50 Years Later

In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision a half-century ago, a unanimous Supreme Court struck down the infamous “separate but equal” racial policy. That policy of absolute racial separation had been decreed by the Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. However, that minimal legal acknowledgement of the humanity of African-Americans was never enforced. Their lives were separate but never equal, from the “colored” hospital wards where they were born to the racially-segregated graveyards where they were buried. As a confused six year-old in rural Arkansas, I once asked my Sunday school teacher if God had a “colored” section in heaven for us.

The “separate-but-equal” laws began on Monday, May 18, 1896, when the Court voted 7 to 1 that Adolph H. Plessy could be set apart in a Louisiana railroad car solely because of his race. It is ironic that, on a Court with only one Southerner and four graduates of Harvard and Yale, only John Marshall Harlan—himself a former slaveowner—dissented with words as evergreen as the cedars of Lebanon: “There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind…”

After the Plessy ruling, segregation laws spread like pestilence to include street cars, buses, taxicabs, schools, water fountains, bathrooms, juries, movie theaters, parks, facilities for the blind, libraries, lunch counters, hotels, waiting rooms, visiting days at the zoo, swimming pools, beaches and so on ad infinitum. They were so complete and cruel that, in the eyes of the law, African-Americans were essentially sub-human. During World War II, Nazi prisoners of war in the United States were permitted to eat in diners and ride in train cars in which uniformed black GI’s could not. Blood supplies were segregated by race, and it was not unusual for hotels and motels to accept the pet dog of white guests, but refuse to rent a room to an African-American.

Against this backdrop, on May 17, 1954 all nine Justices voted to outlaw de jure segregation in the public schools. Fifty-eight years after Plessy, almost to the day, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The median age of the American people is approximately 36 years, and the typical U.S. history course required of high school students seldom reaches World War II. When such a course does reach the present time, the past 70 years are fleetingly covered. More than half of our citizens have not lived or been well-taught about the Plessy years. They can’t appreciate the massive social, psychological and economic damage caused by that policy and how it propagates into our own time. Millions of its victims and perpetrators are still alive and either bear scars or enjoy benefits from that shameful period.

It is ironic that, in this fiftieth year since Brown, that de jure black-white segregation has morphed into de facto black-white-Hispanic segregation today. With it have come some of the same problems that existed during the Jim Crow era—functional illiteracy, diminished motivation and under-performance on academic and employment testing.

Whatever the causes, there are fundamental differences between the experiences of black children in all-black schools today and what their predecessors endured 50 years ago. Not only do they have opportunities beyond the dreams of their grandparents, but advancements in media technology present powerful images of role models to them that they can’t easily ignore. Yes, some of these images are of unsavory athletes, entertainers and other miscreant personalities, but it would be disingenuous to say that no positive images cross their “radar screens.”

Even the most isolated black children see African-Americans (or media reports of them) enforcing the law, presiding in courtrooms, reporting the news, governing cities, participating in local and state legislative bodies and serving on the Supreme Court, in Congress and in presidential cabinets. Surely, some of them are aware that African-Americans lead or teach at prestigious colleges and universities, are chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, have been chosen as Miss America and have won Oscars and Emmys, Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes.

It is important that those who wish to dismantle the latter-day apartheid continue to speak candidly about it to the powerful in our country. They must also direct that same candor toward the powerless and move them to action, too. Put another way, leaders should not only speak truth to power, but they should also speak truth to impotence and generate power! To do less would only reshuffle the “separate but equal” deck in our schools.

We are a long way from the “colored” and “white” schools outlawed by Brown, but their legacy persists and African-Americans cannot wait for others to solve the problems of educating black children. They have the political potential to solve some of the problems themselves by heeding the self-help adage: “The solution is not always out the window, it is sometimes in the mirror.”

Those who would commit themselves to this task can take heart in the words of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.”

David L. Evans is Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard College.