Plessy Research Articles

Review: Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, by Mia Bay

Review: <i>Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance</i>, by Mia Bay

Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC

<i>Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies</i>, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC

The Past, Present, and Future of Brown’s Mandate: A View from North Carolina

The unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion is one of the most consequential legal decisions of the 20th century. Even though it concerned government sanctioned racial segregation of public schools, many legal scholars, policy makers, and citizens see Brown’s impact going well beyond ordering the dismantling of de jure segregated public schools and instituting desegregated ones that would provide equitable high quality public education to all students irrespective of their race. Brown’s mandate overturned the notorious Plessy decision sanctioning legal segregation and exposed the fiction that separate could be equal in any institution or sphere of public life. But, progress toward Brown’s literal and figurative mandate has been halting and, at best, uneven. This article considers the question of whether the nation will achieve Brown’s mandate by its 100th anniversary in 2054. The authors reflect upon the relevant history of progress in Brown’s implementation and the current retrenchments on those gains that have returned this nation’s schools, in some districts, to pre- Brown levels of segregation. Using the state of North Carolina as a strategic case study, they speculate about the sets of social forces that may either discourage or encourage realization of Brown’ s mandate going forward. In doing so, they note population changes, national and local political factors, and other events that will either make it more or less likely that Brown’s mandate will be realized by 2054.

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation

Pauli Murray: The US firebrand’s unique opportunity to influence a continent

AbstractThis review article discusses Rosalind Rosenberg’s study of Pauli Murray’s pivotal role in enhancing the civil rights of African Americans and American women. Pauli Murray should be properly regarded as one of the leading legal thinkers of Twentieth-Century America. She played a role in the development of the jurisprudential thinking, which brought about an end to race discrimination as enshrined in the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine in the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and ending sex discrimination beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Reed v. Reed. The objective of this review article is to provide an account of her approach to attacking both legally based race and sex discrimination. Drawing on Rosenberg and referencing key legal texts, it begins with a brief account of Murray’s life and times. This is followed by an examination of her thinking on both race and sex discrimination. The review concludes by commending Rosenberg for her analysis of the intersections between the private and public personas of Pauli Murray in a century which witnessed fundamental changes in America.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937. Julia H.Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures/1896-1937 Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011.How do you identify yourself as American in a period that enacts exclusion acts that deny you access to full citizenship? What is your status as a racialized being when the foundational narrative of your nation is roiled with anxieties surrounding racial difference? What are some strategies that racial minorities might deploy in negotiating and securing a space inside what historically has been a markedly protean and exclusionary national identity? Moreover, how are these themes explored and reproduced in the literature of the period in which they occur? These are only some of the fascinating questions that Julia Lee explores in Interradal Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937.In her book, Lee notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, pairings of blacks and Asians were pervasive and frequently deployed, in a wide variety of discourses, to accommodate an evolving narrative on race and national identity. The use of Asian characters in African American novels in this period, like the use of black characters in Asian novels, were natural outgrowths of this practice. The authors of the texts cited in Lee's study used these pairings to generate narratives that were rich and divergent not only in the ways they engaged the question of racial identity but also in the ways in which they explored political alliances across racial divides. Lee notes that, because of the pervasiveness of these pairings of blacks and Asians in cultural texts from fields as widely divergent as history, the law, and science, identity for each group was deeply imbricated in comprehending the other. Because the popular discourse of the day linked them, both blacks and Asians had to take into account the other when conceptualizing their respective communities.Lee focuses her primary attention on seven works from the period 1896-1937. As she makes clear, each of these texts, in interrogating questions of race and exclusion, simultaneously performs other important cultural work. Some of these texts, like Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, drew on actual historical events. In Marrow, Chesnutt not only reenacts the event that led to the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson-the denial of access to a white car by a black passenger-he also adds a twist by introducing a Chinese laborer into the equation. …

