Brown V Board Quotes

The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’ For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.

Success for the black person requires effective functioning achieved with the knowledge that his or her work will not be recognized or rewarded to the same degree as a white person doing the same thing.

Beyond the ebb and flow of racial progress lies the still viable and widely accepted (though seldom expressed) belief that America is a white country in which blacks, particularly as a group, are not entitled to the concern, resources, or even empathy that would be extended to similarly situated whites.

Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they’ll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork—sore-head, sore-foot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more...

The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville—the masters of the King’s English all promoted the easy imagery of black as vile and white as purity and thereby fed a deep and potent racism that well served all who would enslave the black men of Africa.

It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race.... However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.2

Work and sacrifice, as important as they are, have never been sufficient to gain blacks more than grudging acceptance as individuals. They seldom enjoy the presumption of regularity, the sense that they belong or are competent, which whites may take for granted.

The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.

By refusing to accept white dominance in our schools, places of work, communities, and, yes, among those whites who consider us friends, we both show a due regard for our humanity and often convey enlightenment to whites deeply immersed in the still-widespread, deeply held beliefs of a white-dominated society.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Among them was a hypocritical charge, in his original draft of the Declaration, that the King of England was a prime promoter of the slave trade. But Jefferson’s language was so sharply chastising that, had it been included in the Declaration, it would have deeply undermined continuation of slavery once the colonies had severed ties to the alleged instigator of the loathsome practice. And this the slaveholding South was not prepared to consider; the offending words were struck from the great document.

His way to wisdom was to hear out others who might or might not know any more than he did and then to sift it all through his own mental strainer.

No better example of the price of economic dependency may be culled from U.S. history than the sustained erosion of the African American’s civil rights.

Its dominant voice belonged to the seventy-three-year-old Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens, a founder of the Republican Party, who declared that America did not stand for “white man’s government” and to say as much was “political blasphemy, for it violates the fundamental principles of our gospel of liberty. This is man’s government; the government of all men alike.

At bottom, though, Brown helped maintain a stable society by moving it forward, far less than civil rights advocates had hoped but far more than opponents felt was needed or necessary.

Everybody at some level believes in it. It's a deeply seductive image. The image that we all want, as oppressed people, is an image of our masters finally loving us and recognizing our humanity. It is this image that keeps prostitutes with their pimps, the colonized with their colonizers and battered women with their batterers. Everybody dreams of one day being safe.

William Julius Wilson makes this point in his book, When Work Disappears. In his view, it is massive unemployment and not the lack of family values that has devastated our inner-cities and placed one-third of our young men-denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills-in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.2

In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activism and new federal laws inspired the same resistance to racial progress and once again led to a spike in the use of Confederate imagery. In fact, it was in the 1950s, after racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, that many Southern states erected Confederate flags atop their state government buildings.

The probability that a black student will have white classmates has dropped to what it was before 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate schools inherently unequal.

Washington's intentions, the surrender of basic citizenship rights in the hope that hostile whites would reciprocate with schooling and better jobs, deserved the condemnation it received from black leaders,

The most important thing now, as fast as conditions are changing, is that no Negro tolerate any ceiling on his ambitions or imagination. Good luck and don’t have any doubts; you haven’t time for such foolishness.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash. The

That act, on December 7, 1787, is perhaps Delaware’s sole claim to distinction as a champion of democracy. Certainly it was long hostile to the Negro, probably longer and more defiantly so than any other state outside of the Confederacy.

It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.… Racial distinctions cannot exist in the machinery that selects the officers and lawmakers of the United States.

The goal was organized resistance to racial subjugation, and its harassing effect was probably more potent precisely because they risked so much without either economic or political power and with no certainty that they could change a system that they had known and hated all of their lives.

Today, many whites oppose all social reform as "welfare programs for blacks." They ignore the fact that poor whites have employment, education, and social service needs that differ from the condition of poor blacks by a margin that, without a racial scorecard, becomes difficult to measure. In summary, the blatant involuntary sacrifice of black rights to further white interests, so obvious in early American history, remains viable and, while somewhat more subtle in its contemporary forms, is as potentially damaging as it ever was to black rights and the interests of all but wealthy whites.

