Julian Bond: On the Legacy of the Brown Decision
Fifty years ago this past April , Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his first sermon as the new pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25 years old.
One month later, on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declared that segregated schools violated the Constitution's promise of equal protection.
Two months later, on July 17, 1954, construction began at Disneyland. Sadly, today Brown's promise is still lost in fantasy land. The Magic Kingdom remains closed to children of color in America.
There can be no mistake—those 50 years since Brown have seen the fortunes of black America advance and retreat, but the decision is always cause for sober celebration, not impotent dismay.
We celebrate the brilliant legal minds who were the architects of Brown v. Board ; we celebrate the brave families who were its plaintiffs; and we celebrate the legal principle that remains its enduring legacy—that, in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."
That the quest for meaningful equality—political and economic equity—remains unfulfilled today is no indictment of past efforts. It is testament to our challenge.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision, it is easy to cast a cynical eye on the status of school desegregation in America today—or the sorry state of race relations—and minimize the significance of Brown. That is a grave mistake, for Brown —by destroying segregation's legality, gave a nonviolent army the power to destroy segregation's morality as well.
Thus it is no coincidence that this year we also celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the most sweeping civil rights legislation before or since, and our democracy's finest hour.
We look back on the years between Brown and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with some pride. In those years, Brown's anniversary became a celebratory signpost, as major events focused on commemorating the date. The year after Brown, Rosa Parks sat down to stand up for her rights, and the Montgomery bus boycott began. Martin Luther King's first national address was at a 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage on the third anniversary of Brown at the Lincoln Memorial. Later that same year the Little Rock Nine successfully integrated Little Rock's Central High School. Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters burst out across the South in 1960, followed by the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the forcible integration of Ole Miss in 1962. In 1963 alone, the year that King—fresh from the battlefields of Birmingham—told the nation of his dream at the March on Washington, there were more than 10,000 anti-racist demonstrations.
King was the most famous and well known of the modern movement's personalities, but it was a people's movement. It produced leaders of its own; but it relied not on the noted but the nameless, not on the famous but the faceless. It didn't wait for commands from afar to begin a campaign against injustice. It saw wrong and acted against it; it saw evil and brought it down. Those were the days when women and men of all races and creeds worked together in the cause of civil rights. Those were the days when good music was popular and popular music was good. Those were the days when the president picked the Supreme Court and not the other way around. Those were the days when we had a war on poverty, not a war on the poor. Those were the days when patriotism was a reason for open-eyed disobedience, not an excuse for blind allegiance. Those were the days when the news media really was "fair and balanced" and not just cheerleaders for the powerful.
But those were not "the good old days."
Then, the American social order was rigidly stratified and racially codified. In those days, "[t]he law, the courts, the schools, and almost every institution... favored whites. This was white supremacy." Martin Luther King described it in 1962. He said then:
When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown
your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen
curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the
vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage
of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your
tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old
daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised
on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown
is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning
to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality
by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do
white people treat colored people so mean?" when you are harried by day
and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly on
tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with
inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating
sense of 'nobodiness'—then," King concluded, "you will understand."
You would understand that most southern blacks then could not vote. Most attended
inadequate, segregated schools, if they went at all, and many attended only
a few months each year. Most could not hope to gain an education beyond high
school. Most worked as farmers, or semi-skilled laborers. Few owned the land
they farmed, or even the homes in which they lived.
This was a massive system of racial preferences, a vast affirmative action plan for whites—enforced by law and terror. It had one name and one aim—to crush the human development of a whole population. It began with slave-catching in Africa, and it continues on to the present day.
Only by acknowledging the name, nature and scope of the problem can we measure the magnitude of our successes—and the costs of our failures.
The day Brown was decided, 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.
Within a year, in Brown II, the Supreme Court allowed desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed." For the first time, the Court had declared a right and delayed its implementation.
Three months after Brown II , Emmett Till, who was nearly my age, was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman. His death and the black newspapers that came into my Pennsylvania home created a great vulnerability and fear of all things southern in my teenaged mind. When my parents announced in 1957 that we were relocating to Atlanta, I was filled with dread.
Emmett Till's death had frightened me. But in the fall of 1957 a group of black teenagers encouraged me to put that fear aside. These young people—the nine young women and men who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.—set a high standard of grace and courage under fire as they dared the mobs who surrounded their school.
Here, I thought, is what I hope I can be, if ever the chance comes my way.
The chance to test and prove myself did come my way in 1960, as it came to thousands of other black high school and college students across the South. First through the sit-ins, then in Freedom Rides, and then in the voter registration and political organizing drives in the rural South, we joined an old movement against white supremacy that had deep, strong roots; for many of us, however, it was the recent Brown decision that had created the opportunity for young people to play active roles, to seize and share leadership in the movement for social justice.
Brownwas the movement's greatest legal victory. It changed the legal status of black Americans, and ironically made challenges to the established movement's narrow reliance on legal action possible.
As Richard Kluger has written: "Not until the Supreme Court acted in 1954 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; the quest for meaningful equality—equality in fact as well as in law—had begun."
I believe in an integrated America—integrated jobs, homes and schools. I believe in it enough to have spent most of my life in its elusive pursuit. I think it is a legal, moral and political imperative for America—a matter of elemental justice, simple right waged against historical wrong.
As Jack Greenberg, one of the attorneys for the Brown plaintiffs, put it: "The other side's briefs talked about federalism, separation of powers, textualism. Ours talked about right and wrong."
And black and white. Brown was about black inequality, what Lyndon Johnson called "the one huge wrong of the American nation."
"The Supreme Court said nothing about Latinos until 19 years after Brown and there never was any significant enforcement of desegregation for Latinos."
Today, "U. S. schools are becoming more segregated in all regions for both African-American and Latino students." By contrast, Asian students are the most integrated. I not only have spent most of my life in the cause of integration, in 1947—when I was seven years old—I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit in rural Pennsylvania against segregated schools. It never came to trial. The school board had segregated schools by giving students achievement tests which all blacks failed and all whites passed, but when the two dumb sons of the local white political boss failed the test, they closed the black school, and all of Lincoln University Village's children went to a one-room school together.