May 31, 2004
Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education; A Legacy Well Worth Lauding
On this the 50th Anniversary of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education (Brown v. Board), I am called upon by humility and circumstance to reflect on its broader meaning and implications to Our American society. Long looked upon as the seminal Supreme Court ruling of the last century, Brown v. Board’s importance is now being openly questioned by many in the black community.
Its detractors point to the seeming resurgence of segregation in the public schools of America’s inner-cities as proof that Brown v. Board’s legacy is unraveling, its promise broken. I assert that it is not; that in fact ending segregation in the public schools was just one of the legacies of Brown v. Board. The other more sweeping legacy has had a profound effect on the fabric of American society and has once and for all brought true liberty and equality before the law to all American citizens.
Many prominent black scholars, including Georgetown University Law Professor and Author Sheryll Cashin, point out that while “legal segregation is a thing of the past, racial separation persists in schools and in communities.” And other detractors have also pointed to stark decline in the once highly touted all-black schools that were once pillars of excellence under segregation, but have now become unwitting victims of so-called "bright flight," as highly qualified black teachers left for promising and more lucrative teaching opportunities elsewhere. One could credibly argue that A.H. Parker High School in Birmingham, Alabama—an institution with a long list of distinguished graduates and a 100-year history—is an example of such a school.
While I find merit in the argument that racial integration has had mixed results in the nation's public schools, as report after report has painstakingly detailed, I question the wisdom of placing the blame for such failures at Brown v. Board’s multi-faceted feet. I submit that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board was more than just an antidiscrimination decree meant to equalize the glaring inequities in our nation’s public schools that were a fact of life in 1954. Brown v. Board fully extended constitutional protections to black Americans heretofore only enjoyed by whites, and bestowed fully the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence upon black citizens.
While the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, it did not confer equal standing before the law upon the newly freed slaves. Even after the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, black Americans still could not claim full and equal constitutional protection. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessey v. Ferguson in which the Court upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating racially segregated, but equal railroad carriages, cemented the separate but equal doctrine fully into the foundation of American jurisprudence, and in effect validated the Southern states’ heinous Jim Crow laws. The Court’s ruling that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution dealt only with political, and not social equality, legitimized black Americans’ standing as second class citizens in the United States. Their skin color prevented them from calling the Declaration of Independence and U.S. or State's constitutions their own. Thus began the American Apartheid in earnest.
Brown v. Board was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. Brown v. Board was the catalyst that set in motion the tide of a Civil Rights movement which, although begun before Brown v. Board, would now hold up as proof that the law was theirs to claim and no longer the sole province of whites. In effect the ruling in Brown v. Board would lead to the systematic dismantling of the now unconstitutional Jim Crow laws culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia in which miscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivering the majority opinion of the Court opened thusly:
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. [n. 1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
Because of Brown v. Board the Civil Rights movement was given legal legs upon which to stand. To be sure the road ahead after Brown v. Board was to be littered with the blood, sweat, tears, anguish, sacrifice and sorrow of black as well as white Americans who struggled to end the American Apartheid, but without Brown v. Board we might still be engaged in that titanic battle. Instead, today, we are battling for the hearts and soul of Americans who still cling to the idea that skin color disenfranchises one from enjoying the American dream. Hearts and souls cannot be changed by laws—that change must come from within, through the banishment of the darkness of ignorance replaced by the light of truth and understanding.
As I sit here, now typing this essay on my computer, at a desk in the loft of the house my wife and I built for our family, living the quintessential American dream, I am ever mindful of the sacrifice and dedication to the cause of freedom and equality of those who went before me. Because of their courage Brown v. Board was brought before the High Court and argued by a man who will forever personify what it means to fight for the cause of freedom and equality against seemingly impossible odds. That man of course is Thurgood Marshall, who would later take his seat as Associate Justice in the very court that once again restored the lawful balance between white and black Americans. And from that perch he helped further the cause of liberty and equality for Black folk with his eloquent, persuasive arguments and undying belief that the Constitution was a document written for all of America’s citizens.
To me, Brown v. Board will always be about more than the guarantee that little black children could go to school with little white children; it was the case that brought to life the possibilities of the American dream for all Americans, not just those lucky enough to be born white. Brown v. Board gave new birth to the founding principles of our nation, that all men are created equal and that all American citizens could and should expect and demand the right to sit under the shade of constitutional protections, whilst seeking the coolness of freedom, equality and due process before the law.
