A Continuing American Dilemma

Abstract

FOR MOST Americans, December 7 is a date serves as a reminder of the beginning of a horrific conflict thrust us forever onto the world stage. World War II changed our economy, our society, and what we thought of ourselves and of our values. Few Americans, however, realize December 7 -- especially this year -- needs to be remembered for an event shook up society as much as, if not more than, the war. On day 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court began three days of final hearings on Brown v. Board of Education. arguments presented to the Court provided the last chance for the stalwarts of segregation and the proponents of racial equality to state their legal cases. chamber of the High Court filled with emotion. Making his last appearance before the Court, 80-year-old John Davis of South Carolina pondered the effect on children if classrooms in Clarendon County, S.C., were predominantly of children. Would they be any more serene? he asked. He ended with tears on his cheeks. Thurgood Marshall, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, argued arcane legal questions. (He once told a colleague wearily sometimes get awfully tired of trying to save the white man's soul.) His last words to the justices, whom he later join as the first Supreme Court justice, dispensed with legalese and addressed Davis' point. I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday, he said, that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child fall apart. . . . Those same kids in . . . South Carolina . . . play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, [but] they have to be separated in school. segregation laws were nothing but black codes, Marshall said. only way the court could uphold them be to declare Negroes are inferior to all other human beings. For Chief Justice Earl Warren, sitting on the Supreme Court just a few days after his appointment, the momentous debate was followed by months of careful negotiations. During time, the majority opinion, obvious at the regular Saturday morning session held after the hearings closed, was shaped into a unanimous decision, delivered on May 17 of the following year. memos the justices wrote to one another and to clarify their own thinking reveal a general consensus knowledge and values had changed since the doctrine of separate but equal was established in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. justices were also well aware of potentially violent reactions to a Supreme Court decision end segregation. Neither the North nor the South had adapted its racial practices to reflect the values professed since the Civil War, Justice Robert Jackson wrote in a memo. The race problem, he argued, would be quickly solved if some way could be found to make us all live up to our hypocrisies. country has been dealing with its hypocrisies on the race issue for the last 50 years. It has been wracked by further lawsuits, dumbed-down curricula, desegregation plans often directed by federally appointed masters, multicultural initiatives, resegregation, compensatory education, and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, this new law is the latest attempt to erase the effects of prejudice and discrimination from the education system, though some of its supporters never describe it as such. …