FIVE 

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

ON MAY 17, 1954, Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren conducted about forty minutes of routine court business and then announced: “I have the judgment and opinion of the court in No. 1—Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka. . . . In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be available to all on equal terms.” Then, he came to the crucial question: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of their race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.”

“The doctrine of ‘separate but equal,’“ Warren said, “has no place!”¹

I was fourteen years old when this happened. I remember this feeling my parents had of great joy and optimism about it. I don’t think they thought things would change overnight. But they thought this was a sign of change. Things were looking up.²

The Brown decision came from a long history of Black efforts to obtain an equal education. The formation of the NAACP formalized the drive for access to education. The strategy was designed by Charles Houston and carried forward by Thurgood Marshall after Houston’s death in 1938. Beginning in 1936 with Pearson v. Murray, integrating the University of Maryland’s law school, the NAACP won a series of lawsuits that aimed at forcing separate to be truly equal, thus making segregation so expensive it would have to be abandoned. The NAACP then shifted from trying to make separate facilities equal, and winning equal pay for segregated Black teachers, to a direct attack on the beast itself.

In 1951, Marshall began to coordinate lawsuits attacking segregated education as unconstitutional on its face, even if the separate facilities were equal. The suits hailed from Clarendon County, South Carolina; Prince Edward County, Virginia; New Castle County, Delaware; the District of Columbia; and Topeka, Kansas. On December 9, 1952, the Supreme Court heard oral argument on all five cases, combined them under the name of the petitioner listed first—Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, suing on behalf of his daughter Linda. Linda Brown lived three blocks from a segregated school; instead of attending that school, she rode a bus each day to an all-Black school two miles away.

When the case first came before the court, both its presenters and the justices who heard it understood its historic potential. In an unusual but not unheard-of procedure, the case was argued in the 1952 term and re-argued the next.

Among other issues, the court struggled with the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, that portion of the Constitution adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws as well as due process. In its earliest cases defining the Fourteenth Amendment, for instance, in Strauder v. West Virginia in 1880, the court had said: “It ordains that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“What is this,” the court asked, “but declaring that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as well as the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States, and, in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color?”³

From that noble beginning there emerged, only a few years later, the disgraceful doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.⁴

In 1952, a half century after Plessy, for the first time the court confronted “separate but equal” head-on. The court asked the lawyers to prepare written responses to five questions, two of them dealing with the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The NAACP turned to scholars, including my father, and constitutional experts for assistance. While C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin were studying post-Reconstruction policies regarding Southern race relations, my father researched the intentions of the ratifying states with respect to school integration.

My father believed so strongly in school integration that in 1947 my sister and I were plaintiffs in a lawsuit to integrate the schools of tiny Lincoln Village in Pennsylvania. Before that case could come to trial, the district closed the all-Black school, and my sister and I and the other Black children integrated the formerly all-white school.

In the end, the court regarded the historical evidence as “inconclusive” and “a draw,” which meant victory for the NAACP.⁵ Plessy had said Congress condoned segregation; now free to look for guidance elsewhere, the court was able to speak for what one historian called “the American conscience.”⁶

The day Brown was announced, the NAACP held a news conference to announce an ambitious new agenda. To Thurgood Marshall, Brown was the Magna Carta of Black America, a declaration of our rights. School segregation would be eliminated, he thought, within five years. He was right about the former; he was obviously wrong about the latter.

Southern whites, with some exceptions, were adamantly opposed to Brown. The governors of South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi threatened to close public schools rather than permit integration. A Richmond newspaper wrote that the justices were “an inept fraternity of politicians and professors” and the decision “repudiated the Constitution, spit upon the Tenth Amendment, and rewrote the fundamental law of this land to suit their own gauzy concepts of sociology.”⁷ Yale-educated Mississippi judge Tom Brady wrote a book called Black Monday, distributed widely by the White Citizens’ Council. He expressed the attitude and fears of many when he wrote:

When a law transgresses the moral and ethical sanctions and standards of the mores, invariably strife, bloodshed and revolution follow in the wake of its attempted enforcement. The loveliest and purest of God’s creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that tread this celestial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl. . . . We have, through our forefathers, died before for our sacred principles. We can, if necessary, die again.⁸

THOSE WHO PREDICTED the promised land would be slow in coming were proved right on May 31, 1955, a year and two weeks after the initial decision. The first decision, in 1954, announced that school segregation was illegal and must end; the second decision, in 1955, said yes, but not today, not now, in fact not at any time soon. Rather, the court ordered the affected states to make haste slowly, in a masterpiece of ambiguity, to “admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties in these cases.”⁹

The court did not set a date, as the plaintiffs had hoped. It did not ask for plans of action within three months, as the federal government’s brief had requested. Brown II represented the costs of unanimity. Chief Justice Warren had believed a divided court would have been “catastrophic.” For the first time, the Supreme Court had stated a right and delayed its exercise.

