ME (AND YOU AND YOU AND ALL OF US) AND BROWN V BOARD OF EDUCATION On May 17, 1954—50 years ago tomorrow—the Supreme Court of the United States announced its decision in Brown v Board of Education: "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It overturned a decision of 1896, Plessy v Ferguson, in which "separate but equal" facilities was ruled constitutional. Plessy v Ferguson was one of the pillars of the Jim Crow system in America, the system of segregation of people of color into separate, almost always inferior facilities, jobs, economic status, and social standing. Brown, and subsequent civil rights legislation, ended that system's legal reign, even though some of its effects are still felt in our land. If Brown was nothing else, it was a symbol of a new kind of commitment to racial justice in America It was not the only symbol. Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line in baseball in 1947, the integration of the armed forces by order of President Truman in 1948, the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, and other achievements were also important. Brown was an important symbol because it addressed the needs of children as no other act or event did. It recognized the lasting effects of a poor education on black children. It recognized that teaching children that they are inferior because of the color of their skin is deeply wrong, morally and constitutionally. It recognized that white children were deprived of a vital social understanding in not being able to associate in the classroom and on the playground with black children. There have been many articles and books about the Brown case in the past few months, some of which I have listed in the bibliography that will appear with the printed text of our remarks this morning. Today my interest is personal. What has Brown meant to me and to you. How has it affected my life and yours? How are you and I different because of that decision? Two other members of our professional team were alive and in school at the time of Brown, Janet Johnson-Haynes, our Administrator, and Sarah Albright, our Music Director. Before I share my own experiences and impressions, let us hear from them. Janet Johnson-Haynes, Administrator: I was 10 years old when the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was reached. That decision did not much affect me or most of the black community living on the South Side of Chicago, which at that time was a very segregated city. We lived in a very self-contained all-black neighborhood It housed our grocery and drugstores, and other businesses, Five & Dime Store, our church, dentist and physician offices. When we went to the movies, we went to one of the 3 or 4 that were in our neighborhood. Everything was within a 2-8 block walk from our house, including public transportation. I attended the neighborhood grammar and high schools. The teachers in both schools were primarily white as were the principal and assistant principals. The office workers in both schools were white. Our schoolbooks were old, never any new ones, always badly used with writing or coloring throughout the books. We were never allowed to take our course books home. We purchased our own school supplies (paper, pencil, crayons). Our school library was small and although it contained quite a few books for its size, (many of which were also quite old and used) not very many of them were on people that represented me in a positive way (or Native Americans or other cultures for that matter). There were books on major black figures: W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver and his miracles with the peanut, some poetry books and novels written by Blacks, and very few books written by or about women. But compared to the library's holdings, not very much was there as compared to other books in the collection. At my young age I was aware of how the history books portrayed "me. Some of our Black teachers worked very hard in helping us to see a different "us," rather than what was portrayed in the history books. They also encouraged us to go on to college. My school experience was a bit different (but yet very much the same) than that of my friends who attended school in Hyde Park (on Chicago's Southeast side near the Lake), which was just beginning to become integrated. In both environments, however, it was assumed that we would not be big achievers and we were neither encouraged nor challenged to do more than what was necessary to pass on to the next grade. I can remember discussions at our dinner table about Brown vs. Board of Education and what it "might," mean to us. My family believed that not much was going to change, that somehow the Black community would be the ones to be "inconvenienced" and that Whites would not want Black children going to school with their children. Chicago was no different in its view of race that any town in the deep South. Change in the racial makeup of schools would not occur until housing was opened up. As it turned out, no one in my school was bused anywhere. And conditions did not change appreciably. For me, I understood a little about race relations in our city (and to a lesser degree our country), not because of anything that happened to me personally, but more because of the discussions at our dinner table with my parents and