Plessy v. Ferguson: race and inequality in Jim Crow America

Six decades before Rosa Parks boarded her fateful bus, another traveller in the Deep South tried to strike a blow against racial discrimination--but ultimately fell short of that goal, leading to the Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson . Now Williamjames Hull Hoffer vividly details the origins, litigation, opinions, and aftermath of this notorious case. In response to the passage of the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890, which prescribed equal but accommodations on public transportation, a group called the Committee of Citizens decided to challenge its constitutionality. At a preselected time and place, Homer Plessy, on behalf of the committee, boarded a train car set aside for whites, announced his non-white racial identity, and was immediately arrested. The legal deliberations that followed eventually led to the Court's 7-1 decision in Plessy, which upheld both the Louisiana statute and the state's police powers. It also helped create a Jim Crow system that would last deep into the twentieth century, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and other cases helped overturn it. Hoffer's readable study synthesises past work on this landmark case, while also shedding new light on its proceedings and often-neglected historical contexts. From the streets of New Orleans' Faubourg Treme district to the justices' chambers at the Supreme Court, he breathes new life into the opposing forces, dissecting their arguments to clarify one of the most important, controversial, and socially revealing cases in American law. He particularly focuses on Justice Henry Billings Brown's ruling that the statute's equal, but separate condition was a sufficient constitutional standard for equality, and on Justice John Marshall Harlan's classic dissent, in which he stated, Our Constitution is colour-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens. Hoffer's compelling reconstruction illuminates the controversies and impact of Plessy v. Ferguson for a new generation of students and other interested readers. It also pays tribute to a group of little known heroes from the Deep South who failed to hold back the tide of racial segregation but nevertheless laid the groundwork for a less divided America. This book is part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series .

The Dissents of John Marshall Harlan I

I want to start by offering you two quotations. Both are from Harlan's famous dissent from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when the rest of the Justices held that it was constitutional to segregate people according to their race. The first quotation is famous; the second is not well-known—in fact, some of you may have never heard it before. Here is the first quotation:

Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of “separate but equal,” which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible in him.” This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial “passing.” The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth century created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called upon to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial response to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law's role not only in the treatment of racial groups, but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.

Race in Commodity Exchange and Consumption: Separate but Equal

The movement of blacks from the status of a slave to that of a consumer had tremendous social and geographic consequences. Slaves were not possessors of money and did not engage in the commodity circuit. Emancipation elevated blacks to wage laborers and consumers. The commodity circuit produced social relations that were problematic for race relations in the postbellum South. The geographical and social solution to this problem was neither integration nor exclusion of blacks from the commodity circuit, but segregation. While the model of consumption may be white, the way of capitalism is not to deny anyone access to the commodity circuit. Exclusion would have provided too rigid a boundary for the commodity circuit. The Plessy decision satisfied the structural imperative of capital to expand consumption while also retaining race as a social marker. It provided for the right amount of inclusion and exclusion in the commodity circuit, reducing just enough of the racial obstacle to expand the sphere of consumption to include the former slaves.

Brown v. Board of Education: caste, culture, and the Constitution

Before 1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation throughout much of the nation. That began to change with Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the pernicious separate but equal doctrine. In declaring that legally mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court played a critical role in helping to dismantle America's own version of apartheid, Jim Crow. This new study of Brown the title for a group of cases drawn from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia offers an insightful and original overview designed expressly for students and general readers. It is concise, up-to-date, highly readable, and very teachable. The authors, all recognized authorities on legal history and civil rights law, do an admirable job of examining the fight for legal equality in its broad cultural and historical context. They convincingly show that Brown cannot be understood apart from the history of caste and exclusion in American society. That history antedated the very founding of the country and was supported by the nation's highest institutions, including the Supreme Court whose decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supported the notion of separate but equal. Their book traces the lengthy court litigations, highlighting the pivotal role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and including incisive portraits of key players, including co-plaintiff Oliver newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recognized the crucial importance of a unanimous court decision and helped produce it. The authors simply but powerfully narrate the obstacles these individuals faced and the opportunities they grasped and clearly show that there was much more at stake than educational rights. Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste it also changed our view of the Court's role in American life. The dramatic story of the road to and from Brown, despite the retrenchments of recent years, needs to be heard anew. As we prepare to commemorate the decision's fiftieth anniversary in May 2004, this book invites readers to walk that road again and appreciate the lasting importance of what is indisputably a landmark case.

