Prof. Bond delivered the following speech on May 15 in Topeka,
Kansas, at the NAACP’s Brown commemoration.
Fifty years ago this past April, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached
his first sermon as the new pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church. He was twenty-five years old.
One month later, on May 17th, 1954, the United States Supreme Court,
in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declared that segregated
schools violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.
Two months later, on July 17, 1954, construction began at Disneyland.
Sadly, today Brown’s promise is still lost in fantasy land.
The Magic Kingdom remains closed to children of color in America.
There can be no mistake – those fifty years
since Brown have seen the fortunes of black America advance
and retreat, but the decision is always cause for sober celebration,
not impotent dismay.
We celebrate the brilliant legal minds who
were the architects of Brown v. Board; we celebrate the brave
families who were its plaintiffs; and we celebrate the legal principle
that remains its enduring legacy – that, in the words of Chief Justice
Earl Warren, "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place.”
That the quest for meaningful equality – political
and economic equity – remains unfulfilled today is no indictment
of past efforts. It is testament to our challenge.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision,
it is easy to cast a cynical eye on the status of school desegregation
in America today – or the sorry state of race relations – and minimize
the significance of Brown. That is a grave mistake, for Brown,
by destroying segregation’s legality, gave a nonviolent army the power
to destroy segregation’s morality as well.
Thus it is no coincidence that this year we also celebrate the 40th
anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – the most
sweeping civil rights legislation before or since, and our democracy’s
finest hour.
We look back on the years between Brown and the passage of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act with some pride.
In those years, Brown’s anniversary became a celebratory signpost,
as major events focused on commemorating the date.
The year after Brown, Rosa Parks sat down to stand up for her
rights, and the Montgomery bus boycott began.
Martin Luther King’s first national address was at a 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage
on the third anniversary of Brown at the Lincoln Memorial. Later
that same year the Little Rock Nine successfully integrated Little
Rock’s Central High School.
Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters burst out across the South in
1960, followed by the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the forcible integration
of Ole Miss in 1962.
In 1963 alone, the year that King – fresh from the
battlefields of Birmingham – told the nation of his dream at the March
on Washington, there were more than 10,000 anti-racist demonstrations.
King was the most famous and well known of the modern movement’s personalities,
but it was a people’s movement. It produced leaders of its own; but
it relied not on the noted but the nameless, not on the famous but
the faceless. It didn’t wait for commands from afar to begin a campaign
against injustice. It saw wrong and acted against it; it saw evil and
brought it down.
Those were the days when women and men of all races and creeds worked
together in the cause of civil rights.
Those were the days when good music was popular and popular music
was good.
Those were the days when the President picked the Supreme Court and
not the other way around.
Those were the days when we had a war on poverty, not a war on the
poor. Those were the days when patriotism was a reason for open-eyed
disobedience, not an excuse for blind allegiance.
Those were the days when the news media really was “fair and balanced” and
not just cheerleaders for the powerful.
But those were not “the good old days.” Then, the American social
order was rigidly stratified and racially codified. In those days, “[t]he
law, the courts, the schools, and almost every institution … favored
whites. This was white supremacy.”
Martin Luther King described it in 1962. He said then:
You would understand that most southern Blacks then could not vote.
Most attended inadequate, segregated schools, if they went at all,
and many attended only a few months each year. Most could not hope
to gain an education beyond high school. Most worked as farmers, or
semi-skilled laborers. Few owned the land they farmed, or even the
homes in which they lived.
This was a massive system of racial preferences, a vast affirmative
action plan for whites – enforced by law and terror. It had one name
and one aim – to crush the human development of a whole population.
It began with slave-catching in Africa, and it continues on to the
present day.
Only by acknowledging the name, nature and scope of the problem can
we measure the magnitude of our successes – and the costs of our failures.
The day Brown was decided, the NAACP held a news conference
to announce an ambitious new agenda. To Thurgood Marshall, Brown was
the Magna Carta of black America, a declaration of our rights. School
segregation would be eliminated, he thought, within five years. He
was right about the former; he was obviously wrong about the latter.
Within a year, in Brown II, the Supreme Court allowed desegregation
to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” For the first time, the Court
had declared a right and delayed its implementation.
Three months after Brown II, Emmett Till, who was nearly my
age, was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman.
