|
 Brown
v. Board of Education
by David Halberstam, Parade Magazine, April 18, 2004
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It was the first
item listed on the docket for the U.S. Supreme Court’s October
1953 term. Ostensibly it was about the right of a black girl to
attend a newer, all-white school only seven blocks from her home
instead of an older, all-black school more than a mile away. But
Brown v. Board of Education, as the case came to be known, was
always about much more than that. At its core was whether state
governments could claim the right to sustain “separate but
equal” schools and other public facilities, segregating black
Americans into a world of far less opportunity and denying them
full participation in American life.
Nearly 100 years after the end of the Civil War, Brown loomed as
nothing less than a great legal test of whether we were going to
continue as a house divided against ourselves—as two Americas,
one black and one white, standing side by side, unequally and in
perpetuity, with the law in most of the South completely and
unalterably on the side of the whites. Or were we finally going
to begin the long, difficult journey toward becoming one
country?
The Brown decision began the birth process —however slow,
however difficult, however painful—of a new America.
It also was a great moral test. At stake was the right of the
states to tell millions of Americans that they were inferior to
others by the nature of their birth and the color of their skin;
that they were not worthy of the educational and economic
opportunities that America had to offer and must remain
second-class citizens.
How it began. The Brown in the case was Oliver L. Brown, a
resident of Topeka, Kan. In 1950, Brown tried to register his
7-year-old daughter, Linda, at a new school closer to their
home. Her application was rejected.
At the time, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) was recruiting black parents in Topeka
for a class-action lawsuit against the local school board. For
the NAACP—then the organizer of a number of parallel cases
around the country—Oliver L. Brown was the perfect lead
appellant for the lawsuit. He was a boxcar welder in the Santa
Fe Railroad yards, a part-time minister and had a solid family
with three children. What’s more, Linda Brown was a good
student.
The Brown case was filed in Kansas in 1951, then made its way to
the Supreme Court. (Actually the Supreme Court case was a
combination of five cases, with more than 200 plaintiffs from
four states and the District of Columbia.) More than three years
later, on May 17, 1954, the Court handed down its ruling: School
segregation was by its very nature unequal. It imposed a feeling
of inferiority on black Americans and thus represented a
violation of their rights. There was no such thing as “separate
but equal.”
Most remarkable in a case that involved such an explosive issue,
the Court ruled unanimously, 9-0. For that, much credit must go
to Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former governor of California
who used his very real political skills to unify a badly divided
court.
A different country. Looking back, the America of 1954 was so
different from that of today that it is sometimes hard for me to
believe it existed in my lifetime. In all too many parts of the
South, blacks could not register to vote, could not serve on
juries and thus were deprived of the most basic justice.
Black children went to neglected, poverty-stricken elementary
and high schools—whose schedules were often arranged so that
they would not interfere with cotton picking—and could not go to
the best state universities.
The indignities inflicted on blacks every day were both small
and large. They could not swim in local pools, eat at local
restaurants, stay at local hotels; they could not go to local
movie theaters through the main entrance and had to sit
separated from the white audience in a ghetto area upstairs.
Overcoming the damage of 200 years of racism may prove to be the
most difficult of American journeys.
My friend John Lewis—a young civil rights protester from Troy,
Ala., when I first met him in 1960, now a distinguished
Congressman from Atlanta—still does not go to movies, because it
was so bitter an experience when he was a boy.
In my own memory, I share a comparable image. As a young man, I
traveled with Louis Armstrong and his band on their bus from
Atlanta to Nashville, where I was working as a reporter.
Armstrong was probably the world’s best known and best loved
American then. But what I remember clearly all these years later
was his bus having to stop along the side of the road so that
this proud and joyous man could slip into the bushes to answer
the call of nature. In that America, he was not allowed to use a
gas-station toilet.
A change is going to come. The Brown decision, more than any
other act—political or legal—began the birth process, however
belated, however slow, however difficult and however painful, of
a new America. Associate Justice Stanley Reed, the Kentuckian
who was the last member of the Court to join the majority and
make the vote unanimous, later said he believed it was probably
the most important ruling the Court had made in its entire
history.
