Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (68 page)

Urged on by Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), the burly, barb-tongued attorney from Baltimore who led the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, small-town folks in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware balked at the injustice of “separate but equal” educational systems. The people who carried these fights were soon confronted by threats ranging from loss of their jobs to dried-up bank credit and ultimately to threats of violence and death. In 1951, one of these men was the Reverend Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter in the all-white Topeka school. Since Brown came first in the alphabet among the suits brought against four different states, it was his name that was attached to the case that Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953.

Marshall seemed to have momentum on his side. In 1950, the Supreme Court had already made three important decisions that chipped away at the
Plessy
ruling
:
the
Sweatt
decision said equality involved more than physical facilities; the
McLaurin
decision said black students in state universities could not be segregated after admission; and the
Henderson
case banned railroad dining-car segregation. But these were limited, circumscribed cases without broader interpretations.

There had also been a change in the makeup of the Court itself. After the arguments in
Brown v. Board of Education
were first heard, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, the Truman appointee who had ordered the other justices flown back to Washington to ensure that the Rosenberg execution would proceed on schedule, died of a heart attack. In 1953, with reargument of the case on the horizon, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren (1891–1974) chief justice of the United States. No legal giant, Warren was a good Republican soldier, a fairly moderate California governor, and the vice presidential candidate on the 1948 Dewey ticket. His past held only one black mark—at least in retrospect. As California’s attorney general, he had pressed the cause of internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, a policy he had then helped carry out in his first term as California’s governor. But in 1953, that seemed like evidence of good sense rather than the grievous smudge it would be today.

Certainly nobody at the time suspected that Warren would go on to lead the Court for sixteen of its most turbulent years, during which the justices took the lead in transforming America’s approach to racial equality, criminal justice, and freedom of expression. President Eisenhower, the good general and hero of democracy who marched firmly in place when it came to civil rights, later said the appointment of Warren was “the biggest damfool mistake I ever made.”

From the moment the justices began to confer on the case, Warren—as yet unconfirmed by the Senate—made it clear that he would vote to overturn
Plessy
because he believed that the law could no longer tolerate separating any race as inferior, which was the obvious result of “separate but equal” laws. But Warren was an adroit politician as well as a jurist. He knew that the case was so important and politically charged that it demanded unanimity. Achieving that unanimity was less simple than forming his own decision. But through gentle persuasion, Warren was able to shape the consensus he wanted—and what the case needed. All nine of the brethren not only voted to overturn
Plessy,
but allowed Warren’s single opinion to speak for them. When Warren read the simple, brief ruling, it was the judicial equivalent of the shot heard ’round the world.

In
Simple Justice,
a monumental study of the case and the history of racism, cruelty, and discrimination that preceded it, Richard Kluger eloquently assessed the decision’s impact:

The opinion of the Court said that the United States stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate. . . . The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.

Of course,
Brown
did not cause the scales to fall from the eyes of white supremacists. The fury of the South was quick and sure. School systems around the country, South and North, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts toward desegregation. The states fought the decision with endless appeals and other delaying tactics, the calling out of troops, and ultimately violence and a venomous outflow of racial hatred, targeted at schoolchildren who simply wanted to learn.

Must Read:
Simple Justice: The History of
Brown v. Board of Education
and Black America’s Struggle for Equality
by Richard Kluger.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

C
HIEF
J
USTICE EARL WARREN,
from the unanimous opinion in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
(May 17, 1954):

We come then to the question presented: 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? We believe that it does. . . .

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications 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. . . .

. . . We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Why did the arrest of a woman named Rosa Parks change American life?

In its historic judgment, the Supreme Court gave the civil rights movement its Ten Commandments. What the movement lacked was its Moses. Rosa Parks may not have been Moses, but she certainly was a voice crying out from Egyptian bondage. In 1955, Egypt was Montgomery, Alabama.

A forty-three-year-old seamstress who worked in a downtown Montgomery department store, Rosa Parks was on her way home from work on a December day. Loaded down by bags filled with her Christmas shopping, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and moved to the back—
legally, traditionally, and, it seemed, eternally—the Negro section. Finding no seats there, she took one toward the middle of the bus. When the driver picked up more white passengers, he called out, “Niggers move back,” an order to vacate the white seats even if it meant standing. Mrs. Parks refused. Active in the local chapter of the NAACP, Rosa Parks had already decided that she would make a stand if asked to give up her seat.

Unwilling to leave that seat, Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Montgomery’s transportation laws. Mrs. Parks was ordered to court on the following Monday. But over the weekend, the blacks of Montgomery found their Moses. Meeting to protest Mrs. Parks’s arrest and the reason for it, the black community of Montgomery selected the twenty-seven-year-old pastor of Mrs. Parks’s church, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader. Calling for a peaceful form of resistance, the young minister urged his people to boycott the buses of Montgomery. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68). In a short time the bus boycott and the movement it inspired in Montgomery would raise him to world fame and make him one of the nation’s most admired and reviled men.