His death and the black newspapers that came into my Pennsylvania home
created a great vulnerability and fear of all things southern in my
teenaged mind. When my parents announced in 1957 that we were relocating
to Atlanta, I was filled with dread.
Emmett Till’s death had frightened me. But in the fall of 1957 a group
of black teenagers encouraged me to put that fear aside. These young
people – the nine young women and men who integrated Central High School
in Little Rock, Arkansas – set a high standard of grace and courage
under fire as they dared the mobs who surrounded their school.
Here, I thought, is what I hope I can be, if ever the chance comes
my way.
The chance to test and prove myself did come my way in 1960, as it
came to thousands of other black high school and college students across
the South. First through the sit-ins, then in Freedom Rides, and then
in the voter registration and political organizing drives in the rural
South, we joined an old movement against white supremacy that had deep,
strong roots; for many of us, however, it was the recent Brown decision
that had created the opportunity for young people to play active roles,
to seize and share leadership in the movement for social justice.
Brown was the movement’s greatest legal victory. It changed
the legal status of black Americans, and ironically made challenges
to the established movement’s narrow reliance on legal action possible.
As Richard Kluger has written:
And black and white. Brown was about black inequality, what
Lyndon Johnson called “the one huge wrong of the American nation.”
“The Supreme Court said nothing about Latinos until nineteen
years after Brown and there never was any significant
enforcement of desegregation for Latinos.” (See Orfield, Gary & Chungmei
Lee, “Brown at
50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?”)
Today, “U. S. schools are becoming more segregated in all regions
for both African-American and Latino students.” By contrast,
Asian students are the most integrated.
I not only have spent most of my life in the cause of integration,
in 1947 – when I was seven years old – I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit
in rural Pennsylvania against segregated schools.
It never came to trial. The school board had segregated schools by
giving students achievement tests which all blacks failed and all whites
passed, but when the two dumb sons of the local white political boss
failed the test, they closed the black school, and all of Lincoln University
Village’s children went to a one-room school together.
Last year I visited Berea College in Kentucky, opened by abolitionists as an
integrated school in 1855. It was closed by the Civil War, but opened
again in 1866 with 187 students – 96 blacks and 91 whites. It dared
to provide a rare commodity in the former slave states: an education
open to all - blacks and whites, women and men.
One of those early
students was my grandfather, James Bond.
Like many others,
I am the grandson of a slave. My grandfather was born in 1863, in
Kentucky; freedom didn’t come for him until the 13th Amendment
was ratified in 1865.
He and his mother
were property, like a horse or a chair. As a young girl, she had
been given away as a wedding present to a new bride, and when that
bride became pregnant, her husband – that’s my great-grandmother’s
owner and master – exercised his right to take his wife’s slave as
his mistress.
That union produced
two children, one of them my grandfather.
At age 15, barely
able to read and write, he hitched his tuition – a steer – to a rope
and walked across Kentucky to Berea College and the college took
him in.
My grandfather belonged to a transcendent
generation of black Americans, a generation born into slavery, a
generation freed from servitude by the Civil War, a generation determined
to make their way as free women and men. From Berea, he studied for
the ministry, married, and had six children – one of them my father,
Horace Mann Bond. My father graduated from Pennsylvania's Lincoln
University and earned a doctorate in education from the University
of Chicago. For him, too, education was a means to a larger end -
the uplift of his people and the salvation of his race.
How fitting, then, that he would be asked
to help the NAACP in its legal campaign against school segregation
- the campaign that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education.
When Brown was before the Supreme
Court, both its presenters and the Justices who heard it understood
clearly its historic potential. In an unusual, but not unheard of
procedure, the case – actually four cases combined, from Kansas,
South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware – was argued first in the
1952 term and reargued the next. A fifth case, from Washington, DC,
was argued separately.
Among other issues, the Court struggled
with the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, that portion of the
Constitution adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection
of the laws, as well as due process.
In the earliest cases defining the Fourteenth
Amendment, the Court had said:
From this hopeful beginning there emerged,
only a few years later, the disgraceful doctrine of “separate but
equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.
In “laboring with the doctrine for over
half a century” before Brown, the Supreme Court examined how “separate
but equal” applied in a number of contexts, including education.
But not until Brown was the continuing validity of the doctrine
squarely presented.
