Brown v. Board turns 67
6th July 2021 · 0 Comments
“In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
– Brown v. Board of Education,
Supreme Court of the United States,
May 17, 1954
PART I
Linda Brown couldn’t attend the school four blocks from her home. She was the wrong color – the victim of a law created by racist politicians to keep Black and white Americans apart. Stepping back in time to 1952 Topeka, Kansas, the curious time traveler must marvel at the sheer insanity and ignorance of a U.S. Supreme Court that would make segregation the law of the land in 1896.
History is cyclical. As it happened in the summer of 2020, there was also a racial reckoning in Topeka in 1952. However, instead of taking to the streets, the protest for justice and equality took place in courtrooms. The Reverend Oliver Brown, Linda Brown’s father, consulted with the local NAACP and filed Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education Topeka.
Two years after attorneys, led by Thurgood Marshall, filed the Brown v. Board case (combined with similar lawsuits from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Delaware), the Supreme Court reversed itself.
It would be more than a half-century before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its 1896 ‘separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, a lawsuit brought by prominent New Orleanians. The Court’s decision did much more than calling for integrated schools. It ended legal apartheid in America.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions.
“The legacy of Brown v. Board is that it began an era, an era of change when it comes to racial justice and equality in this nation,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said in a 2012 Alliance for Excellent Education video on the landmark case.
The Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division Pamela S. Karlan wrote a commemorative statement about Brown v. Board posted on the DOJ website last May. In her analyses of the case, Karlan celebrated the impact of the court victory and pointed to work that is still needed to level the playing field in education for Black Americans.
Karlan said Brown was the culmination of a multi-year and nationwide campaign of students, parents, advocates and lawyers to change the law on the books and establish school segregation’s unconstitutionality. “But it was only the beginning of a quest to make real the promise of that ruling in school districts and communities across the country – a quest that continues today.”
Karlan is a voting rights and employment discrimination litigator. The New Orleans-based Chisom case was the first case the former NAACP-LDF attorney and Stanford law school professor argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In her DOJ statement, Karlan wrote about the resistance to school desegregation and the lingering effects of state-sponsored segregation. She spoke of the efforts of students and families to achieve equality within schoolhouses.
“At first, the lawsuits were simply about getting Black students into the same buildings as their white counterparts. But in the decades since Brown, DOJ has fought alongside students and families to achieve equality inside those buildings.”
Karlan points out a litany of challenges today’s students of color face: Unfair school discipline, expulsion, and arrests; unnecessary segregation of students with disabilities; punishment for not following dress and grooming codes (rooted in race and gender stereotypes); and hostile environments where students are harassed, sometimes even by school officials, for being who they are.
“Discriminatory discipline and unchecked harassment, like overt racial segregation can, in Brown’s words, ‘affect students’ “hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,’” she adds.
What’s also evident is that 21st century public schools in many regions of the U.S. remain primarily segregated. Some states have successfully integrated schools, but the advent of white flight in the 20th century and charter schools, without accountability or diversity plans, have added to the resegregation of public schools.
The Century Foundation’s December 2020 report, “Here Is What School Integration in America Looks Like Today,” found that Black and Latinx students across the nation are still disproportionately confined to racially and economically segregated, underfunded schools.
“Nationwide, two out of five Black and Latinx students attend schools where more than 90 percent of their classmates are non-white, while one in five white students attends a school where more than 90 percent of students are also white,” the report reads.
Halley Potter, a senior fellow with The Century Foundation, wrote that “School segregation and education inequality are not products of nature: they are the result of racist school and housing policies – conscious decisions by lawmakers – combined with individual choices that families make.”
Potter suggests deliberate policies and practices could give students access to diverse learning environments, equitable resources and school cultures that affirm their identities.
“The growth of integration policies over the past four years is a hopeful sign that progress on integration is still possible. From 2017 to 2020, seventeen school districts and twenty-eight charter schools added new integration policies.”
There is hope that educational justice will someday become a reality and schools will be fully integrated. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona knows the playing field is uneven, and his priorities include ensuring that all students have access to quality education.
Cardona is already getting resistance from so-called conservative lawmakers in Congress trying to tell the education secretary what his priorities should and should not include. Republicans are slamming Cardona for supporting the teaching of the 1619 Project, which offers a view of slavery and its effects from a Black perspective. They are also railing against Critical Race Theory, which examines laws that have a discriminatory impact on people of color.
Achieving his goals poses a significant challenge because the federal government has ceded public education to states like Louisiana, where state law only offers a “minimum education foundation” to public school students.
This article originally published in the July 5, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