Delay and the promise of more delay gave the opposition time to organize, defend, and attack. It allowed the collapse and abdication of responsible white leadership and their replacement by extremists and opportunists. The vacillation of the Eisenhower administration gave no encouragement to white liberals or moderates. Instead, Eisenhower’s hopes of building on and enlarging the Southern white votes he had received in 1952, and his administration’s ignorance of the white South’s potential for angry explosions, laid the foundation for the crisis yet to come in Little Rock in 1957, one of more than five hundred instances of violence and reprisals against Southern Blacks between 1955 and 1958.¹⁰

Southern members of Congress organized themselves to fight against the school decisions. Defiance of the court became proof of Southern loyalty and support of the white race. In 1956, 101 members of Congress, including every member from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia, signed a “Southern Manifesto,” asking their states not to obey the Supreme Court and warning against “meddlers” who might provoke Southerners to “unlawful acts,” thereby disclaiming, predicting, and sanctioning violence all at the same time.

The Southern states passed more than 450 laws to block school integration and attack those who promoted it. The all-out attack on the NAACP—injunctions in Texas and Alabama, removal of tax-exemption in Georgia, South Carolina’s forbidding public employment to NAACP members—reduced the NAACP’s Southern membership, but it also unintentionally opened the door for more dynamic leadership, including some members of the Black clergy, previously better known for caution than courage.

Brown destroyed segregation’s legality and gave a nonviolent army license and power to attack and destroy segregation’s morality as well. The Southern protest movement was emboldened by Brown. The decision’s anniversary quickly became a celebratory signpost for the growing movement for civil rights. Martin Luther King’s first national address was at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage at the Lincoln Memorial on Brown’s third anniversary. I marched with several thousand others when the Atlanta student sit-in movement held its largest protest—a march on the Georgia State Capitol—to commemorate Brown’s sixth anniversary in 1960. The Freedom Rides were expected to end their tour through the South in New Orleans on the seventh anniversary of Brown in 1961.

When schools opened in the fall of 1956, some modest desegregation occurred, most often in school districts in the Upper and Border South, but resistance quickened. For the first ten years after 1954, the emphasis was more on “deliberate” than speed. The focus was on dismantling the dual school systems in the South, the products of de jure segregation, and, in Southern accents, “all deliberate speed” meant any conceivable delay. Integration was more a legal fiction than actual fact. President Eisenhower had lobbied Chief Justice Warren to rule for the South; he never endorsed Brown, and the resistant white South, encouraged by his silence, reacted with evasion and delay. Its tactics included violence, establishment of private segregation academies, plans to abolish all public education, repealing compulsory school attendance laws, state support to escaping white students, and the long-discarded theories of interposition and nullification, put forth in the 1830s by South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, who argued that states could “nullify” federal law. Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its public schools for five years, believing children were better off uneducated than integrated. Ten years after Brown, more than 97 percent of all Southern Black children still attended segregated schools.

A second phase occupied the five years from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until 1969. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination wherever federal funds were spent, and for the first time, under a Southern president, Lyndon Johnson, the federal government took an active role. The percentage of Black children in school with white ones rose from 3 percent to 13 percent.

But there were great costs too. In North Carolina, from 1963 to 1970, the number of Black elementary school principals dropped from 620 to 170. Black secondary school principals went from 209 to 10. By 1973, only 3 were left. By 1972, 3,051 Black North Carolina schoolteachers—one-fifth of the state’s Black teachers—had lost their jobs as Black and white schools merged. Across the South, an estimated 31,000 Black schoolteachers lost their jobs. Lost as well was history—revered school names, mottoes, mascots, traditions. Black students found themselves in formerly all-white schools that retained the identity they had acquired in the segregated past. Wherever Black school buildings were retained, their names were changed. Plaques, trophy cases—all the artifacts that honored Black achievement—disappeared.¹¹

In the ten years after the 1964 act, the Department of Justice brought actions against more than five hundred school districts, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare filed more than six hundred complaints. But it was a full thirteen years after Brown that the court—in the 1968 Green decision—declared “separate but equal” extinct—and required school districts to dismantle segregation “root and branch” and produce integration plans “now!”¹²