In scheduling Brown for re-argument,
the Court asked the lawyers to prepare written responses to five
questions, two of them dealing with the history of the Fourteenth
Amendment and public education. The lawyers turned to historians
and constitutional experts, including my father, for assistance.
While C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin
were studying post-Reconstruction policies regarding race relations
in the South and Alfred Kelley and Howard J. Graham were working
on the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, my father
was researching the intentions of the ratifying states with respect
to school segregation.
Some scholars, like Henry Steele Commager,
declined to help the NAACP in this work; they believed the facts
would not support the NAACP's position. My father knew, however,
that both the historical record and the political goals could be
pursued without sacrificing either. In the end, the Court regarded
the historical evidence as "inconclusive", a "draw",
which may have meant victory for the NAACP. It may have allowed the
Court to overcome Plessy's flat statement that Congress condoned
segregation. Free to look for guidance elsewhere, the Court was able
to speak for what one historian has called "the American conscience."
Perhaps, having done the right thing by
denouncing "separate but equal", the Court then felt free
to delay the implementation of what it had announced. Whatever the
reason, the phrase "with all deliberate speed" was added
to the lexicon of ignominious judicial pronouncements less than a
year after one of the most shameful judicial doctrines had been discarded.
The Court, a year after announcing its decision
on the merits, ordered the nation to make haste slowly in desegregating
the system of separate and unequal schools. The defendants were required,
in a masterpiece of ambiguity, "to admit to public schools on
a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the
parties in these cases. "
For the first ten years after Brown,
the emphasis was more on "deliberate" than on "speed." The
focus was on dismantling the dual school systems in the South, the
products of de jure segregation, and in southern accents, all deliberate
speed meant any conceivable delay. Actual integration was more a
legal fiction than fact. President Dwight Eisenhower had lobbied
Chief Justice Warren to rule for the Southern states and segregated
schools; he never endorsed the Brown decision, and the resistant
white South, emboldened by his rectitude, reacted with evasion and
delay. Their tactics included violence, expansion of private schools,
state support for fleeing white students, proposals to abolish public
education, repeal of compulsory attendance laws, and the long discarded
theories of interposition and nullification. Prince Edward County,
Virginia, simply closed its public schools for five years, believing
that uneducated children were preferable to integrated ones. Where
massive resistance failed, aggressive resistance succeeded.
By the end of 1964, ten years after Brown,
more than 97% of all Southern black children still attended segregated
schools. There was far too much deliberation and far too little speed.
When the ’64 Civil Rights Act was being
debated and finally became law, most in the civil rights community
concentrated on the public accommodations section of the Act – on
lunch counters and restaurants, and on provisions affecting employment
discrimination. Overlooked, for many, were provisions of the Act
dealing with education, and overlooked today is how important the
Act could have been in making Brown’s promise a reality.
When Congress was debating the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, in all of Alabama, only 29 black students attended formerly
white schools, only 9 in South Carolina, and none in Mississippi.
The four years following the passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represent the only period in the 50-year-history
of Brown when there was active support for desegregation from
both the executive branch and the courts.
For the first time, under a southern President,
Lyndon Johnson, the Federal government began to take an active role.
This period saw the percentage of black children in school with white
ones more than quadrupled, rising from 3 to 13%.
But still there were costs. Surrendering
to caution, the integration process became a one-way street as a
few black students and fewer black teachers and even fewer administrators
were admitted to formerly all-white schools. Thousands of black schoolteachers
lost their jobs as black and white schools merged. Lost too was history – revered
school names, mottoes, mascots, traditions. Plaques, trophy cases,
school colors – all the artifacts that honored black achievement
disappeared. Black students found themselves in formerly all-white
school buildings that retained the character and identity acquired
in the segregated past – Booker T. Washington High School vanished;
Robert E. Lee High School persevered.
In President Lyndon Johnson's last year
in office, the federal government reviewed 28 communities for compliance
with desegregation guidelines; in President Richard Nixon's first
year, the figure dropped to 16. By the second year it stood at 15;
the third year at 11; the fourth year at 9; the first year of his
second term at 1, and by the next year, the number dropped to none.
The years 1968-73, however, represent the
most active period of Supreme Court intervention on behalf of school
desegregation. The court that 13 years earlier had been content to
see desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed” ordered segregation
removed “root and branch” in 1968.To that end, it permitted busing
in 1971.
