50 years of diversity: Brown v. Board anniversary

Ebony, May, 2004

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said it was "the most significant legal decision in the last 150 years." Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said it was" the opening gun of the civil rights revolution." PUSH President Jesse Jackson Sr. said it "broke the back of legal segregation." Elaine R. Jones, former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said it marked the end of "the era of apartheid in America."

The subject of this high-level analysis was the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which electrified the country when it was handed down on Monday, May 17, 1954, by a unanimous Supreme Court. Even today, 50 years later, Brown still strikes sparks in the public mind, and in the weeks and months following the 50th anniversary celebration on May 17, 2004, the hills and streets and schools of America will resound with new answers and questions.

What was Brown, as it is called almost everywhere?

What did it say?

What did it do?

The first thing to notice is that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was about more than Topeka, Kansas. It was, in fact, a consolidation of five cases challenging segregation in public schools in the United States of America. The five cases had been heard by lower courts and had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by attorneys representing Black schoolchildren in South Carolina, Washington, D. C., Delaware, Virginia, and Topeka. By agreement, the five cases had been docketed under the name of Oliver Brown, who was acting on behalf of his then-7-year-old daughter, Linda Brown.

The central issue of the case was education. But Brown was about more than education; it was about reversing the course of American history, a course that had been set in 1896 by the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous decision that played a major role in creating the Jim Crow world of 1954.

It's hard to imagine that world today. It was a world, in the South and to a great extent in the North, where Black employment opportunities were severely limited, and segregated parks, theaters, restaurants, hospitals, libraries, and schools was a way of life.

Brown changed all that, legally, destroying the infrastructure of Jim Crow and creating conditions that led to a racial revolution that changed the way Americans live and dream. That revolution led to progress on a number of fronts, including the political front, where the number of Black political officials grew from a mere handful to the more than 9,000 today. There were also major changes in the corporate world that led to the Kenneth Chenaults and the affirmative action programs of several major corporations. As a result, diversity has become an accepted goal in most aspects of American life, as the Supreme Court ruled in the University of Michigan affirmative actions case of 2003.

Nor was this the end of it. For the legal successes spawned by NAACP and NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys, seconded by the Freedom Movement, helped free other Americans. "We opened the doors for other minorities and women with the push of the Civil Rights Movement," Elaine R. Jones says, "because the Women's Movement is patterned after the Civil Rights Movement."

Brown helped others, but it couldn't help itself. For ironically, it has not had a lasting effect in the one area it was supposed to change--public elementary and secondary education. One reason for this is that the decision was flawed from the beginning. In order to get unanimous support, Chief Justice Earl Warrren agreed to insert the "with all deliberate speed" clause in the 1955 implementation order.

This meant, among other things, Professsor Charles J. Ogletree says in his new book, All Deliberate Speed, that people opposed to the decision "were allowed to end segregation on their own timetable." To make matters worse, post-Warren courts backed away from the enforcement of busing, strict timetables and guidelines.

The inevitable result was documented in a recent study by Harvard's Civil Rights Project, which found a reversal of the desegregation process in America's public schools. "The resegregation process that is taking place in school districts across this country is alarming," Kweisi Mfume says. "It's scary and it's something that people can't continue to ignore."

Elaine Jones and Ted Shaw, her successor at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, agree, saying: "We've got to spend this year talking about the unrealized promise of Brown."

We should also spend this year, they say, remembering the tenacity and brilliance--and the sacrifices--of the Charles Houstons, Thurgood Marshalls, Walter Whites and Oliver Browns and Linda Browns who helped make Brown possible. "They got us out of the legal shackles of apartheid at great cost to themselves," Jones says. "We owe them, and the least we can do is finish the unfinished business, which is quality public education for all our children. That's the unfinished agenda."