Given racism's critical role in providing an outlet for white frustrations caused by economic exploitation and political manipulation, one wonders whether American society could survive as we know it if large numbers of whites ever realized what racism costs them and decided to do something about it.

The essence of this detrimental effect is a confusion in the child’s concept of his own self-esteem—basic feelings of inferiority, conflict, confusion in his self-image, resentment, hostility towards himself, hostility towards whites, intensification of … a desire to resolve his basic conflict by sometimes escaping or withdrawing.

By far the most important psychological and political part of the Hayes compromise package, of course, was the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. It was far better, said the new President, for the white man and the black man of the South to make their peace together than to live in constant tension under the surveillance of a federal garrison.

Among other targets of protest was the infuriating Red Cross practice of separating Negro from white contributions to blood banks for the aid of wounded servicemen—a division made all the more distasteful by the fact that the plasma-preserving process that made blood banks practical had been largely developed by a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew of Howard University.

My parents were typical of many who drilled into me at an early age that because you are black, you have to be twice as good to get half as much. Unspoken in that advice is that whites are presumed competent until they prove the contrary. Blacks are assumed to be mediocre and certainly no intellectual match for whites until their skills and accomplishments gain them an often-reluctant acceptance.

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954: I’m sure you’ve heard of this one. If you live in the South and go to a diverse school, this is why. This was the case that said racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The results: The schools began to mix. What’s really interesting about this case, though, something rarely discussed, is that it’s actually a pretty racist idea. I mean, what it basically suggests is that Black kids need a fair shot, and a fair shot is in White schools. I mean, why weren’t there any White kids integrating into Black schools? The assumption was that Black kids weren’t as intelligent because they weren’t around White kids, as if the mere presence of White kids would make Black kids better. Not. True. A good school is a good school, whether there are White people there or not. Oh, and of course people were pissed about this.

To go back to Brown, a concern the United States government had was definitely part of the picture. At that time, we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the State Department filed a brief in Brown v. Board urging the Court to end what was basically apartheid in America. It said, we are being embarrassed constantly by the Soviet Union charging that the United States is a racist society. Please, Court, help us to end that era.

Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.

the President of the United States addressed the thirty-eighth annual conference of the NAACP assembled before the Lincoln Memorial. “The extension of civil rights today means not protection of the people against the government, but protection of the people by the government,” Truman declared. “We must make the federal government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans. And again I mean all Americans.” No President had ever dared say such a thing.

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.

Another problem is confusion in the mind of the child—confusion concerning basic moral ideology—and a conflict which is set up in the child who belongs to the segregating group in terms of having the same people teach him democracy, brotherhood, love of his fellow man, and teaching him also to segregate and to discriminate. Most of these social scientists believe that this sets off in the personalities of these children a fundamental confusion in the entire moral sphere of their lives.

… There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for racial prejudice. It is all caused by unreasoning emotional reactions and these are gained in early childhood. Let the little child’s mind be poisoned by prejudice of this kind and it is practically impossible to remove these impressions, however many years he may have of teaching by philosophers, religious leaders or patriotic citizens. If segregation is wrong, then the place to stop it is in the first grade and not in graduate colleges.

The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time,” W. E. B. Du Bois would write a generation afterward, “amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not even ownership of the rags on his back. Free!

The Portland school board's policy equated integration and racial assimilation. This policy, Rist explains, is a "means of socializing nonwhite students to act, speak, and believe very much like white students." It leaves dominant group values intact, does no damage to notions of white superiority, and helps to gain the support of those whites who view it as a means of helping "nonwhite peoples to become fully human by instilling in them `white' ways of thinking and feeling." In keeping with the assimilationist tone of the program, the principal assigned one or two black children to each classroom, and scheduled only a few special teacher-training sessions, which were poorly handled. The principal's desire was to treat the black students just like the whites. This approach was undermined by his failure to recognize and address fears and misconceptions of teachers about the black children's academic ability and behavior problems, the adequacy of their home backgrounds, and their moral turpitude.

