, they say, will create a more "welcoming environment" on campus for black students. "Time and time again, we see UCLA administration pushing our issues under the rug. UCLA continues to fail students of color by not responding or taking any steps to improve the campus climate," the ASU said in a statement adding, "This university has a history of poor racial climate, and we, as the Afrikan Student Union, will not take it any more."

The "separate but equal" doctrine has been revived by these demands – the creation of "a separate Afro-house residence for black students and faculty, the creation of an exclusive "Task Force" designed for and comprising only black students and faculty members and a massive increase in funding for the ASU itself. They thoughtfully suggested that an initial grant of $30 million could get the ball rolling to address these "demands".

The university was given three weeks to respond and, naturally, it did.

Vice-chancellor Janina Montero announced that she, and the university administration, were "open to many of the ASU's demands including exclusive funding for the ASU, revision of the school's anti-discrimination policies, an 'Afro-house' for black students, a black students advisory board for campus diversity, increased enrollment of black students and the creation of a Black Student Leadership Task Force.

UCLA's brother/sister campus, the University of California, Berkley, already not only has segregated housing for black students but for other racial minorities such as Asians and Hispanics.

Racially segregated housing and facilities for students at American universities is not new although it is accelerating.

The University of Connecticut has already established a residence hall for black men called the Scholastic House of Leaders and it is supposed to provide a "safe space" for them. In fact, it is a new ghetto, the type of which their parents and grandparents fought so strenuously to escape.

Lawyers have pointed out that segregation of student facilities violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which the Federal Department of Education enforces and which prohibits race segregation at federally-funded universities. So, to avoid this little legal technicality, universities which establish these segregated facilities have to rely on grants from private sources – usually left-wing and progressive private funding bodies. It also helps that the Education Department looks the other way although this could be about to change - read on.

In fact, as far back as the 1960s, American universities have caved in to demands from black students to provide racially segregated campus housing and other facilities. Cornell University, a privately funded university in New York State, established its black-only student residential hall called Ujamaa in 1972 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston established black only residences in 1975, calling it Chocolate City.

One black student at Cornell in the early 1970s and now a law professor at the University of San Diego has been quoted by the New American Civil Rights Project as saying that he refused to live in the black only accommodation. "Universities talk a lot about diversity and the need for students of different backgrounds to be exposed to each other but when they support racially-themed dorms, which simply increase racial tension on campus, it's hard to take these schools seriously."

On the eve of Independence Day (July 4) President Trump announced that "affirmative action" policies introduced by the Obama Administration which encouraged the use of racial categories to grant or deny university places were now withdrawn.

What had happened under the Obama Administration policy was that many Asian American students were being denied places at universities because, and there is no other way of saying this, they were significantly brighter than any other ethnic student group be they white, black or Hispanic. On the basis of racial profiling, Asian students who more than qualified on the basis of their scholastic results were being denied university places so that those who had lower results could get in. Asian students had bought lawsuits against universities which denied their entry just because they were Asian and bright.

Predictably, there was opposition to Trump's decision.

A black academic, preacher and radio host Professor Michael Dyson said that racial demographics should be a "significant feature" when considering university admissions adding that "African American and Latino populations" should receive compensations because of their race via consideration "of their race and ethnicity". In other words, black and brown students shouldn't be held to the same scholastic level as white or Asian students.

Somehow, I don't think that black only university residences and racial profiling to decide which students were allowed to enter universities is what Dr King and Chief Justice Warren had in mind all those years ago.