Brown : The fight for equity in America's schools

By Christina Bartolomeo

“To separate them [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

—From the U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Brown v. Board of Education

The court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological complexity and citizenship and another battle of the Civil War has been won…. What a wonderful world of possibilities … unfolded for the children.”

So wrote noted African-American author Ralph Ellison after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Brown v. Board of Education  on May 17, 1954. On hearing the unanimous decision read by Chief Justice Earl Warren, “I was so happy, I was numb,” remembered Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” who argued the case and who had spent the previous 20 years risking his life to challenge apartheid laws in the segregated South.

The Brown  opinion was only 11 pages but, word for word, few documents in the history of the high court have had as immense an impact on the fabric of American society. With Brown , writes historian James T. Patterson, the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the brave families they represented had “fired their legal guns at the most sensitive citadels of the Jim Crow system … which was anchored on segregation in schools.”
 

BEFORE BROWN

Seventeen Southern and border states had laws mandating the racial segregation of public schools in 1954. School segregation prevailed even in Washington, D.C., where in 1868 Congress had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing all Americans equal protection under the law.

An unbreachable color line separating black and white schools was a key component of an entire system of legally enforced (or “de jure”) segregation in the South. From about 1890 on, Southern states had enacted “Jim Crow” laws to ensure the separation of blacks and whites in public schools, parks, hotels, restaurants and on public transportation. Some state laws even restricted blacks from working in the same rooms with whites in factories and workplaces.

The legal codes of the segregated South were bolstered by post-Civil War Supreme Court decisions, in particular the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson , in which the court declared “separate but equal” public facilities for African-Americans to be constitutional.

What did Jim Crow mean for conditions in Southern and border state schools? They were deplorable, particularly in rural regions. Black children were taught in one- or two-room schoolhouses, many little more than tarpaper shacks with leaking roofs and no running water. Without district-provided transportation, children often walked miles to school. Textbooks, when available, were out-of-date hand-me-downs from white schools. Many counties had no high schools for blacks.
 

PAVING THE WAY FOR BROWN

The Brown  case never would have come into being without the NAACP and its Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The fund retained a staff of brilliant, underpaid lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, the fund’s national counsel and, later, the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice. Many of the fund lawyers graduated from Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., and were mentored by its distinguished dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, an architect of early civil rights litigation strategy. These lawyers repeatedly risked lynching, gunfire and beatings to defend the legal rights of black plaintiffs in integration cases throughout the South.

Without specifically challenging the constitutionality of the “separate” aspect of Plessy , and aware of the lightning rod that K-12 schools represented, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund between 1939 and the early 1950s demonstrated in case after case that where equal facilities for higher education were not provided for black students, those students had a right under Plessy  to attend white institutions. Using this strategy, Marshall and his team won a string of Supreme Court victories that resulted in the admission of some black applicants to white universities.

But these decisions were sometimes hollow victories; institutional resistance to true integration remained an obstacle. Plaintiff Ada Sipuel, for example, was admitted to the University of Oklahoma’s law school, but the board of regents then established a separate “law school” for her: a roped-off section of the state Capitol’s basement where she sat alone with access to only three instructors.

By the late 1940s, the fund had decided it was time to challenge the constitutionality of segregation itself.
 

FIVE CASES FOR THE WARREN COURT

The case now known as Brown v. Board of Education  was actually a combination of five cases involving school segregation: one in Kansas, three in Southern and border states, and one, Bolling v. Sharpe  (for which a separate opinion was handed down due to legal procedural reasons), in Washington, D.C.

The cases exemplified the gamut of ills that black children faced in segregated schools. In Clarendon County, S.C., a poor, agricultural region in the Blue Ridge foothills, the district spent 100 times more per capita for white students than for blacks. Children walked as far as eight miles each way to flimsy shanty schools, and the district had refused to equalize black teachers’ salaries despite a court ruling. In Prince Edward County, Va., the high school for black students was so overcrowded that sometimes classes were held on a school bus. In Topeka, Kan., where school facilities for blacks and whites were roughly equal in quality, Oliver Brown (whose 10-year-old daughter, Linda, became the “face” of Brown v. Board ) and 12 other parents fought for their children’s right to attend white schools in their own neighborhoods, rather than endure long walks and school bus rides to attend more distant, all-black schools.

When Brown  came before the Supreme Court, its outcome was far from certain. While in retrospect the Warren Court can be seen as one of the most liberal and activist courts in U.S. history, its chief justice, Earl Warren, arrived on the court in 1953, only after the first oral arguments in Brown  had been heard.

The court itself was deeply divided between justices such as Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, who supported judicial activism, and those more like Robert Jackson and Felix Frankfurter, who pressed for judicial restraint. Finally, Marshall and his team were facing a daunting adversary: 79-year-old John W. Davis, a veteran litigator who had participated in 250 Supreme Court cases and who was so committed to segregation that he offered his services on Brown  for free.
 

