Brown vs. Board of Ed turns 65
20th May 2019 · 0 Comments
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, (1954), the groundbreaking U.S. law that ended institutionalized racism in the public schools, reached senior citizen status on May 17, 2019.
In 1952, Thurgood Marshall, then-chief counsel for the NAACP devised a “chip-away” strategy for overturning Plessey v. Ferguson, which made the Brown decision possible. Marshall would go on to become the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
For example, one of the early cases he brought involved exclusion of Blacks from segregated law schools in Southern states like Texas and Louisiana.
In Brown v. Board of Education, the named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, an assistant pastor at his local church, and an African American. Brown’s daughter, Linda Carol Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated Black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.[13][14]
As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and directed to the segregated schools.
The decades-long fight to end 125 years of “separate but equal” accommodations in public institutions prompted a widespread backlash from white Americans who chanted “2-4-6-8, we don’t want to integrate.” Whites opted out of New Orleans’ public schools. They either moved to neighboring parishes or they enrolled their children in private or parochial schools to avoid integration.
New Orleans holds the historic distinction of being the birthplace of legalized segregation. Homer Plessy, (Homère Patrice Adolphe Plessy), a shoemaker, was born in New Orleans on March 17, 1863 and died on March 1, 1925. Plessy was the lead plaintiff in sued in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which sanctioned the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine and legalized segregation, nationwide.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy walked into the Press Street Depot in New Orleans, bought a first-class ticket to Covington, and boarded the East Louisiana Railroad’s Number 8 train. As the train pulled away from the station, the conductor asked the light-complexioned Plessy if he was a “colored man.” Plessy said he was, and the conductor told him to move to the colored car. Homer Plessy refused. “I am an American citizen,” he told the trainman. “I have paid for a first-class ticket and intend to ride to Covington in the first-class car.”
The conductor stopped the train, and Detective Christopher Cain boarded the car, arrested Plessy, and forcibly dragged him off the train with the help of a few other passengers. After a night in jail, Plessy appeared in criminal court before Judge John Howard Ferguson to answer charges of violating the Separate Car Act.
When Plessy v. Ferguson reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Edward Douglass White Jr. was one of the Associate Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold the legality of state segregation to provide “separate but equal” public facilities in the United States, despite protections under the Fourteenth Amendment to provide equal protection to all citizens.
White fought briefly for the Confederacy in the Civil War and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan Born near Thibodaux, LA, White was the son of a judge, U.S. congressman, and Louisiana governor. A statue of White is one of the two honoring Louisiana natives in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Another statue of White stands outside of the Louisiana State Supreme Court building in the French Quarter. The local anti-supremacy group, Take Em Down NOLA has called for the removal of White’s statue.
When Brown v. Board of Education became the law of the land, whites in New Orleans took to the streets, literally spitting insults and shouting violent threats at six-year-old African-American girls in 1960. At the tender age of six, The “McDonogh 3,” Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne, the first African Americans to integrate McDonogh 19, and Ruby Bridges, who integrated William Frantz Elementary School, were subjected to verbal abuse of rabidly racist white segregationists.
Bridges’ ordeal was immortalized in a Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting entitled “The Problem We All Live With, a seminal image of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
On May 17, 1954, the Court’s unanimous (9-0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision’s 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court’s second decision in Brown II (349 U.S. 294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”
In 2019, we still are waiting for integration with all deliberate speed and we still have the problem with all live with, de facto segregation and institutionalized racism.
Brown v Board of Education did not end de facto segregation: institutionalized racism, or any other segregation resulting from societal differences between groups, socioeconomic or political disparity. Elementary, secondary, and colleges and universities remain segregated in various degrees.
In the U.S., the only truly integrated institutions are organized sports and the entertainment industries.
African Americans today are still being treated as “the other,” as inferior, and viewed as three-fifths human, in spite of the major contributions they have made, their excellence in many fields of endeavors, and having the first African-American president, Barack Obama, to occupy the “White” House.
Today, there are unspoken bans on natural hair styles, African Americans are being killed for sport by some white supremacists, African American youth are being disproportionately jailed and suspended from school, and blackfacing and bullying persist.
On May 16, 2019, In Niguel Beach California, Christian Tinsley went off on her daughter Jade Prince’s Niguel Hill middle school classmates for bullying her dark-skinned child. Her daughter was suspended, as a result, prompting You Tube commentator, Paris Milan, who posted a video of the incident to say, “Those white kids are vicious and relentless, and they can drive kids to suicide. They have the protection of their white adult counterparts to ensure they will make their kids out to be the victims, when they’re the ones doing the taunting.”
As we celebrate the 65th Anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, let us be inspired, let’s keep hope alive in the knowledge that equality will someday be ours. As the browning of America, we can all take comfort in the fact that we are moving toward a more perfect union and a day when African Americans will be judged based the content of their character; not the color of their skin.
This article originally published in the May 20, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
