Brown v. Board of Education Set the Stage
By: Terry Donnelly
May 26, 2014
On May 17 the landmark Supreme Court decision, Oliver Brown
v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, celebrated its 60th birthday.
The case overturned a portion of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that
allowed the creation of the segregated cast system practiced in the old
Confederacy of ‘separate but equal’. The Plessy decision stated that blacks
could be segregated from whites if the provided services were of equal value.
From this, most of the Jim Crow segregation laws were validated. In fact, there
was nothing close to separate but equal facilities from drinking fountains to
hospital waiting rooms across the South.
Brown v. Board of Education overturned the section of Plessy
v. Ferguson dealing with public education. In 1954 under the hand of Thurgood
Marshall arguing for Oliver Brown and his daughter, the court decided that
separate but equal did not apply to public schools. Brown’s daughter was to be
admitted to her local school and not have to travel a distance from her home to
attend an all black school.
Well done–except for the fact that the law languished for
almost 20 years with only a smattering of instances in which the case was
invoked. In 1957 after waiting three years for, what the state called ‘gradual’
school integration; nine well-qualified black students were registered into the
all white Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus
tried to keep them from attending. He managed to pit local law enforcement,
trying to keep the nine students out, against National Guardsmen sent by
President Dwight Eisenhower to get them in. The students were finally admitted.
In 1962, James Meredith was the first black student to
enroll in the University of Mississippi. Meredith was well qualified, as he had
successfully been studying at Jackson State University for two years after a
stint in the United States Air Force. Not surprisingly, Mississippi Governor Ross
Barnett tried to keep him from matriculating. Again, it took federal
intervention from President John Kennedy for Meredith to be allowed to exercise
his constitutional rights.
Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood in the schoolhouse
door in 1963 and delivered his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever” speech trying to keep two black students out of the
University of Alabama. Wallace failed.
These three instances got national attention, but the 1954
ruling was still waiting for general enforcement. School districts just didn’t
know how to apply the law on a wide spectrum. If individual blacks wanted to go
to a local school, mostly, they were allowed. But, there was nothing like equal
education for the masses of black students attending separate public schools.
The reason was that there was little integration of local housing. White kids
lived in white neighborhoods and went to the local school. Blacks did the same.
The problem was black schools did not get the resources necessary to be quality
schools. Pre-Brown v. Board of Education separate and unequal customs still
existed.
In the early 1970s states started putting pressure on their
school districts to start enforcing Brown. Districts began experimenting with
forced bussing of kids away from their local schools into sometimes far away
schools so that the numbers of black and white students in classes better
matched the ratio in the particular school district. There were all sorts of
programs proposed to integrate schools, but none of them were satisfying
anyone–black or white. The kids wanted to stay close to home, go to school in
the neighborhood, play on the sports teams, and be a part of the social
atmosphere of a school. This was not possible if students were bussed away from
their local school and often had to get right on a bus after school and ride
for perhaps an hour back home. One plan even had teachers teaching first and
last periods on the bus as the black students commuted to a formerly all white
school for the middle part of the school day–six classes a day, two on the bus,
four in the school building. Not a chance of ever working.
The rule of thumb for forced bussing was that black kids
rode busses and white kids ‘welcomed’ them into their schools.
No educator wanted to see kids leave their local school. Having
a local school is part of what makes public education work. The problem was,
and is, housing patterns. Until neighborhoods are totally integrated, the
problem of segregated schools will persist.
The other solution is to equally fund and staff every local
public school. Schools get equal state funding, but more affluent communities
build bigger and better buildings and supplement funding to make their school
the best possible. Good for them, but the problem still exists–poor black
neighborhoods still do not get an equal education to more affluent areas of
school districts. Today, the division is not just black and white. As is the
plight of most big cities, the inner city–black, brown, white–lags behind
affluent areas.
We cannot allow a large portion of our children to be
undereducated. The problems of poverty, education, housing, to name a few, can
only be solved with a quality education of every student. Brown v. Board of
Education called attention to the problems and provided a legal resource for
providing an equal education to all American students. But, a legal ruling
isn’t enough.
Bussing was not the answer. It wasn’t even a noble experiment.
It was a failed political answer to a problem that needs a more universal
solution. We all have to believe that education is the silver bullet out of
poverty and every student deserves the very best chance to achieve his or her
potential if America is to achieve its potential. The highly successful schools
can point to themselves as models, but until we all believe every kid deserves
an academy-like education, and look beyond our own parochial needs and decide
to support every kid in every school, education will remain a reason for the
great American social and economic divides.
Note: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 voided the rest of the
‘separate but equal’ provisions of Plessy v. Ferguson.
