Inherently Unequal

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2004 by Fletcher, Michael, Gamber, Frankie

IT WAS THE SUPREME COURT CASE THAT CHANGED THE NATION. THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY, THOUGH, WAS JUST BEGINNING.

Soon after his election to Congress in 1992, Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) personally hung nine black-and-white photographs on the wall of his Capitol Hill office. The pictures honor some of the anonymous heroes of Brown v. Board of Education, the seminal Supreme Court case that marked the beginning of the end of the nation's long history of government-sanctioned racial discrimination.

Clyburn's makeshift exhibit has no pictures of Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, James M. Nabrit Jr. or Robert L. Carter, who were among the storied lawyers who sculpted the years-long legal strategy that climaxed in the Brown victory a half century ago on May 17, 1954. Neither is there a picture of Linda Brown, who, as a 7-year-old, had to cross dangerous railroad tracks to catch a bus to her segregated elementary school in Topeka, Kan. The landmark case bears her family's name.

Instead, Clyburn's photographs honor the little-known people from his home state who stood firm in the face of threats, the loss of jobs and outright violence to take part in the first of the series of lawsuits that toppled American apartheid. They are representative of the farmers and preachers, gas station attendants, high school activists and maids who put their lives on the line to support the five cases that were consolidated and came to be known as Brown.

"These were just ordinary, salt-of-the-earth people," Clyburn says. "They were not Ph.D.s. They were not LLDs. They were no Ds."

Their courage helped bring victory in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in the nation's history. Brown outlawed the doctrine of "separate but equal," putting the nation's schools on the road to desegregation - however slowly - and helping to ignite the already energized Civil Rights Movement, which exploded on the heels of Brown.

The legal strategy that led to the Brown victory was "designed to dismantle the entire system of White supremacy," says Vernon Jordan, the power broker, investment banker and longtime civil rights leader. The plan worked, at least when it came to erasing racially discriminatory laws from the books and moving the nation closer to the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It didn't take a lawyer to see that if racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, so were segregated water fountains, buses and restaurants. With the decision, "America declared itself to be on the side of equality," says Anthony T. Kronman, the outgoing dean of Yale Law School. "It instantly became one of the moral pole stars of our national life."

As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of Brown, the decision's hallowed declaration that "separate but equal" is inherently unequal is embraced virtually without controversy. Across the country, there are teach-ins and seminars and conferences remembering Brown.

The federal government has established a commemorative site for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Topeka, and it also has appointed a commission to travel the country to encourage and coordinate celebrations of the Brown decision.

Congress plans later this year to honor posthumously four of the people remembered on Clyburn's wall with the Congressional Gold Medal. The recipients will be the Rev. Joseph A. De Laine, a minister; Levi Pearson, a farmer; and Harry Briggs, a gas station attendant; and his wife, Eliza, a motel maid, all of whom were instrumental in a school desegregation lawsuit in South Carolina that was the first of the five Brown cases.

The principles embodied in Brown may seem unremarkable now, but fighting for them was downright radical - not to mention dangerous - when the first litigants began agitating for equal education opportunities in the 1940s.

While the nation seems to agree with desegregation in theory, there is hardly a consensus about how to achieve it. Consequently, racially balanced schools remain an elusive goal in much of the country today.

In 2001, some 40 percent of the nation's 7.9 million Black students still attended schools that were at least 90 percent minority, according to a report released this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. In the Northeast, the report said, three out of four Black and Latino students attended schools that were overwhelmingly Black and Latino. Overall, some 70 percent of Black students attend majority minority schools, the report concluded.

None of this developed by accident. Massive resistance to any efforts to make school desegregation a reality quickly followed the 1954 Brown decision. Local officials shut down entire school systems to avoid desegregation in parts of the South, and more than 100 members of Congress adopted the Southern Manifesto, vowing to oppose the court decision.

"Impeach Warren" signs sprouted along highways across the South, in anger at Chief Justice Earl Warren, who engineered the unanimous Brown decision. In some states, governors famously stood in schoolhouse doors to prevent Black students from attending classes with Whites.