Just 60 years earlier, the Court had upheld racism in the Plessy
v. Ferguson decision (it ruled that the segregation of schools
was constitutional), but now the climate was shifting. World War
II, just nine years ended, had been fought against
totalitarianism and racism. The forces that drove both Brown
and, later, the civil rights movement, were in many ways the
first reflection of profoundly changed attitudes among a new
generation of Americans. They’d carried the burden of the war
overseas and were appalled to find that some of the things they
had fought against existed in their own country.
Not without a struggle. Robert Jackson—the Supreme Court Justice
who had been the principal American prosecutor at the Nuremberg
trials of Nazi war criminals—once said that Brown was a
benchmark in a country that seemed to be momentarily caught
between two worlds, “one dead, the other [still] powerless to be
born.”
That the South, especially the Deep South, would resist the
demise of segregation was obvious at the time. It was something
the Court members were acutely aware of, and the decision was
crafted to allow the South to respond with good will and “all
deliberate speed.” But the totality of the resistance staggered
even the skeptics.
Overcoming the damage of 200 years of racism may prove to be the
most difficult of American journeys.
I was a young reporter in Mississippi in 1955 when, over in
Yazoo City near the Delta, a group of middle-class blacks signed
a petition asking to integrate the local schools. Almost
immediately all of them lost their jobs. Banks suddenly called
in their mortgages. The young head of the state NAACP, Medgar
Evers, soon to be murdered, arranged for me to be smuggled into
Yazoo City to meet the victims of the economic backlash. All
were quite properly terrified and in no way anxious to continue
any further challenge to the power structure. It was clear to me
that night how difficult a struggle it was going to be.
Still, Brown was a signal that the Court, if not the political
system, was now on the side of equality. It was as if the
Supreme Court had changed the color of a giant national traffic
light from red to green. Suddenly it was permissible for the
national media to put the South under a withering scrutiny that
had been lacking in the past.
Among other things, the Brown decision served as the ignition
system for the civil rights movement. That movement—led by a
group of young black ministers, most notably the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.—gradually orchestrated a brilliant assault upon
some of segregation’s most toxic forms and helped turn around
the conscience of the nation, watching at home on television.
How far have we come? Some of the progress is remarkable. Not
only do we have a new black middle class, ever expanding, but
Oprah Winfrey—who could not have gone to one of the great white
universities in her hometown of Nashville when she was a girl—is
our most popular television host; Michael Jordan—who could not
have played basketball for North Carolina before Brown—was our
most popular athlete and the greatest salesman in our history
before he retired; and Bill Cosby has become arguably our most
popular comedian. In addition, a whole new generation of black
CEOs are now leading some of our nation’s most important
companies.
In many ways, the educational map of the South is quite
different. At the great universities of the Deep South—places
where many a local politician once said that blacks would never
attend—blacks not only earn degrees, they also teach. A large
part of the athletic programs that are the pride and joy of
states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia are
black-dominated. Yet it also is true that, in many small towns,
whites have created their own schools and have left the existing
public schools—essentially still segregated—to blacks.
But there also are, not just in the South but in the whole
country, heart-breaking reminders both of black poverty and
black alienation.
Sometimes, looking back at how I and so many others felt at the
time of the Brown decision 50 years ago, I think we had no sense
of the extent of the damage that we, as a nation, had inflicted
on black Americans in more than 200 years of intense racism,
starting with the harshness of slavery and ending with the
bitterness of segregation.
The legal and political change that came in from the years 1954
to 1965 was, I now think, the easy part. The hard part—in this
most difficult of American journeys—is overcoming the
educational, economic and psychological damage produced over so
long a period.
But that does not lessen the importance of the Brown decision as
a towering historic act and the great new beginning that it
represented. It allowed, to paraphrase Justice Jackson’s
prophetic words, the new, second America finally to be born.
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