The Brown Decision: Its Long Anticipation and Lasting Influence

THOUGH IT WAS LONG IN COMING AND SURPRISINGLY FAR-REACHING IN ITS influence, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision was not unanticipated. In the decades following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), African Americans and their white allies slowly pushed toward the day when that ruling would be overturned. Most African American people understood that the Plessy case, which legalized separate but facilities and cleared the way for other Jim Crow restrictions, would eventually be ruled unconstitutional. They believed in and understood this hopeful outlook just as so many African Americans in the antebellum era had believed and understood that America would in time have to dismantle its system of racially based chattel slavery. In 1896, only about thirty years following slavery's demise, African Americans were still very much in a struggle to be indeed--free in establishing economic independence, free in political participation, and free in setting and choosing their social circumstances. The Plessy decision further limited their lives and served to remind them that their actions could be circumscribed by the will and whims of white Americans. Despite the daunting limitations, African Americans held on to the hope that Plessy, like slavery, would be removed sometime in America's future. Within the boundaries of segregation, black Americans created strong institutions that would one day help them in their battle against unjust oppression. During the early twentieth century, they built organizations, staged campaigns, and protested in individual circumstances. Blacks also cultivated alliances with those white Americans who believed that segregation was wrong and that the laws operated unjustly toward a group of people who deserved equality and who had belatedly been protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (the so-called Reconstruction Amendments). Looking to the day when the effects of Plessy would be dismantled, African Americans established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and 1910. Its leaders included descendants of white abolitionists and, in the person of W. E. B. Du Bois, a key proponent of an equal and just society. In 1911 activists set up the National Urban League, whose founders also included both black and white Americans seeking economic equality for blacks who had relocated to urban areas. In this dark time of their history, African Americans continued to build on to educational institutions that today we refer to as historically black colleges and universities. Black leaders understood that educated people were a must in the struggle to create a more equal situation for African Americans. Moreover, they recognized that if life circumstances improved for black people, the entire nation would benefit. Thus, blacks reminded all Americans of their interdependence. With a reputable list of organizations--including some specifically led by women like Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women (which still operates in the twenty-first century)--African Americans continued to mount a tremendous force against Plessy, its legalization of Jim Crow laws, and all the practices and traditions surrounding segregation. Academic work by black scholars contributed to the growing movement in crucial ways. A telling moment that helped black people to appreciate the long-lasting impact of the Plessy decision came with the publication of studies showing that black children would choose white dolls over black ones, an indication that segregation was causing black children to dislike their own image. Some argued that black children, through segregation and discrimination, had even come to hate themselves by internalizing the hatred that many whites felt toward black people in general. The studies about dolls by Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark played a significant role in convincing the members of the Supreme Court that segregation no longer had a place in American society, not even in the American South. …

A Continuity of Conservatism: The Limitations of Brown v. Board of Education

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life. (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that 'The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation. (2) Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy. It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3) One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference. Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. …

Impact of Brown on Multicultural Education of Hispanic Americans

This article suggests that many forces, including various branches of the federal government, in confusing and often conflicting ways, have constructed and influenced the Hispanic identity and educational status. Moreover, this unique identity of Hispanics is important because of their common cultural experience in the United States-an experience that is both distinct from and common to that of African Americans. School desegregation, however, has collapsed the Hispanic narrative, rendering it homeless in a Black-White binary that was the legacy of Brown, and, then, rendering it invisible in a White-Non-White binary that was the legacy of Keyes v. School District No. 1 (Denver, Colorado), which held that Hispanics constitute an identifiable class for purposes of the 14th Amendment. Recognizing Hispanics as a distinct group would threaten the privilege connected to those binaries. Nevertheless, Hispanics are a significant percentage of our nation's population and are becoming a greater percentage every day. Allowing for the greater educational segregation of Hispanics is inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of Brown. INTRODUCTION Few issues in American education have drawn more intense attention and controversy than school segregation. More than a century after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson made racial segregation the law of the land, and 50 years after the Court overturned that decision in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation still exists in U.S. schools. Furthermore, contemporary trends point to a return to widespread segregated schooling. This article provides an overview of U.S. national trends in school segregation and summarizes the results of this author's research on the impact of Brown on multicultural education. The 2000 Census tells us that Hispanics have become the largest minority group in the United States (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Unfortunately, Hispanic school enrollment exploded during the post-civil rights era, and very little has been done to provide desegregated education for Hispanic students. They have been more segregated than Blacks for a number of years, not only by race and ethnicity but also by poverty (Orfield, 2002). There is also serious segregation developing by language. Most Hispanics are concentrated in high poverty, low-achieving schools and face by far the highest dropout rate. Also, since many are concentrated in the large states where affirmative action for college is now illegal and with high stakes high school graduation tests (California, Texas, and Florida), the concentration of these students in schools with a poor record of graduating students and sending them onto college raises important national issues. The Hispanic population changed and became more diversified throughout the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1980, the composition, social-class status, and ideological orientation of the Hispanic population underwent dramatic transformation. It became more heterogeneous and included multiple groups with a range of views and experiences with education. Between 1848 and 1940, Mexican-descent individuals were the predominant and, in some areas, the only group of Hispanics in the United States. Most of these individuals were concentrated in the Southwest. During the 1920s, Mexican-descent individuals began to migrate to other parts of the United States, especially the Midwest. During the 1940s, the United States experienced a tremendous influx of Hispanics from Puerto Rico. Beginning in 1959, the United States again experienced another tremendous influx of Hispanics. This time they were from Cuba. Beginning in the mid-1960s and later spurred by political conflict and economic instability in their homelands during the 1970s, there was a tremendous influx of immigrants from Central and South American countries, such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru. Despite the tremendous influx of Hispanics immigrants from Central and South America in the past three decades, Mexicans, both citizen and non-citizen, continued to be the largest and oldest residing group of Hispanics in the United States. …

Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and Forces against Brown

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown, declaring that state-imposed school segregation was unconstitutional, increased the politics of education rather than decreased its importance in the school desegregation. This article describes the political activities in school desegregation after Brown by the two major political parties, republicans and democrats. In summary, the Republican Party placed its major activities toward winning southerners ' votes in order to change the majority in the U.S. Congress, slowing down the desegregation process, creating alternatives to public school desegregation (such as school-choice option), and making conservative appointments to the federal judiciary. The Democratic Party sought to retain its southern political base by promising an orderly process for implementing the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown, providing legal remedies through the courts with assistance by the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, and providing financial support to local school districts seeking to desegregate their schools. Nevertheless, the conservatives, over a 50-year period, lost a few struggles but won the political war against court-ordered school desegregation. The national political struggle over school desegregation is discussed in this article, and that struggle continues. The America constitution leaves the role of public education to the individual states. In America we have 50 state educational systems with varying degrees of educational services for their citizens and approximately 16,000 local school Districts (Thompson & Wood, 2001). For the purpose of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), implementing the 1954 Court's decision, plaintiffs must bring legal action in each offending local school districts. The federal government gets involvement in public education by passing and enforcing legislation to protect the legal rights of school children under the general welfare clause of the U.S. Constitution. After the U.S. Civil War, Congress enacted three Constitutional Amendments: the 13th Amendment ended slavery, the 14th Amendment gave the former slaves legal rights and citizenship, and the 15th Amendment gave Black males the right to vote. The important Amendment for school desegregation under Brown is the 14th Amendment, that applied the Bill of Rights to State Action, provided expanded due process beyond those found in the Fifth Amendment, and added the Equal Protection Clause. Despite the wishes of the Reconstruction U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court changed and in 1896 the Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld a Louisiana statute requiring separate but facilities as meeting the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Louisiana outlawed integrated rail travel within the state. In the 1954 Court, Brown (1954) reversed the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and held that the state-enforced separate but doctrine was in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The executive branch of government represented by the President of the United States gets involved in public education when it is to his political advantage; and that is what President Richard M. Nixon did in 1968 when he sought the Republican nomination for President. Brown gave birth to the modern reform movement via public vouchers and other educational reform measures under his Southern Strategy, that was designed to gain the votes of individuals who opposed school desegregation and the votes of northern Whites who did not wish for their children to attend school with urban minorities, but who did not have the resources to move to White isolated suburban communities. The school-choice movement that became the backbone of the Southern Strategy in education began in the State of Virginia in late 1950s with attempts to derail school desegregation, and drew national attention with the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griffin. In 1959, Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public schools for five years rather than desegregate. …

Fifty Years after Brown: The Benefits and Tradeoffs for African American Educators and Students