King was born in Atlanta, the son of one of that city’s prominent black ministers and grandson of the man who had organized a protest that created Atlanta’s first black high school, named for Booker T. Washington, which King himself attended. He went on to Atlanta’s Morehead College, studied theology and philosophy at Crozier Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania, and had completed his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 when he took the call at Dexter Avenue. Buttressed by the twin principles of nonviolence and civil disobedience inspired by Henry David Thoreau and India’s Mahatma Gandhi, King planned to shape a civil rights movement using the fundamental moral teachings of Christianity—love, forgiveness, humility, faith, hope, community—as its bedrock. The Montgomery boycott, begun on December 5, 1955, presented him with the first opportunity to try this approach.

For more than a year, the boycott was hugely effective. Angry because they couldn’t make these Negroes ride the buses, the whites of Montgomery looked for other ways to retaliate. Mrs. Parks was re-
arrested for failing to pay her fine. King was arrested, first on a drunk-driving charge and later for conspiring to organize an illegal boycott. Insurance companies canceled the auto insurance on cars being used to circumvent the buses. When peaceful means failed, black homes were firebombed. A shotgun blast broke the windows of King’s home. And of course the KKK appeared on the scene, to march through the streets of Montgomery.

The case wound its way back to Washington, where the Supreme Court, now armed with the
Brown
precedent, was beginning to roll back “separate but equal” statutes in all areas of life. The Court ordered an end to Montgomery’s bus segregation in November 1956, and on the morning of December 21, 1956, the blacks of Montgomery went back to the buses. They had won a battle, but the war was just beginning. The peaceful boycott movement gathered momentum and was duplicated throughout the South. For the next ten years these peaceful protests led the civil rights movement until the painfully slow process finally boiled over in the urban racial violence of the mid-1960s.

Despite the success of the protest, the international notoriety Martin Luther King had gained created some dissension within the ranks, according to David J. Garrow’s book
Bearing the Cross.
Mrs. Parks, who lost her job as a seamstress, later took a job at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and remained a living symbol of the civil rights movement.

In 1957, King moved to Atlanta and organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Later that year he led the first civil rights march to Washington in a prayer pilgrimage. This time 50,000 blacks joined him. In the future he would return with hundreds of thousands.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court had issued a second ruling in May 1955, known as
Brown II,
which attempted to address some of the practical concerns of its desegregation order. Walking a dangerous tightrope without a safety net, the Court reasserted that the states in the suits must begin to make a prompt, reasonable start toward full compliance with the 1954 ruling. But Warren concluded with the now-famous phrase that this process should move with “all deliberate speed.” The Court had told the country to go fast slowly. Of course, to the advocates of integration, the emphasis was on speed. To segregationists, “deliberate” meant sometime in the days of Buck Rogers.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

R
ELMAN
M
ORIN,
an Associated Press reporter, at Little Rock, Arkansas (September 23, 1957):

They were carrying books. White bobby-sox, part of the high school uniform, glinted on the girls’ ankles. They were all nicely dressed. The boys wore open-throat shirts and the girls, ordinary frocks.

They weren’t hurrying. They simply strolled across perhaps 15 yards from the sidewalk to the school steps. They glanced at the people and the police as though none of this concerned them.

You can never forget a scene like that.

Nor the one that followed.

Like a wave, the people who had run toward the four negro men, now swept back toward the police and the barricades.

“Oh, God, they’re in the school,” a man yelled.

Morin won the Pulitzer Prize for his account of the arrival of nine black students for the first day of classes in a Little Rock, Arkansas, public high school.

Why did President Eisenhower send the Army into Little Rock, Arkansas?

Through all of these Supreme Court decisions and during the Montgomery boycott and other peaceful protests that followed, the Eisenhower White House stood as a vacuum of moral leadership on the civil rights issue. While the Cold War general was making the world “safe for democracy,” his own vision of a free society seemed to have no room for blacks.

Apparently fearful of alienating the powerful bloc of “Dixiecrats,” the southern Democratic congressmen whose votes he needed, Eisenhower was ambiguous in his public comments. He promised to uphold the laws of the land, but refrained from endorsing the Court’s rulings. At the time, a word of leadership or outrage at Jim Crow conditions from this popular president might have given the civil rights movement additional vigor and force. Instead, Eisenhower was ultimately forced to act, with great reluctance, in a showdown that was more about presidential power than about the rights of black children.

In September 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, posted 270 fully armed men from the Arkansas National Guard outside Little Rock Central High School. Their duty was to prevent nine black children from entering the previously all-white school. On American television and all over the world, people watched with revulsion as the children tried to enter school and were turned away by the guard as an angry, jeering mob spat and cursed at them, all under the watchful eyes of the guardsmen. A federal district court order forced Faubus to allow the children into the school, but the governor withdrew the Arkansas state guard, leaving the protection of the black children to a small contingent of resentful local policemen, some of whom refused to carry out the order.