Johnson’s commitment to civil rights had
sustained enforcement efforts in the South in the face of widespread
white opposition. When Republicans captured the White House, the
process was politicized, and the principle sanction available to
enforce desegregation, cutting off federal funds, was renounced.
Within months of Nixon’s election, what
was then known as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare
(HEW) was under orders to end the threat of funding cut-offs as a
prod to integration; enforcement was transferred from HEW to the
Department of Justice, which under Attorney General John Mitchell,
argued in the Supreme Court for less desegregation, not more, establishing
a pattern adopted by the Ford, Reagan, and Bush Administrations.
Nixon’s HEW Secretary took the extraordinary
steps of writing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to say that
desegregation plans prepared by his own department’s experts form
Mississippi would cause “chaos, confusion, and catastrophic educational
setbacks.”
The Carter Administration attempted to revive
fund cutoff enforcement. Cut-off action was begun in Kansas City.
But the only limiting amendment adopted by Congress to the ’64 Civil
Rights Act was pushed by liberal Democrats Thomas Eagleton of Missouri
and Joseph Biden of Delaware, when schools in their home states faced
desegregation efforts.
The Reagan Administration launched an attack
on school desegregation. They invited school districts to reverse
existing desegregation orders and intervened in court cases even
where school boards had not requested it. They asked the Supreme
Court to authorize tax exemptions for private segregated schools.
They settled cases with remedies that had failed elsewhere. They
eliminated the major desegregation aid program.
What distinguished the Administrations of
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush was their attacks on virtually
all components affecting segregation and discrimination in American
education.
After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
the first President Bush, then a House member, told his fellow Texans, “The
new Civil Rights Act was passed to protect 14% of the people. I’m
worried about the other 86%.”
The percentage of black students at majority
white schools in the South went from zero in 1954 to a peak of 43.5
percent in 1988, proving there is nothing wrong with Brown’s premise.
It is Brown’s promise that has been broken – betrayed by
a failure of Presidential leadership, defeated by a lack of Congressional
oversight and action, ruined by a retreat by the federal bureaucracy
charged with enforcement, and crushed by a series of unfavorable
court rulings, ranging from the adverse to the hostile.
When William Rehnquist joined the Supreme
Court, courtesy of Richard Nixon, all major desegregation cases since Brown had
been unanimous. Rehnquist, as a clerk to Justice Jackson during the Brown case,
had written a memo arguing that the Court should uphold Plessy
v. Ferguson. Then he lied about it at his confirmation hearing.
As a Justice himself, Rehnquist cast the first dissenting vote in
a post-Brown desegregation case in 1973, setting the stage
for what would become a new anti-desegregation majority in the 1990s
after he became Chief Justice.
So today we have a Chief Justice who has
consistently opposed school desegregation and an Attorney General
who built his political career on attacking the efforts of the federal
courts to desegregate St. Louis and Kansas City schools. As Missouri’s
Attorney General and then Governor, John Ashcroft continually attacked
the federal courts managing school integration in his state and,
when the courts found the state to be “the primary constitutional
violator,” he fought to limit the state’s contribution to the remedy
the court imposed.
It is hardly a surprise, then, that when the current state
of school integration is examined, discouraging results abound.
If the years since Brown have not
succeeded in dismantling segregated schools, those years have seen
American preferences for segregated education shrink. That constitutes
modest achievement for black Americans. For us and other minorities,
separate has never been equal, not then, not now.
America’s history tells us that has always
been true.
There are few matters on which experts in
any given field agree. Educational experts, however, agree that no
school district in America has managed to create equal education
on a large scale in segregated schools, be they black or Hispanic
schools. This is not to say that one-race schools are never successful.
A few are – particularly on the elementary level. But the bottom
line is that students who attend schools that are segregated by race
and income consistently rank lower in educational achievement, especially
at the secondary school level. In short, the United States can't
afford separate schools.
The educational damage done by racial segregation
does not grow from the relationship between blacks and whites alone;
it grows from the relationship between blacks and whites and green.
In America, the education dollar follows the white child. The students
who are most likely to find themselves in schools of concentrated
poverty today are not white; they are black and Latino.