This article examines the benefits and tradeoffs for African American professional educators and students that resulted from the profound Brown v. Board of Education decision. It addresses the impact of the Brown decision immediately after it was rendered for African American educators and students and the legacy of Brown for both of these groups during the previous 50th years. The article also presents the findings from a study of 36 current and recently retired African American high school principals in North Carolina and Alabama to determine their perceptions of the legacy of the Brown decision for both African American educators and high school students. Additionally, the article presents the views of a small sample of these principals who were interviewed regarding the degree to which African American high school students are currently involved in student leadership roles and school activities. Results of the study indicated that the vast majority of the respondents believed that Brown had benefited both African American educators and students; however, they indicated that it had some unintended consequences such as a precipitous drop in the number of African American teachers to serve as role models, competent professionals, and authority figures for students-both Black and White. Furthermore, they perceive that, particularly in integrated high schools where White students are in the majority, the curriculum usually does not adequately address the history, contributions, culture, and experiences of African Americans. Moreover, the principals perceive that African American students in fully integrated schools, with few exceptions, are underrepresented in school leadership roles and are often reluctant to run for elective leadership positions because they usually do not believe they can win. INTRODUCTION On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., the United States Supreme Court rendered its momentous decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). The fundamental public policy that the court unanimously ruled upon was straightforward: segregated schools (established and maintained by state action) were inherently unequal. The court clearly said, through its ruling, that but was, in fact, a contradiction in terms-official state sanctioned segregation was a violation of the protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids any state from making or enforcing any laws which deny any person within its jurisdiction the protection of the laws. Prior to the Supreme Court's ruling, dual and segregated school systems had been established and maintained for African American and White students. These schools systems were primarily in the southern states where Jim Crow laws had prevailed after reconstruction. Ironically, the rationale for establishing and maintaining de jure segregated schools had been also formalized by the United States Supreme Court in another momentous decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, which legitimized the principle of separate but equal (1896). The case evolved from a suit filed by Homer Plessy, a Black man who had filed suit after he had initially been fined for sitting in the White section of a railroad car in Louisiana. His case questioned the constitutionality of an act of the General Assembly of the State of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for railway carriages for the White and colored races. Plessy contested the decision all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the state's but doctrine. In the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court gave racial inequality and segregation an air of legitimacy for over a half century. Moreover, it served to institutionalize racial segregation and social norms, particularly in me South, in both public and private arenas. Not only did the decision condone and maintain racially railroad cars and other modes of public transportation, it virtually assured segregation in schools and school activities, courthouses, waiting rooms, public beaches, swimming pools, restaurants, bathrooms and drinking fountains. …

Introduction and Overview: The Continuing Search for Quality Education by African Americans: Fifty Years after Brown

The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled against required separation of the races in statesponsored institutions and ended apartheid in American education. That decision also led the way for ending segregation in public facilities and in private institutions not generally covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This decision did not end de facto racial segregation due to private choice of residential segregation. This special issue, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown, seeks to provide current readers of The Journal of Negro Education with an informed analysis of issues associated with race and education in America and a record for future readers with an interest in that period of America's past. We sought and achieved this task with the assistance of distinguished scholars on race and education in this country. The quest for quality integrated education in America began before the end of slavery. In 1849, a Black family sued the City of Boston (Roberts v. City of Boston, 1849) to allow its daughter to attend a neighborhood White school rather than travel a much longer distance to attend the city's all-Black elementary school. The state High Court ruled against the Black family, and that decision was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court. This action, seeking desegregation of public education, occurred before the enactment of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14' Amendment applied the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments to the Constitution) to the states and gave Blacks citizenship; moreover, Congress added an Equal Protection Clause to the 14th Amendment. The country, in general, obeyed the laws of the land until 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, held that states may satisfy the Equal Protection Clause of the 14* Amendment by providing the different races with but facilities. Plessy involved public transportation but was generally applied to most areas of public life involving race. Thereafter, all of the southern states and some border states enacted laws making it illegal for Black and White children to attend the same school. The first test of Plessy in education occurred in the State of Mississippi in 1927 (Gong Lum v. Rice) when a Chinese family sought relief from having its child attend Black schools and asked the Court to allow the child to attend White schools. The -Mississippi Court applied the Plessy decision to all non-Whites, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. However, beginning in the late 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began legal action to desegregate public graduate education in the southern states. Its first, efforts involved getting Black students admitted to White graduate and professional schools where none existed for Black students in Black colleges and universities. The NAACP won several cases, but the case with the most meaning for the future Brown decision was Sweatt v. Painter (1950). In this case, a Black student applied to the University of Texas Law School, and the state responded by establishing a Black Law School at all-Black Texas Southern University. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such a law school could not be the equal of the University of Texas Law School; therefore, the Court failed the but test and ordered the Black student admitted to the University of Texas Law School. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown, ruled that laws requiring racially separate schools were unconstitutional. The Brown decision of 1954 did not immediately end racially segregated schools. The desegregation of public education, en mass, occurred almost two decades later; and, in 2001, the U. …

Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890-1950

Without the parallel institutions that the black professional class created, successful challenges to white supremacy would not have been possible. The formation of parallel organizations (such as the National Medical Association in 1895, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908, and the National Bar Association in 1925) proved to be far more radical, far more capable of nurturing resistance, than anyone could have anticipated in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth.1 The development of the black professional class and of the educational and practice facilities in which its members were trained and worked seemed to imply acquiescence in segregation. But such institutions never silenced internal dissent. Ideological tensions between parallelism and integrationism haunted black discourse throughout the twentieth century. Black professionals identified the Achilles' heel of white supremacy: Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imperative, to develop a range of distinct institutions that they controlled. Maneuvering through their organizations and institutions, they exploited that fundamental weakness in the “separate but equal” system permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.2 For all their violence, lynchings, prejudice, and hatred, white supremacists could not exterminate black people. The white supremacists' major goal, after all, was to maintain a pliable, exploitable labor force that would remain permanently in a subordinate place.