… How can we say that we deeply revere the principles of our Declaration and our Constitution and yet refuse to recognize those principles when they are to be applied to the American Negro in a down-to-earth fashion? During election campaigns and in Fourth of July speeches, many speakers emphasize that these great principles apply to all Americans. But when you ask many of these same speakers to act or vote so that those great principles apply in fact to Negro-Americans, you may be accused of being unfair, idealistic or even pro-Communist. … A person has real moral courage when, being in a position to make decisions or determine policies, he decides that the qualified Negro will be admitted to a school of nursing [as had recently been done at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington]; that the Negro, like the white, will receive a fair trial no matter what the public feeling may be; that every Catholic school, church and institution shall be open to all Catholics—not at some distant future time when public opinion happens to coincide with Catholic moral teaching—but now. Are these requests of our business, governmental and religious leaders too much to ask? I think not.

Dream of Freedom There’s a dream in the land With its back against the wall. By muddled names and strange Sometimes the dream is called. There are those who claim This dream for theirs alone— A sin for which, we know They must atone. Unless shared in common Like sunlight and like air, The dream will die for lack Of substance anywhere. The dream knows no frontier or tongue, The dream no class or race. The dream cannot be kept secure In any one locked place. This dream today embattled, With its back against the wall— To save the dream for one, It must be saved for ALL.

...even though I’m a product of Brown v. Board of Education, about 12 years ago I realized that I don’t think we could win Brown v. Board of Education today.... I don’t think our court would do anything that disruptive on behalf of disfavored people, on behalf of marginalized people. And that terrified me. But it also energized me to recognize that we were going to have to get outside the court and create a different consciousness. The question for me is, why wouldn’t we win? And it’s because we haven’t really reckoned with these larger issues of what it means to be a country dealing with our history of racial inequality.

… The cloak of racism surrounding the actions of the Brotherhood in refusing membership to Negroes and in entering into and enforcing agreements discriminating against them, all under the guise of Congressional authority, still remains. No statutory interpretation can erase this ugly example of economic cruelty against colored citizens of the United States.… A sound democracy cannot allow such discrimination to go unchallenged. Racism is far too virulent today to permit the slightest refusal, in the light of a Constitution that abhors it, to expose and condemn it wherever it appears in the course of a statutory interpretation.

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.

I, too, grew up in a place that could sometimes feel as limiting and final as being locked in an airtight closet, the air humid and rank with one’s own breath and panic. A place where for all the brilliant, sun-drenched summer days, there is sometimes only the absence of light: America, and the American South. A place where the old myths still hold a special place in many white hearts: the rebel flag, Confederate monuments, lovingly restored plantations, Gone with the Wind. A place where black people were bred and understood to be animals, a place where some feel that the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education are only the more recent in a series of unfortunate events. A place where black life has been systematically devalued for hundreds of years.

In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby was the featured speaker at an NAACP awards ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Cosby used the occasion to offer a stinging critique of contemporary black culture. He said that blacks today are squandering the gains of the civil rights movement, and white racism is not to blame. “We, as black folks, have to do a better job,” he stated. “We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.” Today in our cities, he said, we have 50 percent [school] dropout [rates] in our neighborhoods. We have . . . men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because [she is] pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father.

3. Serving Two Masters Derrick Bell has pointed out a third structure that impedes reform, this time in law. To litigate a law-reform case, the lawyer needs a flesh-and-blood client. One might wish to establish the right of poor consumers to rescind a sales contract or to challenge the legal fiction that a school district is desegregated if the authorities have arranged that the makeup of certain schools is half black and half Chicano (as some of them did in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education). Suppose, however, that the client and his or her community do not want the very same remedy that the lawyer does. The lawyer, who may represent a civil rights or public interest organization, may want a sweeping decree that names a new evil and declares it contrary to constitutional principles. He or she may be willing to gamble and risk all. The client, however, may want something different—better schools or more money for the ones in his or her neighborhood.

The Negro had been deeply disappointed over the slow pace of school desegregation. He knew that in 1954 the highest court in the land had handed down a decree calling for desegregation of schools "with all deliberate speed." He knew that this edict from the Supreme Court had been heeded with all deliberate delay. At the beginning of 1963, nine years after this historic decision, approximately 9 percent of southern Negro students were attending integrated schools. If this pace were maintained, it would be the year 2054 before integration in southern schools would be a reality. In its wording the Supreme Court decision had revealed an awareness that attempts would be made to evade its intent. The phrase "all deliberate speed" did not mean that another century should be allowed to unfold before we released Negro children from the narrow pigeonhole of the segregated schools; it meant that, giving some courtesy and consideration to the need for softening old attitudes and outdated customs, democracy must press ahead, out of the past of ignorance and intolerance, and into the present of educational opportunity and moral freedom.

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians' tendency to fix upon legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to maintain dominance, whites needed more than the statutes and signs that specified "whites" and "blacks" only; they had to assert and reiterate black inferiority with every word and gesture, in every aspect of both public and private life. Noted theologian Howard Thurman dissected the "anatomy" of segregation with chilling precision in his classic 1965 book, The Luminous Darkness. A white supremacist society must not only "array all the forces of legislation and law enforcement, " he wrote; "it must falsify the facts of history, tamper with the insights of religion and religious doctrine, editorialize and slant news and the printed word. On top of that it must keep separate schools, separate churches, separate graveyards, and separate public accommodations-all this in order to freeze the place of the Negro in society and guarantee his basic immobility." Yet this was "but a partial indication of the high estimate" that the white South placed upon African Americans. "Once again, to state it categorically, " Thurman concludes, "the measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

time proved that the persistent educational gap between black and white students was only indirectly traceable to segregation. Instead, the root of the problem appeared to be the substantial disparities in the resources provided to black students relative to white students. Many, including myself, decided that given the difficulty of integrating black and Latino students with their swiftly fleeing white counterparts, we should concentrate on desegregating the money.

As with most voluntary school integration programs, dispersal of the black children was the norm. In Portland, no more than forty-five black children were bused to any single elementary school, and white schools of four-hundred to five-hundred pupils received as few as four and in most instances only ten to fifteen black students. Brush Elementary, the all-white school Rist selected for daily observation, received about thirty black children. The principal, along with most of his all-white teaching staff, had never taught a black child. He hired a black school aide because he felt that most of the white students had never spoken to a black person. His lack of racial sensitivity was illustrated in a staff discussion about the collection of milk money, when he said, "I guess we had better not call it chocolate milk any longer. It would probably now be more appropriate to refer to it as black milk.

A few white children were friendly, but others were hostile or simply distant. Teachers unthinkingly added to both problems by physically separating black students in the classroom either for special instruction or in response to the black students' requests.

In ways so closely tied to an individual's sense of self that it may not be apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white can become a valuable asset that whites seek to protect.

Du Bois reminds us that, to compensate their low wages, segregation gave whites a "public and psychological wage." As whites, they were admitted freely to public functions and parks, the police were drawn from their ranks, and they could elect local leaders who treated them well. David Roediger adds that status and privileges "could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South.

Here is a foundation for understanding today what was clear to only a few fifty years earlier. Now we can see how the state-mandated racial segregation that was the subject of the Brown litigation did not suddenly appear, as a former student, Nirej Sekhorn, put it, like a bad weed in an otherwise-beautiful racial garden, a weed the Court sought to eradicate with a single swing of its judicial hoe. It illustrates as well how segregation provided whites with a sense of belonging based on neither economic nor political well-being, but simply on an identification with the ruling class determined by race and a state-supported and subsidized belief that, as whites, they were superior to blacks.

