CHAPTER 14

TURNING LIKE A SPINNING TOP

AS SHE HAD EACH MONDAY FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, ON May 17, 1954, Ethel Payne joined a group of lawyers and reporters at the neoclassical-styled Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in hopes of being present when the court handed down its long-awaited decision in the Brown v. Board case. Payne had covered the final oral arguments five months earlier. Then the chambers had been packed and the press section was overflowing with reporters, including many foreign correspondents. When NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, along with his mother and wife, passed by the press box he paused to tell reporters, “If any of you are in touch with the man upstairs, you can put in a good word for us on this case please.”

Presenting the opening arguments was Spottswood Robinson III. He had represented the children from the Robert R. Moton High School in Virginia, where student Barbara Johns had led the student body out on strike. Representing the other side were such Southern stalwarts as Virginia’s assistant attorney general, who, Payne noticed, peppered his speech with the word nigra, and John Davis, who invoked an Aesop’s fable as a warning that integration might cause Negroes to lose the gains they had already made. “By the time Thurgood Marshall took to the floor for the rebuttal,” wrote Payne, “he was in his best fighting form as he coolly repudiated all the arguments of the opposition.”

For three days the lawyers waged verbal battle over racial segregation while the justices listened and questioned. Presiding for the first time was their new chief justice, Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower had appointed. Schoolchildren were at the heart of the case, but the principle at stake was greater. Ever since 1896, the South had built a legal rampart around its segregationist culture on the principle enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal treatment of blacks was permissible under the Constitution. Should the court now overturn this principle when it came to schoolchildren, other forms of segregation would certainly be doomed. A decision was expected before June on a Monday, the day the court handed down its decision.

The Mondays of winter and spring had come and gone, and June was now only two weeks away. But when Payne and her colleagues reached the pressroom on the ground floor of the Supreme Court building that morning, they were told that it looked like a quiet day. At noon the justices took their seats, entering the chamber through an opening in the red velvet curtain. In the audience were fewer than a dozen African Americans, but among their ranks were Thurgood Marshall and two other NAACP attorneys. The day before, Marshall had received a phone call in Mobile, Alabama, suggesting he might want to be at the court the next day. Reporters made little note of the presence of the NAACP attorneys or the fact that all nine justices were in attendance, including one who had been recently hospitalized for a heart attack. The consensus that this was not the day for the ruling seemed to be confirmed when the justices began disposing of some routine business and announced a decision in a dairy monopoly case.

But as the time on the wall clock neared 12:45 PM, a pneumatic message descended to the pressroom. After reading it, the court’s press officer stood up, put on his jacket, and told the reporters as he left the room that the “reading of the segregation decision is about to begin in the courtroom.” Payne and her colleagues raced up the marble steps and took their seats in the press box.

AT 12:52 PM, Chief Justice Warren picked up a document before him. Normally printed copies of a court’s decision were distributed to the press at this moment. Not this time. “I have for announcement,” Warren said, “the judgment and opinion of the Court in No.1—Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka.” The Associated Press alerted its newspaper and broadcast clients. Bells on wire machines in newsrooms around the country began to ring. In Chicago, the Defender halted its presses 8,000 copies into the run of its national edition.

Slowly and deliberately Justice Warren read from the opinion, reviewing the history of segregation, the arguments in the current case, and alternative solutions. Fifteen minutes into Warren’s reading, Payne, the reporters, the lawyers, and the lucky members of the public who were in the audience could not yet tell which way the court was ruling. The first clue came when Warren asked, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of 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,” he said. The Associated Press rushed out another bulletin and Warren read on. He reviewed more case law and took the unusual action of referring to the opinions of social scientists, most notably those of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Their experiments with black and white dolls had revealed a preference for white dolls among all children, thereby buttressing arguments that segregation internalized racism among black children.

At last Warren came to the point. “We conclude,” he began. Then, deviating from the text before him, he inserted the word “unanimously” and continued reading, “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” At that moment it was clear to all what had transpired. Even from his bench above, Warren felt the audience’s reaction. “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken,” he recalled years later, “a wave of emotion swept the room, no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.”

For Payne it was beyond belief. “There I was—right in the middle of it and almost out of my mind!” she wrote, trying to explain the moment to her readers. “I’m so excited, like I’m drunk. I’m turning around like those spinning tops.” The Associated Press was finally able to report to its clients the entirety of the court’s decision. In thirty-four languages the Voice of America flashed the news around the world on its network of shortwave stations. Within a few hours, listeners from tiny Albania to the vast reaches of Communist China heard the news in their own languages along with explanations that the issue was settled by law rather than mob rule or dictatorial fiat. In Farmville, Virginia, sixteen-year-old Barbara Trent, a Moton High School student, burst into tears when her history teacher announced the decision. “We went on studying history, but things weren’t the same, and will never be the same again.”

When the decision was broadcast on the radio in Washington, the mostly black cabbies celebrated their jubilance with a cacophony of blaring horns. Now rolling quietly, a taxi picked up Payne on the steps of the courthouse. She gave the driver an address on Park Place, where Sarah Bolling, a widow, and her two young sons lived. One of her sons had been refused admission to Sousa Junior High School four years earlier. His legal case, Spottswood Thomas Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe, was one of the five school desegregation cases that comprised the court’s decision.

A gangly but athletic boy, the sixteen-year-old Spottswood did not relish the publicity. When he came around the corner and spotted the photographers at his house, he started to back away. “Heck,” he said, “I thought those guys would give up and go home.” Payne won admission to the house and sat down to talk with Sarah Bolling, who had been let off early from her government bookbinding job when word of the ruling came down.

“At first,” she told Payne, “I couldn’t realize that it had really happened.” She had been anxious during the ordeal. Some had tried to discourage her from using her son as a test case, and she didn’t want to stir up antagonism among her neighbors. Happy the matter was at an end, she told Payne, “I wish that all the people could understand that we want for our children the same rights as any other human beings.”

EVEN THOUGH ITS ATTORNEY GENERAL had filed a brief in support of the NAACP’s case, the White House puzzled over how to react to the unanimous decision. The first indication of the president’s public sentiments came at his weekly press conference two days after the ruling. He stayed clear of recognizing Payne, Dunnigan, or Lautier. The white reporters he selected launched into questions about the McCarthy hearing. At last a correspondent from South Carolina asked Eisenhower about the Brown v. Board ruling. “Mr. President,” he said, “do you have any advice to give the South as to just how to react to this recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation, sir?”

“Not in the slightest,” Eisenhower replied. “I thought that Governor Byrnes [of South Carolina] made a very fine statement when he said, ‘Let’s be calm and let’s be reasonable and let’s look this thing in the face.’ The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey.” Two more questions on the case followed. But again reporters asked only about the political implications of the ruling and how it might affect the administration’s standing in the South, coming, as it did, under a Republican administration. The president curtly replied, “The Supreme Court, as I understand it, is not under any administration.”

Given a chance to call on members of the press who represented readers most directly affected by the Supreme Court ruling, Eisenhower opted not to. Given the opportunity to use the presidential bully pulpit to urge citizens to follow the court’s edict because it was morally right, Eisenhower demurred. He said only that he would obey the decision. In seconds, it was back to the McCarthy hearings. The chasm between the black reporters and the white ones was so deep that the person constitutionally obligated to enforce the court’s edict—the most significant advancement of civil rights since the Emancipation Proclamation—could escape a press conference with only a few light questions on the most important court ruling for African Americans in sixty-one years.