It is May 17, 1954. Eighteen months previously, a Kansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons had recruited 13 black parents in that city, with a railroad welder leading them, to sue the local board of education on the grounds that the 1879 state law allowing schools to be segregated was unconstitutional.
He and the other 12 black Kansans sit before the Supreme Court as NAACP lawyers argue the case for desegregation — and, by proxy, the cases of three other states and the District of Columbia, each with the same mission: providing equal education opportunities for children.
The court's old chief justice had died in September 1953. The new one, a former California attorney general, and who had previously approved of the internment of the Japanese during World War II, takes his place and unites the court in a unanimous decision, with only one opinion written.
The case will come to be known popularly by just the last name of that welder and his family: Brown. Brown works in Topeka, and the case declares that separate but equal is separate, but not equal.
For my father, who was born on this day in 1958, and who needed no Supreme Court to tell him that the Supreme Being made us all equal.
Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.
— Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.
There's a lot of importance paid to Brown. A lot of importance should be paid to it. Making that decision 10 years before poll taxes and literacy tests were outlawed, less than 10 years after the armed forces were desegregated, took serious balls:
[...] Brown was a potent catalyst for ambitious social change, both in Congress, where the aspirations of Brown helped prompt the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 among others...
But ... the victory was largely symbolic. Now, don't get me wrong, symbolism is important. But symbolism doesn't pay the bills, doesn't increase test scores and doesn't change much by itself:
By 1964, a decade after the first decision, less than 2 percent of formerly segregated school districts had experienced any desegregation.
The first quotation, you'll notice, comes after the second quotation in the article I cited. The argument seems to me to be this: Brown was important more for what it allowed by proxy than what it allowed in particular.
The 1964 statistic (which I assume is derived from one of the many texts cited by the article's author) speaks to me a lot about racism, about education, about poverty and about how far we haven't come. I was raised by parents who had college degrees. Plural. My mother double-majored in Greek and religion (and got her master's in education last year), and my father double-majored in history and English, then got a nursing degree from Georgetown. My father's father was an editor at the Washington Post for many years and also worked at the Library of Congress. His wife was headmistress of the school they founded.
And all my mother's father did was do well enough at West Point and in the field to be promoted to brigadier general before he retired. His wife sacrificed her professional career for his. (Don't dare think of that as an afterthought.)
My point is that the diaries you read, the nuggets of history I can find, are a product of the ridiculous amount of information and literature forcefed to me from a very young age. I slept near a Latin-English dictionary, for pity's sake. We (my family, not the dictionary and I) spent a month in France 13 years ago — and then I spent two weeks in Ireland with relatives who own a house there. When I got my current job, my parents were able to loan us $1600 for moving expenses. I don't recall it being a strain of any sort.
I have no doubt that many black people have similar stories. But I'd bet my parents' mortgage that the number of white Americans with similar stories is many times higher. The black high school student born in 1950 is probably attending a segregated high school in the 1960s. And even if the high school is newly desegregated, I hope you won't retreat to the possibility of a friendly librarian and ignore the probability of everyone else being racist.
Maybe that high school student gets an education equal to that of her white peers. And maybe she doesn't. Maybe she is able to go to a college where she takes classes with students from many backgrounds, and maybe she takes classes at the city college, and maybe she gets a job as a seamstress because there's nothing else. (I do not mean to denigrate manual labor, only to point out what follows.) Maybe she is able to form the knowledge base needed to be able to competently execute any of a dozen jobs with opportunity for advancement, and maybe she isn't.
And the maybes pile up until you have a woman who, with her husband, who maybe had a better lot and maybe didn't, isn't able to teach her children as my parents taught me. (About 5 percent of what I learned academically as a child was picked up in school. I was bored out of my skull. I can read Chaucer in the original Middle English.) And maybe they can't save money the way my parents did. Maybe they don't have insurance for themselves or their kids, and maybe when the husband gets a herniated disk, he just keeps going until it paralyzes him because they can't afford surgery.
I am not a sociologist or an economist, but I think we are at least 30 years from the average poor family having 20 percent of the opportunity I had. (We came into money through no fortune of our own.) And that's if this government starts doing a hell of a lot less bombing of other countries and a hell of a lot more investing in its own citizens. I am appalled by the desire on the part of so many people to keep poor people poor and help rich people get richer.
I began the body of this diary by dedicating it to my father. I didn't do that so I could avoid doing getting him something. I did it because he was my Brown. (My mother also advocated for me, but my father didn't have an office job to tend to.)
I detailed in this diary the general elements of my less-than-fun childhood. I will never give many specifics, particularly since I do not remember them. (I thought for the longest time that it was natural for teenagers to not remember childhood.) I've blocked them out, and I have no burning desire to live through any of that hell again. It's bad enough knowing of some of the things I lived through — others have told me about them, assuming I remembered.
One of the things I don't remember is going from being a cheery, energetic student into one forever withdrawn. I remember being happy when I was 4 and beyond miserable until I was about 16. I don't remember the transition, but I know it happened.
I also know other parents saw it. They, not my teachers (some of whom can roast, for all I care), would quietly say to my father, at dismissal, "Your oldest, there, Patrick, ... he doesn't seem as happy as he used to be."
Yeah, no shit. Thanks to your kid, in some cases. (Never underestimate the extent to which parents don't give a shit about their kids but know they'd never do anything bad.)
My father tried for eight years to get someone to do something. When I told him (and I don't remember the event or revealing it to him) about the girls who physically and verbally assaulted me when I was 6, he told the teacher and the headmaster, and I was accused of lying. Got to write letters of apology to the class for something horrible I'd supposedly done. The teacher, curse her soul, acted like I was lucky to not have been expelled.
My father will probably take to his grave the firm belief that he did not do enough for me. He shouldn't have had to do anything. But we were poor (the girls who abused me had rich parents, and this was a private school I attended for free), the school hired a lot of awful teachers who taught me about life's inequalities by levying them on me, and in a way I have been recovering since I escaped with a degree in survival and a minor in determination.
Now maybe some of you begin to see why so many of my entries focus on the evil we must not forget.
I leave you now with more reading material, more evidence that Brown was the highest peak in a mountain range of civil rights litigation, and a poignant geography lesson. The reading material is this: two contemporary newspaper articles on Brown v. Board. This quotation should maintain, despite the articles' neutrality, any fears of swift and deliberate cooperation with the court's opinion:
Both on the night the action was introduced and Wednesday night, representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made please for immediate abolition of the Step IV option clause which permits some students to attend pre-integration schools, and for teacher integration.
They left the meeting Wednesday feeling their pleas again had failed. The board passed Step IV with no discussion.
Step IV was the plan for complete desegregation. The black members of the community opposed it because it was slated to take place over the next five years — ending 10 years after the lawsuit was first brought.
Here is the mountain range, and here is your sherpa. And here is a mountain range you didn't know about. And there's probably one behind that one, and another behind it.
The poignant and bitter fact is that one of the schools involved in Brown v. Board is 32 miles from where General Lee surrendered.
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