Brown v. Board turns 67, Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project: White people’s new boogeyman
26th July 2021 · 0 Comments
Part IV
The U.S. Supreme Court took a year to decide to integrate public schools. It took more than a half-century, 58 years after the Supreme Court ruled in 1896 Plessy v Ferguson case that ‘separate but equal,’ was appropriate, for the Court to reverse itself in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954.
And it took a year to do that.
On June 3, 1953, the justices ordered attorneys to reargue the case. In his book, All Deliberate Speed, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. points out the SCOTUS justices’ fear of ending racial segregation in public schools.
Ogletree taught President Barack and first lady Michelle Obama and represented Anita Hill, a law professor who testified in the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who she accused of sexual harassment.
“The Brown lawyers recognized the Court’s concern with, and indeed “fear” over, the implementation of a Court decree abolishing segregation, specifically noting that this “fear” was the most “persuasive factor” working for the other side,” he wrote.
Among those on ‘the other side’ was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been in office 15 months when the Brown case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. A southern sympathizer, Eisenhower told Chief Justice Earl Warren, “[Southern whites] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” Eisenhower added, “It is difficult through law and through force to change a man’s heart.” His heart, however, seemed to be with the opponents of integration,” the professor related.
“While the Brown lawyers were right to celebrate this remarkable achievement, the evil that Brown sought to eliminate — segregation — is still with us, and the good that it sought to put in its place — integration — continues to elude us. The violent resistance to integration proved to be more than anyone had imagined. Yet, the more subtle forms of resistance, such as white flight, denial of funding for equalization, and rejection of Brown principles by a conservative Supreme Court, have been the most effective in limiting the promise of Brown,” Ogletree adds.
Anti-integrationists in the 21 Century found a new way to avoid public school integration. Charter schools with admission requirements and the privatization of public education money for private school vouchers allow whites to keep their children separated from children of color.
Over the years, whites overseeing public education have managed to sanitize American history with books that minimized the country’s original sin, slavery, and the violent treatment of Blacks at the hands of people in authority that continue to this day.
From the Red Summer of lynchings to the burning down of Black towns, the murders of civil rights leaders and voter registration workers, the dogs, water hoses, and batons, and police killings of unarmed Black people — I can’t breathe – whites in power have looked away.
That is, until the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 kept everyone inside, but killer cops kept killing Black people, and the harsh glare of reality’s spotlight caught them like deers in headlights. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, et al. touched off a ‘Summer of Reckoning’ and worldwide protests. Calls for defunding the police scared white people.
Equally shocking was the white fear that emerged in response to the truth about American history and its legacy of racism.
Donald Trump Sr., the ex-president who won in 2016 by espousing support for racism and white nationalism and attacking various ethnic groups, had a hissy fit about the 1619 Project in the summer of 2020. The magazine and Critical Race Theory became the boogiemen of his 2020 presidential campaign, the red meat for white voters who embraced his anti-Black, white supremacy propaganda.
Journalist Nikole Hannah Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, which told the Black experience in America from a white and Black perspective. The project was first published in The New York Times Magazine in August 2019 for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia.
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country,” Trump said in September 2020.
Trump signed an executive order to create the “1776 Commission” to promote a “patriotic education.” It was his effort to rewrite and sanitize American history.
Trump also signed an executive order excluding from federal contracts any diversity and inclusion training interpreted as containing “Divisive Concepts,” “Race or Sex Stereotyping,” and “Race or Sex Scapegoating.” “Among the content considered “divisive” is Critical Race Theory (CRT),” Janel George wrote in the Human Rights Magazine American Bar Association.
CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in American society. The study of race in the law first emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. CRT acknowledges that racism is a standard feature of society and embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality.
CRT started under Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr. in the 1980s. Bell was the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. He established a course in civil rights law and wrote Race, Racism and American Law, which today is a standard textbook in law schools around the country.
Other scholars followed Bell’s teachings. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term Critical Race Theory, lectured on critical race theory, civil rights, and constitutional law at UCLA. She and Patricia Williams, a former student, research assistant, and lifelong mentee of Bell’s and now professor of law emerita at Columbia University, advanced the theory. What is Critical Race Theory?
In response to Trump’s attacks, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), led by Crenshaw, launched the #TruthBeTold campaign to expose the harm his order caused. Over 300 diversity and inclusion training sessions were canceled as a result. #TruthBeTold.
The AAPF fought back and secured the signatures of over 120 civil rights organizations and allies on a letter condemning the executive order. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the National Urban League (NUL), and the National Fair Housing Alliance filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the executive order violates the guarantees of free speech, equal protection, and due process.
In January 2021, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris scrubbed the “1776 Report” from the White House website.
Still, the debate over teaching the truth about American history rages on as fearful whites continue to try to suppress the truth. White state legislators in Arizona, Texas, Idaho, and Georgia have passed bills forbidding the teaching of critical race theory. School Boards are trying to rewrite history curricula, teachers are getting fired for educating their students about racial disparities, and potentially, an entire generation is being fed lies about American history.
Kristen Power, USA columnist and CNN political analyst, who is white, summed up the white anti-truth mob’s motivation: “They don’t want people to know about white people’s history.”
Caution: The more you try to hide the fact about racism, the more it will be sought by truth-seekers.
This article originally published in the July 26, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