Compared with poor whites, poor blacks are
more likely to live in neighborhoods where a high percentage of the
residents are poor. They interact mainly with others who are poor,
who share their disadvantage. They live, squeezed together, in less
than standard housing, in neighborhoods denuded of essential services.
They shop at stores owned by merchants geared to do business with
a poor clientele. Their neighborhoods are economically and racially
segregated, bereft of opportunity, out of sight and out of mind.
Their children attend schools only with
other poor, minority children. As the New Jersey Supreme Court said, “They
face, through no fault of their own, a life of poverty and isolation
that most of us cannot begin to understand and appreciate.” Fewer
dollars in the parents' pockets mean fewer dollars in the school
board's treasury. Children in high poverty schools read less, get
lower grades, and miss more days of school.
Economic and racial integration are preconditions
for equal opportunity. Once achieved, they permanently alter the
pattern of minority-majority relationships.
In cities where school integration exists,
it is not only the most visible form of desegregation, but the only
one that impacts personally on the lives of millions of whites. This
is why whites have so strongly resisted it; it is also why blacks
and other minorities must continue to insist upon it.
I recently heard Minnie Jean Brown reflect
on her experiences as one of the heroic Little Rock Nine who integrated
Central High School in 1957. Someone asked why she kept coming back
to school day after day, despite daily harassment and intimidation
that would have driven most people away.
From the ferocity of her enemies, she said, “I
knew there was something precious inside that school,” and she was
more determined to get it than they were to keep it from her grasp.
There are those who scoff at Brown as
if the advantages to black children were to be gained simply by sitting
next to white ones in a classroom, as if a skin-to-skin transfer
of knowledge and education could occur. These critics miss the point
of integrated schools.
They are, as one expert said, "truly
radical.” A public educational system that is fully integrated and
treats minorities and whites equally, is the antithesis of the larger
society, which is profoundly segregated and unequal. The goal of
putting minorities and whites in the same classrooms is not only
to equalize education, but also to change the formative racial experiences
of the next generation.
Today minority children face inequalities
in school spending, and more – they face what Jonathan
Kozol calls “punitive testing and accountability agendas” imposed
by the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools have adopted
a “grill and drill
curriculum” that substitutes learning by rote and teaching
to the test for the transmission of critical thinking
from teacher to pupil.
Our schools present two faces to American
society. In one, they are our most important democratic institution,
pathways to class mobility and generational progress, and their success
or failure impacts the lives and prospects of millions of families
and children every day.
The other face is an instrument for reproducing
the class and race privilege of the larger society, reinforcing the
very inequality they are designed to overcome.
On our present course, we are formalizing
two school systems: one filled with middle class children, most of
them white, and one filled with low-income minorities. For too many,
the latter schools have become a conveyor belt to prison.
Our future as a nation depends on our willingness
to continue to reach into the racial cleavage that define American
society and change the racial contours of our world.
In 1954, the Federal government’s brief
in Brown argued that school desegregation was a Cold War imperative,
a necessary weapon to win America’s battles overseas. Current events
give us the same imperative – to prove to enemy and ally alike that
our commitment to justice is sincere.
What, then, is to be done? Do we continue
to slide backward toward Plessy and segregation, or can we
make Brown’s promise at last come true? The brave Americans
who fought and won Brown fifty years ago faced obstacles we
cannot imagine and had few resources and little public support with
which to do the job. We can do no less.
This fall, we have the opportunity to elect
a pro-Brown president and Congress that will appoint judges
and enforcement officials who understand the Supreme Court was right
then and that the job is far from over.
We can revive the federal aid program of
the Nixon and Carter Administrations that helped multiracial schools
deal positively with issues of race relations, multicultural curricula,
and more effective classroom operation.
We can recruit young people, especially
young people of color, into the education profession, and insure
they receive full and fair employment opportunities from all school
districts, not just minority schools.
We can mount a real fight against housing
segregation, and insure minority parents and their children have
access to middle class schools. We can use choice programs – magnet
and charter schools – if they are enacted in a strict pro-integration
mode, forbidding transfers that increase segregation and rewarding
those that diminish it.
We can amend the No Child Left Behind Act
and provide financial incentives and positive recognition to segregated
suburbs that accept significant numbers of minority students from
failing schools.
When my grandfather graduated from Berea,
he was asked to deliver the commencement address. He said then: