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The African-American Community Forum

(continued from last week)

Part II of III: Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka: Equal Access to Education Facilities.

In last week’s article we examined the doctrine of “separate but equal” that was legalized in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. In the Plessy decision the court ruled that racial segregation of African Americans in public accommodations [railroad cars] did not deprive them of equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment.

This week we are fast-forwarding 58 years later to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the Brown decision, the Supreme Court, using the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, legally invalidated [reversed] the doctrine of separate but equal and created the basis for “equal access to education facilities and equality of opportunity” for African-Americans.

In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that racial segregation of children in public schools deprived minority children of equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling was, in fact, not one case, but five cases; two in Virginia, one each in South Carolina, Kansas and Delaware, raising the same question. They were consolidated by the court under the name of the Kansas case, Brown v. Board of Education Topeka. While each case is quite interesting, here we will limit ourselves to the background on the title case.

Here is the background. Linda Brown was an eight-year-old African American child who had to cross a railroad switching yard to get to the legally segregated school for African-Americans that she was required to attend although there was an easily accessible white elementary school only a few blocks from her home. Her father, Oliver Brown, tried unsuccessfully to enroll Linda in the close-by white elementary school. When Mr. Brown was refused the right to enroll his child in the white school in his residential zone, he took his case to the NAACP which then began the case bearing his name.

When Brown’s lawsuit was heard at the federal district court level, the three-judge panel ruled that “segregation in public education has a detrimental effect upon Negro children, but denied relief on the ground that the Negro and white schools were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers.” The lower courts agreed with the school system that if the facilities were equal, the child was being treated equally with whites as prescribed by the 14th Amendment.

Mr. Brown in Kansas, and other families in other school systems in South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware, appealed to the Supreme Court that even facilities that were physically equal did not take into account that segregation itself has a harmful effect on the education of African-American children. Their cases were filed and argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall and other attorneys associated with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall would later become the first African American justice on the Supreme Court.

On May 17, 1954, exactly 58 years later after the Plessy decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 9-0, unanimously, that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says that no state may deny equal protection of the laws to any person [citizen] within its jurisdiction, and thereby overturned the decision of the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized segregation in public accommodations. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous decision by, in part, quoting directly from the finding of the federal district court in Kansas, which, despite its adverse ruling, had stated that: “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.”

The Chief Justice further wrote that: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal hast no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Supreme Court of the United States, 347 U.S. 483(1954).

The question before the court as Chief Justice Earl Warren stated it, had been, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” And the court’s answer was that it does.

Justice Warren wrote that “To separate them from other similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

The Brown case signaled the end of segregation in the United States of America by law or “de jure” [according to law] segregation and the beginning of a sustained period of massive resistance by a majority of white citizens against the lawful ruling of the supreme Court that stated the Constitution of the United States does not allow school desegregation in the South.

In 1970, and 16 years after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in the United States, the Wilkes County Board of Education, under the influence of Georgia’s Jim Crow laws and the racial prejudice of white citizens of the county at that time, had delayed compliance with the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States to desegregate the Wilkes County School System. Why? What brought an end to the delay?

This question is answered in a research report entitled Segregation in Georgia Public Schools by Catherine Freeman and published by the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

The report links the desegregation of Georgia public schools and all Southern school boards to a 1968 ruling by the Supreme Court in the case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County Virginia. The Supreme Court on May 27, 1968, ruling in the Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, case effectively ordered all Georgia school districts to implement desegregation policies that would be supervised by the Federal Court. The legal argument used by the white South to resist school desegregation following the 1954 Brown decision was based on the 10th Amendment to the Constitution states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In the Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled on the South’s misconception of the 10th Amendment and states that no state laws or policies of the board of education could circumvent the Constitution or congressional laws of the United States.

When the Wilkes County Board of Education abolished its dual school system and desegregated its public school facilities in 1970, it did so by force of law and the need to comply with the rulings of the Supreme Court, the final arbitrator of the Constitution and laws of the Republic. The Wilkes County School Board’s action, 195 years after the first slaveholders and their enslaved Africans arrived in Wilkes County in 1775, brought together their African-American and white descendants to be educated under the protection of law and in the same public school physical facilities.

This act of desegregation under force of law did not involve any religious or spiritual transformation action in the minds, hearts, and soul of a majority of white citizens in the Southern “Bible belt,” including a majority of white Christians in Wilkes County; and it did not come from any other kind of social, economic or political transformation. It was simply the force of the law as dictated by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.

And herein lay many of the challenges we continue to face today in Wilkes County. Can religious, social, economic and political prejudices and injustices rooted in 230 years of living history be overcome in Wilkes County through the comingling of educational experiences and socialization of our ethnic culture offsprings now and the future? We adults must learn not to pass on to each new generation our racial prejudices and hatred.

We must help our children, African American and white; transcend the history that we and our forebears have created. And we, as a nation of laws, can use the principles that govern us to build a truly community of multiculturalism [practice of giving equal emphasis to the needs and contributions of all cultural groups] in Wilkes County. It is true that all human behaviors are learned and that our minds, hearts and souls are culturally conditioned from lifelong experiences to act and behave the way we do. Also, human behavior can be stimulated to change for the betterment of the whole social order in our ethnic culture communities because no laws or the Constitution can be used as remedies for our inhuman illnesses.

Ideally, in our democratic society of the United States of America, we are a nation of laws and nobody is above the law, not even the President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Our institutions of government emerge from basic principles.

In the United States the one basic principle is representative democracy, which defines a system in which the people govern themselves by electing their own leaders. The American government functions to secure this principle and to further the common interest of the people.

Democracy in America is based on six essential ideals: (1) People must accept the principle of majority rule. (2) The political rights of minorities must be protected. (3) Citizens must agree to a system of rule by law. (4) The free exchange of opinions and ideas must not be restricted. (5) All citizens must be equal before the law. (6) Government exists to serve the people, because it derives its power from the people. These ideals form the basis of the democratic system in the United States, which seeks to create a union of diverse peoples, places, and interests.

Send your responses to docdanner@nu-z.net or P.O. Box 1328, Washington, Ga. 30673.

The opinions expressed by this columnist do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of this newspaper.