grandfather, as well as what I was beginning to learn in school. Race, however, was driven home to me in 1955 with the death of Emmett Till, a young Black boy from Chicago's South Side, who was murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi. His funeral was held in a small church on Chicago's South Side and my mother took me to view his body. (Hundreds/thousands of parents also took their children as well.) The image of Emmett, who was two years older than me, lying in his casket, (as well as the reason for his death) is one that has been with me all of my life. My mother, like other parents of Black children growing up in the North, wanted me to understand how very dangerous it could be being Black during those times. In her way, my mother was giving me "one more tool" to use in dealing with racism In looking back, Brown vs. Board of Education did not seem to change or improve things personally or appreciably for me and others growing up in Chicago, at least not that I recognized during those years. Emmett Till's death, however, had more of a profound impact on life in the black community and the beginning of racial change in the city. Sarah Albright, Music Director On May 17, 1954 I was in Junior High School in Martinsville, Virginia, a small industrial town of about 20, 000 important for the textile and furniture industries so prevalent in that region of the South. Economically, the town was pretty equally divided between the wealth that owned and managed the factories and the workers who were quite poor. As long as I attended Martinsville Public Schools the town was segregated in every way, the schools, neighborhoods, restaurants, and the shopping areas to some extent. On that particular day I remember I was hanging out with my group of friends during lunch period and this impertinent brat of a guy cam up to us and said, Hey, did y'all hear we'll be going to school with the "jigs" next year? I'm sure we were all surprised and questioning- What would we do? How could this take place? What did this mean for us? We had never been around many Negroes before except those who did domestic work in our homes. This could be like living in a foreign country! Many discussions took place in the ensuing years in school classes and in church youth groups. I recall some really fine, thoughtful dialogues with some of the teachers who tried to help us understand why it was so important that all people have opportunity, education and a chance at the American dream. I know that my peer group was very concerned about the situation and generally felt integration was probably the right way to go. The problem was with our parents' generation. All we heard was how awful this would be because it would lead to intermarriage. A lot of older folks said they liked Negroes just find as long as they stayed "in their place." These kinds of comments angered and confused me and my friends. We could certainly see our world was going to change and it didn't sound so bad as our parents were make it out to be. The schools in Martinsville are as integrated and normal as any other town in the US. The manufacturing jobs have gone abroad and the town is depressed economically, but the whole community is grappling with these problems together. Although I am not proud that I grew up in a segregated society, I think the experience and our discussions made me more aware of the importance of fairness and goodwill between races in promoting a healthy and just society I was raised mostly in Tennessee and Missouri. My parents came from families with deep roots in the South and its traditions. They grew up breathing the air of white superiority and did not choke on it. I grew up in a home like many other middle class homes in the South, with a black maid and cook paid a pittance to work ten hours a day six days a week. Annie was allowed to enter the house only by the back door, to use only the toilet in the basement, and to eat only at a table on a glassed-in back porch area. The restaurants of my youth were all segregated, as were the movie theaters, the buses, the hotels, the drinking fountains, the bathrooms, the schools and even the churches. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not incorrect in pointing to Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. as the most segregated hour of the week. The polling booths were closed to most Black people in the South. My first real encounter with racial discrimination was when I lost a favorite neighborhood playmate, Johnny Brown. Johnny was his name and we added brown because his skin was that color. He was fast and funny and knew all kinds of good games, and every kid in the neighborhood enjoyed playing with him. Then one day he was not there, not ever again. We were told by our parents that we could not play with Johnny Brown any more because he was a Negro. My mother said that Negroes were not like us and that it was wrong for them to think they were. Johnny's father was the neighborhood trash man and handy man. The white folks in the neighborhood fired him because he had not instructed his son about what his proper place was. Some of the zip and excitement of our games was gone, never to return. A dirty secret that we had not known had now been told to us. Somehow it did not sit well. But young as we were—all of us five to eight years old—we did not know how to talk or think about what had happened. But I have never forgotten the incident. I was 15 when the Brown decision was handed down, at the end of my sophomore year in high school. I had just weeks before finished an extensive research project on housing segregation in Kansas City, which was practiced openly and for the most part legally. An innocent in these dark woods, I was appalled at what I discovered and hoped that my report would change everything. It changed nothing, though other men and women and their deeds did change things, just as Brown was to do. When I learned of the Brown decision, I was exhilarated. It seemed to me that the Court had staked out a high moral position in which we should all rejoice. That was not the view of my parents. They were certain that the schools would be ruined. They were sure that the next thing would be that black boys would want to marry white girls. They repeatedly spoke of black people as either lazy, fundamentally unintelligent, immoral, or all three. I argued heatedly with them on every point they made. Without really knowing a single person of color, I was sure that what they said was wrong. What about Ralph Bunche? What about Jackie Robinson? What about Marian Anderson? They were all hard working, smart people of the highest integrity and achievement. Every rule has an exception, my parents said, but most black people are not like that. Something would just have to be done to stop the Brown decision from being implemented, or our children (our white children, that is) will suffer terribly. Conversations like that were going on all over the South, and maybe the North too. There would be more than talk in the years to come. Public schools would be closed. Private white schools would be opened. Black people and their white supporters would be fired from jobs, denied housing, and threatened time and again. I decided that what I needed to do was to get to know a Black person. Since no Black people were allowed in my school or neighborhood, I struck up an acquaintance with a player on an opposing football team named John Brown. For obvious reasons, the name resonated with me, and he was a terrific player. He later starred on the Iowa State football team. Both of us being football players enabled me to get a conversation going. What John helped me to begin to understand was the tremendous advantages I had as a white person. He spoke of the kind of work his father was able to get and not get, his good fortune in attending a Catholic high school which was academically sound and free of prejudice (unlike the public school for Negroes he would otherwise have had to attend),the limited options he had for college so that a football scholarship seemed like a golden opportunity, the fear he felt in certain places, the anger he felt that he and I could not go to a movie together or eat together in a restaurant. I was beginning to get a sense of the terrible deprivations through which Black people in this land had suffered. I felt that I had also been cheated—of knowing people, of learning from their experience, of working and playing together for our mutual benefit. Two weeks after the Brown decision, the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church , following unanimous votes of the two other major Presbyterian bodies in America, voted in favor of uniting the three groups. Presbyterian polity requires that the districts—called Presbyteries—support Assembly decisions or they fail. Over the next six months 43 Presbyteries voted against union and 42 in favor of it. In my senior honors thesis in college, I analyzed these events and determined that race was a major factor in the defeat of the union proposal. Brown was the symbolically explosive point around which anti-union forces rallied. It would be 30 years before union would be effected, and even then not without some losses of people still opposed to mingling with people of color. In my college years, 1956-1960, segregation and integration were not primary questions on our horizon, except for the ten Black students in our class, one of whom I knew well. He became a novelist whose fiction dealt with racial issues. His white roommate was from Alabama. They became lifetime friends. They taught us all lessons in how to bridge gaps in experience. Bill was a Black man from New York City and Jim was a white man from a small southern town. The Brown decision, its implementation, its potential value, its true meaning, was often discussed. I do not remember specifically what was said, only that we all agreed that this was a momentous ruling that could change the way we lived in America. We were familiar with Gunnar Myrdal's book of 1943 that described race as "the American dilemma." We wanted to break the stranglehold of that dilemma and bring us closer to the ideals of our founding documents. We did not do very much other than talk, but we did know how important Brown was. Brown, whatever it did not accomplish, was, in David Halberstam's words, "the ignition system of the civil rights movement." It was the first society-wide statement by the Federal Government since the passage of the 14th Amendment that segregation was morally and constitutionally wrong. As such, it gave courage and impetus to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and