University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

T 12:52 P.M. ON MONDAY, MAY 17, 1954, CHIEF JUSTICE EARL WARREN read the eagerly awaited Supreme Court decision in four school desegregation cases, couched in legal terms as Oliver Brown et al., Appellants, v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et al. Addressing the jammed Court across the street from the Capitol, the chief justice presented a broad overview of the role of public education in America. Finally, Warren reached the core of the decision: "We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The Court overturned lower court rulings and ordered public schools desegregated.

In so doing, the Supreme Court effectively removed the underpinnings of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding "separate but equal" railroad coaches in Louisiana. By unanimously rejecting the doctrine commonly used to rationalize racial segregation, the Court paved the way for the elimination of the United States' version of apartheid. It was a rigid system of racial separation that dictated where African-Americans lived, where they ate, where they went to school, how they traveled, and even what toilet they could use in public facilities, if they could use any at all.

"The Brown case was so important because it precluded states from having their racism legitimized under the law," says A. Leon Higginbotham, a retired U.S. Appeals Court judge. "Brown gave the moral sanction which made it possible for the other battles to be fought and won. If you look at the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing, etc., all are rooted in Brown's delegitimation of racism."
 

Today, 40 years later, the euphoria of Brown, has been supplanted by a sense of resignation, a feeling that the ruling was extremely helpful at that time but did not anticipate or do anything to correct modern problems, such as the disproportionate number of disciplinary actions taken against Blacks, tracking African-Americans into special low-achievement classes, disparity in standardized test results and the academic gap between Black males and females. Moreover, these developments have continued to unfold as the schools grow increasingly minority.

A report titled, "The Growth of Segregation in American Schools," published by the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, concluded: "The civil rights impulse from the 1960s is dead in the water and the ship is floating backward toward the shoals of racial segregation."

Even in Topeka, where the landmark case started, Oliver Brown's oldest daughter, Linda, is back in court--still seeking meaningful school desegregation. [See page 34.]

But Brown--and its companion cases from South Carolina, Vurginia, Delaware and the Distria of Columbia--was never about African-American students merely sitting at desks next to Whites. Rather, it was about having equal access to educational opportunities, access that would lead to realizing the American Dream of better jobs, better housing, a higher standard of living and removing all doubts about the purported racial inferiority of Blacks. Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legar Defense and Educational Fund's chief lawyer in he case and later the Supreme Court's first African-American member, explained, "The only way I can be sure my kid is getting an equal education is for him to be in the same classroom with the Whites."

The case did just that. In the South, for example, 99 percent of African-Americans attended all-Black public schools in 1954. By the 1991-92 school year, however, only 26.6 percent of Blacks in that region attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent Black, according to the Harvard report.

Although that progress was universally attributed to the Brown decision of 1954, there were the three Brown hearings to place Black children in the same classroom with Whites. The first ruling essentially found racial segregation in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It was in Brown II, which was handed down May 31, 1955, that the phrase "all deliberate speed" was injected to order school desegregation. Brown Ill began in the U.S. District Court in Topeka, on Nov. 19, 1979, to determine if the Board of Education had carried out the mandates of Brown I and Brown II; the third case is still pending.

Despite the unequivocal court rulings, resistance to desegregation did not abate at the elementary, high school or college level. Three years after the 1954 decision, the National Guard had ro be deployed ro integrate Little Rock's Central High School, [See story on page 42.1 and Gov.George C. Walleye made his famous "stand in the schoolhouse door" speech in 1963 at the University of Alabama to block the admission of two African-Americans; Wallace had to step aside and allow their admission after the AlabamaNational Guard was federalized by President John F. Kennedy.

Since then, Blacks have taken part in all aspects of campus life at Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus, including serving as president of the Student Government Association. At Little Rock's Central High, African-Americans are now the majority of the student body, as is the case in most big city systems.

However, Beverly Cole, education director for the NAACP, cautions: "We haven't come as far as we'd like to think," she says. "The litigators thought that by breaking down legal segregation, there would be meaningful integration, that Black children would not only be in school with Whites, but that their differences would be appreciated. This has not happened, and we're back where we were in 1968."

Despite the dramatic rise in high school graduation rates among Blacks and their having greater access to colleges that once turned them away--80 percent of all African-American college students attend predominantly White institutions--African-Americans have an unemployment rate of 14.1 percent, compared with 6.5 percent for whites and when comparing salaries, Black families have a median income of $21,548, compared with $37,783 for White families, though the gap is much smaller among the college educated.

Judge Higginbotham agrees that there is a correlation between poverty and the educational accomplishments of Black youth, but he adds that poverty's continued existence should not be used to understate the accomplishments of Brown. "There is a whole host of other mechanisms that must be used to deal with the one-third to 40 percent of Blacks who suffer the ravages of poverty," he explains. It is foolish to condemn Brown because the other problems have not been solved. Brown must be put into perspective."

Putting Brown into perspective, African-Americans lost more than their all-Black schools during the initial stages of school integration. They lost a cadre of devoted teachers, principals and administrators who lived in their all-Black neighborhoods and cared about them as individuals. Under court-ordered desegregation plans, Black schools usually were closed or consolidated, Black principals often were demoted and teachers were dismissed.

Southern and border states saw a loss of more than half of the Black principals and the dismissal of more than 6,000 Black teachers the year after Brown I was issued, according to a report by the Race Relations Information Center in Nashville. Hundreds of other African-Americans were prevented from supervising Whites in newly desegregated school systems.

The Race Relations Information Center study notes that between 1967 and 1970, the number of African-American principals tell from 620 to 170 in North Carolina, from 250 to 40 in Alabama and the pool of 250 principals in Mississippi was almost completely drained.

James A. Brodie, a 1951 graduate of Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore, Md.,--Thurgood Marshall's alma mater - says segregated schools had certain advantages. "Most of our teachers knew our parents and lived in the same neighborhood," he recalls. "Those teachers knew all about us.

But when opportunities to send African-Americans to predominantly White colleges expanded, Brodie sent his three children to the University of Colorado. Now, he has second thoughts. "I don't think they got any better education at a Colorado or a Maryland than at a Fisk or a Grambling," says Brodie. "They didn't do us any favors."

Charles Willie, a Harvard educator, states that there are so many African-Americans enrolled in college today that, if every historically Black college were filled to capacity, they would not be able to accommodate the 1.3 million African-Americans in higher education. Given that, Willie says, "You can see how important it was for African-Americans to be able to attend formerly all-White universities."

It's also important that Blacks have access to all secondary schools, including predominantly White ones. Although the finger has been pointed at the South's de jure system of education over the years, that region now has some of the country's most desegregated schools. The most segregated ones, according to the Harvard report, are in the Northeast and Midwest.

We cannot say that the problems are strictly because the schools are Black, because it wasn't like this before," observes Pansye Atkinson, director of affirmative action at Maryland's Frostburg State University who did her doctoral research on school desegregation. The point is, we turned our kids over to someone else for their education because we thought that was the answer."

Many Blacks looked to the federal government for answers but none have been forthcoming in recent years. "There has been almost no federal policy to support the findings of Brown from any level since the early 1970s," charges Gary Orfield, the chief author of the Harvard study. "Just putting kids together in the same classroom is not enough. The country is going backward as a result of intentional political exploitation of racial fears."

And that exploitation has encompassed minimizing the problem of racial discrimination. "The problem is that Brown has been viewed as a temporary punishment for Whites instead of a goal n observes Orfield, an expert on desegregation. The courts are now saying, 'Okay, you've suffered enough; now you can go back to doing what's natural.' There has never really been any willingness in the White community to change voluntarily. What has happened is that the government has removed all the pressure to attend to these issues."

The government is not alone.

Even some Black mayors--those in Denver, St. Louis, Seattle and Cleveland--are removing the pressure, joining with some White conservatives who want to eliminate school busing as a tool to overcome segregated housing patterns. [See Emerge,-Black Mayors Driving Away From Busing," March 1994.]

As school systems become more populated by people of color with or without busing, the issue is shifting from having access to White schools--even for the purpose of obtaining better materials and using better facilities--to upgrading the quality of education, even in majority Black schools.

'Brown broke down the doors," says Raymond C. Pierce, a deputy assistant secretary in the Education Department's office for civil rights. "No longer can anyone deny children admittance to public schools because of their color or race. Forty years after Brown, we need to be concentrating our efforts on management of our schools and on the access our schools provide for community involvement."

If the schools are to become well managed, they will need to lower a Black dropout rate that averages more than 50 percent in some cities, narrow the gap between the number of Blacks and Whites who attend college after graduating from high school, review disciplinary systems that inordinately punish Black boys in particular, raise the standardized test scores of Black students and teaching candidates, decrease the overrepresentation of Blacks in special education classes and reverse the underrepresentation of them in classes for the academically gifted.

Efforts to carry out these improvements must be made within the larger context of segregated housing patterns, per pupil spending discrepancies that annually provide $5,000 for largely Black inner-city schools and $13,000 in predominantly White suburban districts, and recurring federal and state budget woes.

'With all of these fights over desegregation and all of the issues that came up, many felt the struggle was too hard," says Mary Frances Berry, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and assistant secretary of education under Jimmy Carter. "Whites resisted integration; Blacks abandoned hope, so it made it easy for districts to retreat.

We said we wanted to improve the quality of our schools, but we didn't do either. The schools aren't desegregated and our kids still go to inferior schools. We did not understand the connection in Brown. We know these people are not going to give us resources for our schools. If we could at least go to the White schools, we know they'd be getting the resources."

Willie, the Harvard education professor, said African-Americans did not pay enough attention to the remedies outlined in Brown II. "The Court played a trick on us," he says. "It caught the fox that was stealing chickens and then said to the fox 'Okay, now design a plan to secure the chicken house.' There were no requirements that these school boards be desegregated. The remedies that were enacted were those that were least offensive to Whites and not necessarily those in the best interests of Blacks."