What neither Warren nor most of the rest of us recognized was that segregation was not, as Nirej Sekhorn put it, simply a "taint" or "bias." It was the dominant interpretive framework for a social structure that organizes the American garden's very configuration. Segregation was not merely an oppressive legal regime, it consolidated the imaginative lens through which Americans would now conceive race. It also reaffirmed the binary system through which we Americans tend to think of race-i.e., "black" and "white.

The Court ignored his racial configuration and simply applied the "one drop" rule. If Plessy was white and ejected from a white railroad coach, the Court said he would have suffered an offense for which the law would have provided a remedy, but if he was not white, that is, possessing even one drop of black blood, he had not been denied any property because he was not entitled to the reputation of being a white man.

This renewed politics of otherness not only allowed entire categories of poor whites to develop a powerful sense of racial belonging, but also allowed entire categories of erstwhile nonwhite immigrants (the Irish are the most prominent example) to become white.

Most school desegregation suits were brought on behalf of blacks, but Mexican Americans also suffered various forms of school segregation throughout the southwestern states, particularly in California and Texas. It was not until 1970 that Mexican Americans were held to be "an identifiable ethnic minority group" for the purpose of school desegregation.8

But few black parents had any substantial contact with the school. Rist doubts their assessment would have been so positive had they been "really aware" of what was happening to their children.

I remember it was a quiet, heat-hushed evening. Walking with Mrs. McDonald up a dusty, unpaved road toward her modest home, I asked, "Where do you and the other black families find the courage to continue working for civil rights in the face of so much intimidation? Black folks active in the civil rights movement are losing their jobs, facing all manner of pressure and intimidation, and you told me shots were fired through your windows just last week." Mrs. McDonald looked at me and said slowly and seriously, "I can't speak for everyone, Derrick, but as for me, I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks.

Regrettably, I paid far less attention to all those students less able to overcome the hostility and the sense of alienation they faced in mainly white schools. They faired poorly or dropped out of school. Truly, these were the real victims of the great school desegregation campaign.

Harry Belafonte explained: [T]he Second World War happened, and my mother told me that the fight against Hitler was our fight, and I went off, just like that. We were fighting against tyranny, fighting for freedom. But when we-the Black soldiers-came home, we found it was business as usual. There were no changes in the segregation laws. There was no right to vote. And yet being part of that war changed something in us-we'd had a peek at freedom. I knew if I could fight for it over there, I could fight for it in America.

It is somewhat ironic to have us so deeply disturbed over a program where race is an element of consciousness, and yet to be aware of the fact, as we are, that institutions of higher learning, albeit more on the undergraduate than the graduate level, have given conceded preferences up to a point to those possessed of athletic skills, to the children of alumni, to the affluent who may bestow their largess on the institutions, and to those having connections with celebrities, the famous, and the powerful.

Also mostly lost in the turmoil over whether minority admissions violate traditional standards of merit is the impressive evidence that grades and test scores do not predict success in the practice of law or medicine.

The general public typically traces the death of Jim Crow to Brown v. Board of Education, although the institution was showing signs of weakness years before. By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political factor of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world." There was also increased concern that, without greater equality for African Americans, blacks would become susceptible to communist influence, given Russia's commitment to both racial and economic equality. In Gunnar Myrdal's highly influential book The American Dilemma, published in 1944, Myrdal made a passionate plea for integration based on the theory that the inherent contradiction between the "American Creed" of freedom and equality and the treatment of African Americans was not only immoral and profoundly unjust, but was also against the economic and foreign-policy interests of the United States.

Sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.” The analogy had special meaning in the constitutional context: In a series of cases triggered by Brown v. Board of Education, the court had said that laws that classified on the basis of race were almost always unconstitutional, or deserving “strict scrutiny.” The court had said in Reed that it wasn’t applying strict scrutiny, but then it seemed to do so anyway. Were laws that classified what men and women could do blatantly unconstitutional the way laws classifying by race were? RBG boldly urged the court to say they were.