In that respect Brown v. Board has been a tremendous success story; the ruling did its part, now it is up to us in the black community to do the rest. Yes the fight to end racism in all of its insidious guises continues across the American landscape, but because of Brown v. Board that fight now and forever has legal teeth. Now is no time to rest and play the victim, not when our community is in need of desperate self-help. Now is not the time to look outward for solutions but inwards for the motivation needed to further uplift one another, to call upon the courage and convictions that so sustained those who came before us and teach our children what it means, what it has always meant to be black in America.
We as a community have come a long way since the time of Jim Crow when blacks and whites were by law made to live separate and inherently unequal lives; Brown v. Board was a significant waypoint along that road. Let us not now lose the historical significance of the ruling in a forest of new educational woes it did not give root to. And in an increasingly divided political landscape we all would do well to remember this election season that we all, black and white, straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, read from the same constitutional cloth which guarantees all citizens life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Very well written panorama of this still crucially important topic, Mr. Martin. I agree with your conclusions. The inescapeable fact about democracy is that each new generation must come to understand what it is, what it means, and how to keep it alive. Skip a generation or two who don’t have time to bother with such issues, and democracy is weakened, milestones set back, and progress retarded. That is why the debate on American public education is so vitally important to America’s future.
If we don’t educate and help our young appreciate how fragile democracy is, and how much suffering has been spent on their enjoyment of the benefits of democracy, we and future Americans stand to lose it all.
Posted by: David R Remer at June 1, 2004 04:44 AMHere, here, Mr. Martin, the effect of Brown v Topeka Board of Education has been to change how we as a nation view one another. It changed, I hope forever, the notion that whites and blacks were to be held to different standards, and made it illegal to hold one or another individual to a different standard based purely on the percieved color of ones skin.
However, while it changed in fact, what behavior is accepted as right and what behavior is not, it is still up to the individual to determine his behavior.
Time and human nature show us which prescriptions are correct and which ones need revision (the more I watch the interactions of children in school, the more I favor gender based segregation of K-12 students).
What is left to figure is how to fire the imagination of parents to give their children the urgency of being educated.
Posted by: Wadendas at June 1, 2004 05:09 AM
BROWN V.TOPEKA BOARD OF EDUCATION
In an effort to stay on subject, I post this under Third Party and Independent, although I am registered Republican.
As a young mother in the early 70’s I would give my little daughter a couple of quarters when we went to the grocery store. She liked to ride the mechanical pony. One day a little boy was watching, she asked him if he would like to ride too. He shook his that he would. She put out her little hand to give him a lift up, and put her last quarter in the box for another ride. The little boy’s Mom came out the store, and stood watching her son ride with my daughter. She looked at me, and said, “Too bad they will grow up and realize that they are two different races”, I said that since hate is taught by example, I plan to not set that example for my daughter. You see, I attended high school in Maryland during the 60’s and suffered name calling by my fellow students as a result of my teatment of the black students who entered our high school. I heard the “NL” word used in referring to me, along with gum in my long blond hair at Pep Rallies,as a result of my aceptance of the students, as what they were “students.”
Posted by: Bev Jamison at June 1, 2004 12:39 PMEd is basically right. But, one component of the decline in our system of education is teaching theory fallacies which justify affirmative action and sabotage learning. Belief in God and affirmative action form politically correct opinion in ways which make genuine dabate rare and dangerous. Affirmative action was a logical place to start and Bill Cosby has recently elevated the dialogue to include hard work and better parenting. We cannot afford to displace one nation, one language, and honest work ethics with a bureaucratic police state.
Posted by: Bayviking at June 1, 2004 02:59 PMThe Cos, Bill Cosby, said it best, the poor blacks are not holding up their end of the agreement. He went on to say that the poor blacks are not pushing their kids to get an education so they can have a better life then the parents have.
Personally, at age 13, I found electricity interesting and spent many hours in the local liberary self teaching myself. Every place I got hired by was because I knew the subject and could talk the talk as well as walk the walk. 50 cents an hour working after school led to my own car at age 16 and over $75,000 a year today.
I briefly mentioned this in another thread, but the biggest difference between the American left and the European left is that in Europe there is NO compromising education, no matter what, not for “political correctness”, not for anything at all. They have no substitute for academic excellence, and if some kid gets his feelings hurt by a bad grade, TOUGH. The way America’s left has lopped entire subjects off of the tree of education, saying it’s “too hard” or “damaging to self-esteem” or whatever, that has dragged us down to far below a European standard of education, and much as America’s right wing is critical of all things European, education would not be one of them if they really knew what it was like.
The barrier to entering college should be a tough exam, not worrying about how to pay tuition, etc.
Ciggy, you mean like moments of silence, and creationism, teaching only the positive aspects of history and eliminating things like segregation, Jim Crow, organized crime and how it melted into government and corporations to avoid being detected or indicted?
Yeah, those are things the ‘LEFT’ have really messed up on, especially down here in GOP Texas. Politics has reached its filthy hands right into our children’s minds and there fights for votes by editing education to shape good party supporters and idealogical paradigms.
Science should be taught by scientists (via textbooks) and history should be taught by reputable historians. Extremists on both sides of the political spectrum however want to pollute the educational system, and have, in a dozen or so states to varying degrees. Following the export of jobs will be upper middle class families exporting their students to England for a solid and honest academic education.
Posted by: David R. Remer at June 3, 2004 05:19 AMDavid, the schools you’ve visited and experienced are obviously different from the ones I dealt with in compiling studies for the Minnesota Department of Education. Creationism in the classroom was where, exactly? Some part of the bible belt, I take it?
One “moment of silence” is an insignificant counterweight to hours upon hours of mind-numbing “self esteem-building” exercises which have nothing to do with math or the English language or any real history to speak of (even focusing on the negative would mean there were a focus, and there is none—kids only vaguely know of “Japanese concentration camps” in California, as the sum total of their WWII learning, for example). In PE, the teams are forbidden to keep score. None of that nonsense is done that way in Europe. I remember a swimming class at the French Lycée where we were all timed and scored on those times and the slowest swimmers had to do extra laps while the fastest ones could free-swim. For the “PC” left, Europe apparently didn’t get the memo, to their credit, because I did get better at swimming, poor widdo hurt feeeeeeeeeewings, and all. It wasn’t warm/fuzzy but it worked.
“Following the export of jobs will be upper middle class families exporting their students to England for a solid and honest academic education.”
That much I can agree with, but I don’t recall seeing much of what you say is right-wing about the teacher’s unions’ agendas in the schools. Do post a link to one of these “right wing” schools of yours. I do remember seeing some corporate influence, especially pharmaceuticals boondoggling their Ritalin or other mind-altering drugs with some phoney diagnoses of students’ disorders, but that’s simple profiteering, not right-wing ideology, per se.
Right-wing PUBLIC schools? Could you post a link to one of them?
Oops. The second of those two posts was a lazy rehash of the first, because I thought the first was lost forever.
Ciggy—
I fail to see what your comment has to do with the discussion at hand. How does the European education system relate directly, indirectly to a discussion of the braoder implications of Brown v. Board?
Posted by: V. Edward Martin at June 4, 2004 03:04 PMV. Edward,
“How does the European education system relate directly, indirectly to a discussion of the braoder implications of Brown v. Board?”
It’s by way of Bill Cosby’s comments on how the liberal activism of recent decades has supposedly set the stage for success among people of color, and yet people of color have not (allegedly) kept up their side of the bargain, by not doing the work necessary and seize the opportunities given to them by said activism.
My introduction of the contrast between America’s McSchools and the real education of Europe was intended to show that part of Bill Cosby’s premise doesn’t hold quite as much water as hoped for by the conservatives kibbitzing and grinning at the little feud that ensued. This is because the liberal activism, while having as its goal the broadening of opportunities for the economically underprivileged, and for preserving self-esteem for the lazy, has decidedly not kept ITS side of the bargain, and that even if a person of color were to apply himself 100% in today’s public schools, the resulting achievement would be something on a par with grade school in a real educational system in Europe, and as such, still less able to compete globally. Of course, whites and Latins and Asians are all similarly chopped off at the knees by substandard education, but African Americans are the easy hook into retaining subject relevance here. No ethnic chauvinism on their part intended.
The persisting and more dangerous segregation as seen today is at the post-secondary level, where the children of the rich attend the best (and most expensive) schools, and thus perpetuate family legacies of wealth and power. Affirmative action introduces racial minorities into the aristocracy by force of law, but even there, all that is really achieved is a more racially diverse aristocracy. What’s really needed is an educational system where barriers to entry at the highest levels are neither economic nor bureaucratic, but ACADEMIC. For that, all schooling period should be public, and all public schooling should be taken very, very seriously, and if it hurts the feelings of those who act up in class or won’t do their homework, that’s just too bad.
Posted by: Ciggy at June 4, 2004 06:19 PM
