Defending quality public education for all.

In January, Elaine R. Jones announced that effective May 1 she is stepping down as President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., after 32 distinguished years as an attorney with the LDF. Under the leadership of her legendary predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, the LDF developed the legal strategy for Brown v. Board of Education and successfully argued the case. BIBR asked Tavis Smiley to interview Jones about her perspective on this landmark decision since its 50th anniversary is being celebrated the month she wraps up her own critical LDF work. Their discussion focused on what yet remains to be done to guarantee quality public education for all American children. Jones is being succeeded at LDF's helm by Associate Director-Counsel Theodore M. Shaw, who wrote the Foreword for The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v. Board of Education, the Black Issues book excerpted on page 14.

Tavis Smiley: What are your thoughts about this seminal case, Brown v. Board of Education, 50 years later?

Elaine R. Jones: The first thing Brown did was to weaken the underpinning of the 1896 ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, which established legal and sanctioned segregation of the races. Brown was the catalytic force that helped us gel rid of American apartheid, or legally enforced racial separation. The second thing Brown tried to do was to get black people equal educational opportunity at the elementary and secondary school level. That has failed. It has not happened because the court turned its back on the issue. When Brown was decided ha 1954, the court tried to push for quality education for black students for the next 18 years. The court got tired. Starting from 1973 up to the present--the past 30 years not only has the court turned its back, but the court has handed down a series of decisions that has undercut the progress of Brown.

TS: What do you see as the unfinished agenda of Brown?

ERJ: We do not have quality public education for our kids. And it's a much more important question today. It was important then, but it's critical now. We're looking out for the future of having a 47 percent population of people of color, 40 years from now. At the time of Brown, it was only 10 percent. In a democracy, if quality public education was a must then, look where we are now. We don't have another 50 years to dawdle around and not get it right.

TS: There are others in this country who feel just as adamantly that integration was the worst thing that ever happened to black folk, especially when you talk about education. Because now you don't have black schools and enough black teachers committed to the achievement of black students. But you argue?

ERJ: You really have to understand that we have separate and unequal Plessy v. Ferguson mandated separate and equal. The reality was the potbelly stove in a tar shack or one-room schoolhouse with no heat, no books, nothing. Or ragged, outdated hand-me-down books from the white schools. That was the reality, especially throughout the South. The five individual cases that combined to be come Brown began as equalization cases. They were thing to get some school buses that would run. They were trying to get some textbooks, and they were trying to keep the rain from falling into the school building. As the case proceeded, there was a big debate--whether we should try to get rid of the doctrine of Plessy about separate facilities, or should we go after equalization (that is, make them live up to the equal in "separate but equal")--or should we do both?

TS: For the last 30 years, you have been working on these kinds of issues. What have your goals been relative to Brown during your tenure?

ERJ: Number One is getting the courts to stay with the notion that it takes resources to have quality education, and that an integrated environment for our kids is also an advantage in terms of access to resources. What has happened is that the courts more and more haven't wanted to give inner-city African American kids, rural African American kids, and Hispanic kids the resources to upgrade the quality of education. We've been fighting it. Our big issue has been how are schools are funded from our property taxes.

A case filed in the Supreme Court said it's uncoustitutional to fund school districts on the basis of property tax because those with the lower tax base aren't going to have any resources for schools. The Supreme Court ruled against it, 5 to 4, back in 1973. Now that's not to say that you don't have some school districts that work; that you don't have some resources going into some black and brown school districts. But they are the exception, not the rule.

TS: Now, based upon that logic--or illogic as he sees it--Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., has suggested that what we need to solve the issue that Brown attempted to address is a constitutional amendment that would guarantee every child in this country access to an equal, high quality education. If not Jesse Jackson Jr's suggestion, what would ultimately finish the agenda of Brown?

ERJ: Listen, Jesse is onto something. What Jesse is talking about needs to be researched and looked at, but should not be taken lightly, because there is no federal obligation to give all of our children a public, quality education. Vouchers won't do it. You give a child $1,200, and his education is $7,000. Where are you supposed to get the other $5,000? The suburbs aren't going to take these inner-city kids unless they want to take them. And they don't want to take them. Eighty four percent of our kids are being educated in the public schools. We have to go back to basics and we have to decide: Is it in our national interest? Do we believe in quality education for all our children? That's Number One.

Two: If so, do we believe in the public education system? Do we believe that in this democracy, in 2004, we should have public education? I don't know what the answer to that is. Too many think access to private schools and other schools and private funding will take care of it. In the next 40 years, with 47 percent of our population becoming black and brown, it's in our interest to find a way of not just educating my child, or educating the white child out in the suburbs, but we had best find a way to educate all our kids if the U.S. wants to stay competitive as a country.

TS: Let me ask you whether or not you agree with your late friend, Judge A. Leon Higginbothom, who said that Brown, with all of its flaws, stands as the most important governmental act of any kind since the Emancipation Proclamation.

ERJ: Yes, Brown had the catalytic impact of telling the world and enshrining into law that the races are equal. It also had an international impact. After World War II, with our soldiers coming back, Russia and China and all those countries were looking at the United States closely. Our equality under the law, although it was written into the Constitution in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments, it did not become actualized until Brown. Brown was our opening salvo, dismantling American style apartheid.