Rick Perlstein: How the chief justice misconstrued history in the school race cases
[Mr. Perlstein is the author of BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS.]
Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."
If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.
Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.
I mean, do I really have to explain this? In 1955, the year after Brown, the Supreme Court specified the compliance language for the first decision: Southern school districts would have to comply "with all deliberate speed."
Instead, they did not comply at all. Instead, the region staged a self-consious movement of "Massive Resistance." Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by "all lawful means." In Virginia senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd's minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate. And in 1957 in Little Rock—well, has Justice Roberts never heard of this?
Since most Dixie municipalities had one school district for whites and another entirely separate district for blacks, and simply did nothing, the federal courts in 1964 ruled that all "dual school districts" not already under court order to do so would have to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health Education and Welfare. Congress was able to help in 1965, after the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided the first serious federal funding to local school districts. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act had provided that no segregated public institution could get federal funds, this was, finally, a chance to punish the vast, vast majority of Southern school districts who - read this carefully, Justice Roberts—11 years after Brown outlawed telling schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.
By that point only 6 percent of Southern schoolchildren attended classes with children of another race. How did we know? Because the federal government counted.
In 1966, HEW published guidelines specifying that schools with no black students or staff would have to show evidence of "significant progress"; those with 4 to 5 percent black students or staff would have to triple that number within the '66-'67 school year; those with 8 to 9 percent would have to double them.
How did the South respond? By openly defying the law. In the same manner as a criminal, told to halt by police, but simply ran as fast as he could in the other direction....
Read entire article at http://commonsense.ourfuture.org
Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."
If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.
Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.
I mean, do I really have to explain this? In 1955, the year after Brown, the Supreme Court specified the compliance language for the first decision: Southern school districts would have to comply "with all deliberate speed."
Instead, they did not comply at all. Instead, the region staged a self-consious movement of "Massive Resistance." Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by "all lawful means." In Virginia senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd's minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate. And in 1957 in Little Rock—well, has Justice Roberts never heard of this?
Since most Dixie municipalities had one school district for whites and another entirely separate district for blacks, and simply did nothing, the federal courts in 1964 ruled that all "dual school districts" not already under court order to do so would have to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health Education and Welfare. Congress was able to help in 1965, after the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided the first serious federal funding to local school districts. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act had provided that no segregated public institution could get federal funds, this was, finally, a chance to punish the vast, vast majority of Southern school districts who - read this carefully, Justice Roberts—11 years after Brown outlawed telling schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.
By that point only 6 percent of Southern schoolchildren attended classes with children of another race. How did we know? Because the federal government counted.
In 1966, HEW published guidelines specifying that schools with no black students or staff would have to show evidence of "significant progress"; those with 4 to 5 percent black students or staff would have to triple that number within the '66-'67 school year; those with 8 to 9 percent would have to double them.
How did the South respond? By openly defying the law. In the same manner as a criminal, told to halt by police, but simply ran as fast as he could in the other direction....