to later civil rights protests that eventuated in legislation to right historic wrongs. Brown sensitized me to the schools my children would attend. In Chicago, when my children were very little, the schools they attended were racially mixed, as they were in Oak Park, Illinois as well. In Canton, Massachusetts, the schools and the town were proud of being "not Boston," a code phrase for being a white town. We were fortunate in receiving a small inheritance that enabled us to send our children to a private school that had a wonderful mix of ethnic, cultural, racial, and national groups. Indeed, all three of my children have had a far more cosmopolitan educational experience than I had. Their friends were Black, Chicano, Caucasian, Japanese, Saudi, Peruvian, and children from other groups as well. It is true that I was privileged in being white, but it is also true that I was deprived of experiences that only mingling with others of different understandings and heritage could bring. Brown helped me to see this. I have often thought that one reason that I am a Unitarian Universalist is that my background was so provincial. I love the diversity in our congregations, and I yearn for more of it. I believe that is part of the mission of not only our congregation but of our whole movement in the 21st century. A huge first step has been taken with the coming to the presidency of the UUA of Bill Sinkford, a man of incomparable gifts and matchless grace, an African American. We need to appreciate and learn from diversity not fear it. Cass Sunstein points out in a recent article about the Brown decision that there are two ways to interpret it. One of them says that it means that governments must be color-blind. The other one says that it means an end to white supremacy. Those who believe in the first interpretation point to Ophrah Winfrey and Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice and Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby as powerful and influential Black people in our society. Those who believe in the latter interpretation point to high rates of Black poverty and joblessness, point to too many schools that are de facto segregated and have inadequate facilities, and point to prejudicial attitudes built into our systems and institutions that demean people of color. What seems true to me is that before we can become a color-blind society, we must first eradicate all traces of white supremacy. That is what the civil rights legislation was all about. It is what the continuing marches and protests are about. It is what affirmative action programs are all about. Color-blind we are not and not likely to be for a long time, though clearly we are closer to that goal than we were fifty years ago. What we are is color-conscious. That means to me that we have a lot of work to do. We have to know and understand our history whether we are black or white or red or yellow or brown. We have to form our opinions within the context of the high ideals of our nation-- the self-evident truths of all being equal and endowed by the Creator with life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and the high ideals of our faith—on the same day that the Brown decision was announced, the Charlotte, NC Unitarian Church announced that "Race or Color No Bar to Church Admittance." We have to commit ourselves not to rest till justice fills our hearts and righteousness touches every thought we have. That process began in this congregation a long time ago with strong support of civil rights legislation at the national level and strong support of the Black Economic Development League at the local level. That process continues now with the fine work of Kathy Edgren in arranging conversations that started some four months ago about the book "WHY ARE ALL THE BLACK KIDS SITTING TOGETHER IN THE CAFETERIA?" There will be more programs and events and a way for all of us to join in realizing the dream embedded in the Brown decision. Shall the dark shadow of racism grow larger in our land or shall we truly overcome that shadow and its legacy? The answer to that question is in our hands. Our commitment, our insight, our sensitivity, our hard work will shape the future of race in America and the ultimate meaning of Brown v Board of Education. BIBLIOGRAPHY Terry H. Anderson, THE PURSUIT OF FAIRNESS: A HISTORY OF AFFIRMATICVE ACTION. Derrick Bell, SILENT COVENANTS: BROWN V BOARD OF EDUCATION AND THE UNFULFILLED HOPES FOR RACIAL REFORM. Sheryll Cashin, THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION: HOW RACE AND CLASS ARE UNDERMINING THE AMERICAN DREAM. Debra Dickerson, THE END OF BLACKNESS: RETURNING THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS TO THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNERS. Michael J. Klarman, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS: THE SUPREME COURT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY. Charles Ogletree, Jr., ALL DELIBERATE SPEED: REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST HALF-CENTURY OF BROWN V BOARD OF EDUCATION. Steven Slon, Editor, MY SOUL LOOKS BACK IN WONDER: VOICES OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS EXPERIENCE. Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, "WHY ARE ALL THE BALCK KIDS SITTING TOGETHER IN THE CAFETERIA?" . 1