Contemporary conservatives often make Roe v. Wade the turning point in the story. In this account, the Religious Right emerged out of opposition to abortion. But the facts don’t really fit that story particularly well. Conservative white Protestants did not become pro-life until the late 1970s. Before that, Protestants were divided on the question and abortion was seen as a “Catholic” issue. The rightward turn of white evangelicals actually began a quarter-century earlier with another Supreme Court case: Brown v. Board of Education. The political architects of the Religious Right—Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie—were quite clear on this point. Opposition to racial integration was the real catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right.

Brown v. Board of Education. This landmark decision mandating school desegregation launched one of the defining civil rights battles of the era. In response, many evangelicals took their children out of public school rather than have them attend with African Americans. Churches and other evangelical organizations founded “segregation academies,” private religious schools that were tax-exempt.

The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people. They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.* Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.” Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.

There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part. If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.

The law of the land is supposed to be obeyed.

Yet only a little more than $5 million—$1.25 per capita—was spent to compensate for 200 years of ignorance enforced on a whole transplanted people.

In Clarendon County for the school year 1949-50, they spent $179 per white child in the public schools; for each black child, they spent $43.

In the twenty years following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 3,000 lynchings occurred.

His liberators were leaving the freedman to wither on the vine.

Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks’ civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders.

Brown is the definitive example of the fate of civil rights policies that were sought with too little regard for either the variables of racial fortuity or the tremendous obstacles those we hoped to help were actually facing in their lives.

Professor Kimberle Crenshaw saw the dilemma a dozen years ago, but concluded that as long as race consciousness thrives, blacks will have to rely on rights rhetoric to protect their interests.16 There are, though, limited options to those deemed the Other in making specific demands for inclusion and equality. Doing so in the quest for racial justice, though, means that "winning and losing have been part of the same experience.

The danger with our commitment to the principle of racial equality is that it leads us to confuse tactics with principles. The principle of gaining equal educational opportunity for black children was and is right. But our difficulties came when we viewed racial balance and busing as the only means of achieving that goal.

Brown, in retrospect, was a serious disappointment, but if we can learn the lessons it did not intend to teach, it will not go down as a defeat.

To benefit from this resource in our midst, blacks must supplement the forms and patterns of striving for racial equality with innovative forms of personal self-image, group organization, resource collection and distribution, and strategic planning, using the concept of racial fortuity as a guideline.

Since whites in general were not held responsible for harm to blacks, it followed that only those whites who were found liable for intentional discrimination should be penalized. As I suggested earlier, the Brown decision substituted one mantra for another: where "separate" was once equal, "separate" would be now categorically unequal.

Here I would mention Samuel P. Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, and almost any book by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (in particular his The Cycles of American History). I would also recommend Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics; Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture; and the personal book by Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education.

The historical arc of black triumph followed by harsh white response was not only instructive in understanding the big issues, such as Reconstruction or the half century of mobilized white response to Brown v. Board of Education, but it also felt very much a part of a menacing present marked by the throaty and effusive rejection of history itself.

The academic gap between rich and poor students now exceeds the gap between white and black students in 1954, the year in which the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Economic inequality today produces greater educational inequality than American apartheid once did.

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the white-run school board in Prince Edward County, Virginia, delayed integrating as long as it could and then shut down the school system entirely rather than allow black students into classrooms with white students. The county had no public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, forcing parents of both races to find alternatives for their children. Local whites diverted government funds to private academies for white students, while black parents, whose tax dollars were now going to the white students, had to make do on their own.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education and schools were forced to integrate, local officials in that county decided that they would get rid of school altogether. The public schools shut down, and the more affluent white children attended private school for the next several years. The Black children simply had no school.

The problems of the 1960s were not simply a case of history repeating itself from the racial discrimination in Boston of black students in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When such racial discrimination became illegal in 1855, public officials complied, and black and white students were able to attend class together. That state law is still valid. However, the 1855 state statute and the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education were both insufficient to deter Boston’s bigoted School Committee in the mid-twentieth century.