THE AFT STANDS TALL AND STEADFAST

The Brown  case was a proud moment in AFT history. The AFT would be the only teachers’ organization to file an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief supporting the plaintiffs in Brown  . AFT counsel John Ligtenberg wrote, “the free public school has become an integral part of American life. No other institution gives as tangible an evidence of American faith in the democratic way of life…. It is ironic that this American institution is permitted by Southern state laws to violate and desecrate this faith so flagrantly and constantly.”

On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., Warren read aloud the unanimous decisions in Brown  and Bolling v. Sharpe , his first major opinions as chief justice: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate-but-equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Blacks and white proponents of civil rights were jubilant. The Chicago Defender called Brown  “the end of the dual society in American life and the system … of segregation that supports it.” Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. recalled the decision in 1960: “For all men of good will, May 17, 1954, came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of enforced segregation.”
 

IMPLEMENTING AGAINST ALL ODDS

Many social and historical factors contributed to the Brown  victory. Among them was a rising spirit of change among African-Americans, 900,000 of whom had fought in World War II in the name of a democracy that denied their rights when they returned home. Another factor was America’s growing embarrassment over its own human rights record at a time when the country was criticizing communist regimes for their human rights abuses.

“There was a ‘current of history’ and the court became part of it,” NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund lawyer Jack Greenberg noted at the time. Many hoped that with the passage of Brown , this current would be powerful enough that segregation would crumble from within. Even Marshall believed that school segregation would be eliminated five years after Brown .

Sadly, events were to demonstrate that Southern opposition to integration was deeply entrenched and often violent. While some cities in border states (among them Wilmington, Del., Baltimore and Louisville) complied with Brown  fairly quickly, these cities were exceptions. Stirred up by racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils, many Southerners embraced a stance known as “massive resistance”—a determination to fight integration by any means. Tactics included token integration plans that admitted only tiny numbers of blacks to all-white schools; the closing of about-to-be-integrated schools coupled with the state funding of private, all-white “segregation academies”; and all manner of violence and intimidation.

Southern resistance was bolstered by President Dwight Eisenhower’s failure to lend the support of his office and his popularity to the Brown decision, and by the Supreme Court’s inexactness in specifying just how quickly integration of Southern schools would be required to take place.

Two now-famous examples of massive resistance were school integration attempts in Little Rock, Ark., from 1957 to 1959, and New Orleans in 1960. In September 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the admission of nine black students (now known as the Little Rock Nine) into the city’s all-white Central High School. One student, Elizabeth Eckford, was set upon by a crowd of angry whites, who also attacked other black residents as well as newspaper reporters and photographers. After more than two weeks of unrest, Eisenhower sent in federal troops to guarantee the students entry for the rest of the school year.

In New Orleans in November 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges was pelted with rotten eggs and spat upon by white spectators as she attempted to enter an all-white elementary school under the protection of federal marshals. (Norman Rockwell would later depict this scene in a painting called “The Problem We Live With.”) Ruby’s father was fired from his job at a local gas station, but Ruby continued to attend school, a class of one taught by a Massachusetts teacher who volunteered when no white New Orleans teacher would take the job.

By the early 1960s, experiences such as these had convinced many activists that judicial means alone could not bring an end to segregation. Building on earlier civil rights successes (such as the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of late 1955 and 1956 spearheaded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.), they launched a grass-roots movement led by groups including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality.

These years of protest were instrumental in bringing about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which authorized the U.S. attorney general to bring suits against school officials and administrators who refused to integrate schools. The bill also authorized cutoffs in federal aid to segregated white schools in the South. These were key victories, putting teeth into the enforcement of Brown . While de facto school segregation—based on housing patterns, school districting policies and other factors—endures in both the North and South, the hard-won laws of the late 1960s finally brought an end to de jure segregation in U.S. schools.
 

THE LEGACY OF BROWN

As Brown’s  50th anniversary approaches, historians and education experts weigh its unfulfilled promises as well as its achievements. Two disturbing trends today reflect those unfulfilled promises. The first is a widening of the achievement gap between black and white students. The second is a return to segregated schools in many areas that had made strides since Brown . A January 2004 report by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project—Brown  at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?—found that “in many districts where court-ordered desegregation was ended in the past decade, there has been a major increase in segregation,” in particular, the report notes, in the South. At Brown’s 50-year mark, the report notes, “We are celebrating a victory over segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated.”

Notwithstanding these daunting challenges, Brown  remains a rare moment in our history—a vindication of American justice and, as historian Richard Kluger phrased it, a “reconsecration of American ideals.” King said of Brown that it “served to transform the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”

But words alone cannot express what Brown  meant to generations of Americans who previously had been abandoned by the laws of their country. It was perhaps best demonstrated in 1993, upon the death of Thurgood Marshall, “Mr. Civil Rights,” who won the Brown  case and went on to become the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. In freezing January weather, a mostly African-American crowd of 20,000 came from morning until late into the night to honor him where he lay in state in the Supreme Court building. Many left copies of the Brown  decision next to Marshall’s coffin.

Related articles:

AFT’s Brown v. Board of Education  50th anniversary resolution

Family's foundation is working to ensure that the Brown  story will still be told

Teaching Brown: A list of resources

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