Then Richard Nixon, in his victorious 1968 campaign for president, courted white votes with promises to roll back integration enforcement. Evasion and delay were given new life in the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley. By 1991 and 1992, a Supreme Court shaped by President Ronald Reagan gave school systems permission to disassemble desegregation plans despite remaining vestiges of segregation.¹³

Despite the dismal picture seen when viewed backward, in its immediate aftermath, in the middle 1950s for Black Southerners, Brown was a great emblem of success and held out great promise. In his history of the Brown decision, Richard Kluger writes: “Not until the Supreme Court acted did the nation acknowledge it had been blaming the black man for what it had done to him. His sentence to second class citizenship had been commuted; now the quest for meaningful equality—equality in fact as well as in the law—had begun.”¹⁴

Brown became more than an occasion for annual celebration; it served as sanction and certification that the effort for equality was just and right. If the Depression in 1929 had convinced America it was obliged to protect its citizens’ well-being, the court’s decision in Brown began to convince reluctant white Americans they would have to share their bounty, their knowledge, and their world. Critics who scoff at Brown as if the advantages to Black children were to be gained simply by sitting next to white ones in a classroom miss the point of integrated schools. A public educational system that is truly integrated and treats minorities and whites equally is the antithesis of the larger society, which is profoundly segregated and unequal.

IN THE WAKE of the Brown decisions, the attorneys general of Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas won court orders against the NAACP. Virginia passed seven laws to restrict the organization. South Carolina made it illegal for schoolteachers to be members. By 1957, the NAACP was facing debilitating litigation and legislation in seven states; it was completely banned in Alabama.

The South’s crackdown on the NAACP resulted in an immediate drop in membership; the number of Southern branches dropped from 60 percent of the total in 1955 to 52 percent in 1958. In 1955, 45 percent of the dues-paying, card-carrying membership was Southern; by 1957, only 28 percent of the NAACP’s members came from the South. As the NAACP grew weaker, activists looked for other organizations, and many created new ones.

Brown gave white racists a rallying cry throughout the South. The KKK was invigorated, and the White Citizens’ Councils organized. They created a firm organizational base for terror and intimidation in each of the Southern states. One result was a series of attacks on voting rights activists that reverberated throughout Black America in 1955: Reverend George Lee was gunned to death in Belzoni, Mississippi, May 7, 1955. His friend and fellow activist Gus Courts was shot six months later but survived the attack, and Lamar Smith was assassinated on August 13 on the courthouse steps in Brookhaven, Mississippi.¹⁵

THEN, IN AUGUST 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till was lynched. He had come from his home in Chicago to Money, Mississippi, to live for the summer with his uncle, Mose Wright. Before he left his mother told him, “If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it.” Leaving a country store, Till allegedly said “Bye, baby” to the white wife of the store’s owner. That night, the store owner, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, came to Mose Wright’s home and took young Till away. They beat him, shot him in the head, and tied his body to a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan and dumped it in the Tallahatchie River. “What else could I do?” one of the killers asked later. “He thought he was as good as any white man.” Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury in sixty-seven minutes.¹⁶

Till’s mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral: “I want the world to see what they did to my boy.” The Till case became a cause célèbre across the United States; his death sent terrifying signals to young Blacks everywhere. I was a year older than Emmett Till and can remember thinking, “If they’ll do that to him, what will they do to me?”

Well-publicized in Black America, spoken of in barbershops and poolrooms, in churches, nightclubs, and social gatherings, the murders were done to instill fear and teach a lesson: that those who dared to challenge the color line could be stopped by brutal death. They did instill fear, but they also increased determination.

JUST AS THESE terror attacks were beginning, Roy Wilkins became the third executive secretary of the NAACP. At that point, the NAACP was the only national organization of Black people fighting for civil rights. As we have seen, it had won impressive court victories against racially restrictive housing covenants, segregated transportation, and segregated public facilities, culminating in the 1954 and 1955 school decisions, and Black Americans had some cause for cautious optimism. But it would take more than court victories to destroy segregation.¹⁷

Wilkins was born in 1901 and educated at the University of Minnesota, where he edited the school’s paper, The Daily. He had become managing editor of the Kansas City Call before joining the NAACP staff in 1931, succeeding Du Bois as editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. When NAACP executive secretary Walter White died, Wilkins succeeded him, taking over the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization just as events in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, would change the nature of the racial struggle and give it new techniques, personalities, and organizations.