The Battle over Brown’s Legitimacy

The Battle over Brown's Legitimacy JEFFREY D. HOCKETT* Constitutional scholars have given few Supreme Court rulings the attention that they have lavishedupon the celebrated decision in Brown v. BoardofEducation} Yetthe literature ofpublic law is surprisingly unedifying with regard to the process by which the desegregation decision achieved iconic status in American legal culture. Scholarly inattentiveness to the history of Brown’ s reputation is startling, given that southern politicians were not the only persons in 1954 to characterize the decision as a manifest instance ofjudicial legislation. Even persons sympathetic to desegregation conceded that the Justices had circumvented traditional legal constraints in rendering Brown} In the years immediately following the ruling, some scholars appealedto the notion ofa“living Constitution” to defend Brown againstcharges that itconflicted with the original understanding ofthe Fourteenth Amendment and with the “separate but equal” doctrine that the Court had established in Plessy v. Ferguson} But critics, some of whom even accepted the concept of the “living Constitution,” also challenged the Court’s reading of social fact—that is, its claims regarding the inherent inequality of segregated schools—which supposedly justified judicial recognition of a right that conflicted with precedent and with the intentions of the Framers ofthe Equal Protection Clause. If Brown reveals the role that discre­ tion can play in the process of constitutional decision-making, however, the decision also demonstrates that the Court is limited in its ability to control the meaning of its rulings. Ironically, this limitation on the Court’s power worked to the Justices’ advantage in Brown. For the exalted status that the decision eventu­ ally achieved was, in part, a function of schol­ arly revisions of the basis of the ruling. More specifically, the fortunes oftheBrown decision improved considerably when certain scholars recast the ruling as an attack upon an institu­ tion that, they argued, could only be charac­ terized as a manifestation ofwhite supremacy. The violence that greeted desegregation efforts in the South made benign characterizations of apartheid seem disingenuous and thus solid­ ified the ethical appeal of Brown. The com­ pleteness ofBrown’s triumph as apolitical icon is reflected not only in a corresponding decline in the status ofthe Plessy decision, but also in the damage done to the reputations of those scholars who accepted the morality of Brown THE BATTLE OVER BROWN'S LEGITIMACY 31 but continued to question the legality of the decision. Scholarly Criticism of Brown The Historical Critique To place the debate over Brown’ s legitimacy in proper historical perspective, one should note that flexible interpretations of constitutional provisions were anything but novel in 1954. Indeed, the concept of the “living Constitu­ tion” had been an accepted part of American legal thought and Supreme Court doctrine since at least the end of the New Deal.4 However, the criticism that some politicians, journalists, and scholars directed at Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion for a unanimous Court in Brown revealed that the jurispruden­ tial consensus regarding the idea that consti­ tutional provisions are relative to time and circumstance applied only to the powers of government and did not extend to the realm of individual rights. Warren made no pretense in his opinion that the Court’s ruling rested upon the intentions ofthe Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment. His treatment ofthe historical sources that were the focus of re-argument in 1953s—a statement that these sources were, “[a]t best,... inconclusive”6— prompted southern congressmen to empha­ size what the Chief Justice merely implied: that constitutional history undermined the Court’s holding that racial segregation in pub­ lic schools violates the concept of equal protection of the laws. Indeed, the incon­ sistency between the Court’s ruling and the history of the Fourteenth Amendment was the focus of the “Southern Manifesto” of March 1956. That statement ofprotest against the Court’s ruling, which more than ninety The plaintiffs in the school desegregation cases were photographed in 1964 at a press conference. From left to right: Harry Briggs, Jr., Linda Brown Smith, Spottswood Bolling, and Ethel Louise Belton Brown. 32 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY UNION AND LIBERTY! AND ONION AND SLAVERY! This 1864 broadside contrasting Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, as a supporter of...

10.2307/3504872

10.2307/3504872