For decades, Boston’s black citizens petitioned the school board for fair treatment but to no avail. Finally, in 1787, Boston blacks demanded that the state legislature provide alternative education opportunities for blacks—a campaign to establish the concept of racially separate schools. Boston’s so-called “free schools” did not benefit black children. As might be expected, the legislature refused their request even though this was 152 years after public schools were established in Boston with the founding of Boston Latin School. Black boys and girls had endured incessant bullying and harassment in the public schools. So, contrary to the petition for integrated schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case that was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1954, Boston blacks sought all-black schools 167 years earlier. This is historically the first time in the nation that blacks tried to separate from whites in schools.

Historically, whenever Black people and people of color made progress in America, the demons of white rage would rise with a fury to choke and wrestle this country back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was inevitable that Obama's election would unleash and invigorate the same malevolent forces that had always existed and corrupted America's promise for the rest of us. I knew it. Many people of color knew it and lived it. Even Obama knew it.

In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.

One of the painful ironies of the racial integration crusade was that Dunbar High School’s 85 years of academic achievement came to an abrupt end, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To comply with that decision, Washington schools were all made neighborhood schools, so that Dunbar could no longer admit black students from all parts of the city, as it had before, but only students from the particular ghetto neighborhood where it was located. Dunbar quickly became a typical failing ghetto school, with serious academic and behavioral problems.

They had been waiting for a leader unbowed, one who wasn’t afraid to attack, head-on, the legal, social, and cultural changes that had unleashed the racist grievances of the American right, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and persisting through the 1960s and ’70s in opposition to school desegregation and government policies to promote it—long before evangelicals made opposing abortion their top issue. Those grievances never went away; the conservative movement’s right flank perpetually groused that the Republican “establishment” had too often made concessions to the liberal political order that had stolen away the rights of Christians, of parents, of whites, and of churches, even America’s very foundation as a “Christian nation.

Genuine social justice has been a oft-announced but rarely pursued ambition throughout history and probably was never achieved by any enduring society or civilization. Within the recent past the world has witnessed the collapse of Soviet-style Marxism, whose ideology enshrined an egalitarian state of selfless citizens--never mind that they were ruthlessly lorded over by a council of privileged cutthroats. The mission of defining, creating, and sustaining a truly just society on a thronged planet, manifestly unfair from its creation, is rendered almost insuperably difficult for a people like ours, a vast, clamorous, polyglot and polychromatic, beaverishly purposeful multitude, without its match on earth. Good-hearted by grasping, earnest yet impatient, easily distractable, and prone to trade its avowed humanitarian principles for triumphalism, American is a colossus of contradictions. For a certainty, justice of any type cannot materialize in such an untidy place without the binding up of its constituent elements. And that is unlikely ever to occur unless and until Americans of every variety acknowledge that what separates them is small change when counted against all they hold in common. Possessing soul is not a uniquely black or white state of grace, any more than owning a white or black skin, or a beige, olive, sallow, or ruddy one is a mark of either superiority or disgrace. A precept, let us admit in candor but with hope, that is more easily stated than lived.

Bell’s activism did not come at the cost of his writing. A few years later he published two law review articles of startling originality that won him widespread attention in the law school world. The first was “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” published in Yale Law Journal in 1976. Bell had became convinced that the black community did not need—or, in many cases, want—busing, the school desegregation remedy that civil rights lawyers had been pursuing for at least a dozen years. Instead, they wanted better schools. This kind of talk was heresy within the NAACP, which at that time was staunchly committed to enforcing the mandate of Brown v. Board of Education, their great legal breakthrough. Bell sounded what turned out to be one of his signature themes: the conflict of interest inherent in much public interest litigation. American law requires a flesh-and-blood plaintiff, usually an ordinary person, with “standing”—a specific, concrete grievance with a specific actor or defendant. Much public interest litigation, however, is maintained by specialized litigation centers, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the National Organization of Women. These litigators must represent victims of the policies they want to change. The idea is to file a case challenging the unjust policy, determined to take it to the Supreme Court in the hope that it will announce new law. In all this,