Looking back at 'Brown.' (school desegregation)(Class Notes) (Column)

On May 16, 1954, 1 made my First Communion at a church in downtown Washington, D.C. It seemed like a very big event at the time. The next day, a few blocks away, the Supreme Court announced its ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case, overturning the "separate but equal" mystification that had codified racial segregation since 1896. These two events - one that filled my life with solemnity and anxiety for months, and the other which I only dimly understood - somehow merged in my child's perspective.

I had successfully mastered the fine distinctions of catechistic instruction and the choreography of filing, genuflecting, kneeling, sitting, and rising in unison - all with only a couple of unexpected raps to the knuckles and the back of the head from Sister Anna Maria's feared clicker. Sacramental dry runs and dress rehearsals finally culminated in the actual First Penance and Holy Eucharist. And then my parents and I could walk comfortably into Washington theaters and restaurants that before had been inhospitable.

Of course, the Brown decision did not outlaw petty apartheid in the District of Columbia or anywhere else - but it created enough of a stir in the adult environment, apparently, to prompt the lifting of some forms of de-facto segregation, and to penetrate the consciousness of a very preoccupied seven-year-old.

Brown's immediate impact was mainly symbolic. It signified a victory in and of principle, and it fueled a sense of possibility. The decision energized and emboldened black Americans, conferring on them a sense of equal membership in the polity.

The ruling's fortieth anniversary this year has momentarily focused public attention on Brown again and on its significance in American life. Now, just as dangerous forces are gathering from across the ideological spectrum to support resegregation, it seems a good time to consider the meaning of the Brown decision and its effects on the larger social order.

Perhaps most significantly, Brown boosted (though it certainly also was influenced by) a rising tide of post-World War II black activism challenging segregation. A year and a half after Brown, the Montgomery bus boycott signaled a sweeping wave of aggressive political action that continued through the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights legislation.

On the other hand, the Brown decision served to obscure the true nature of racial segregation in America. In the popular view, Brown emphasized the harmful psychological effects on black children of separate schools, and defined segregation mainly in terms of attitudes and individual prejudice and discrimination. But racial segregation was a social system, codified and impersonalized by law. Outside the South, it was an ensemble of local ordinances and rules whose purpose was to cordon off and dislocate black Americans not just from physical contact with whites, but also from equal access to the fruits of citizenship. Separate schools, publicly enforced ghettoization, and racially gerrymandered electoral districts not only rested on notions of black inferiority; they were devices for denying blacks an equal claim on public resources and a means of redress.

The South, Jim Crow's natural home, was a regime of white supremacy. After Reconstruction, alliances of Redeemers and New South progressives rewrote one Southern state constitution after another to establish public life on an explicitly white-supremacist basis, and to define race as the elemental foundation of citizenship and social status.

Virtually every Southern state passed laws specifying the fractions of "black blood" that marked the boundaries of whiteness. (Louisiana - where much of the white population's claim to that exalted status could not bear careful scrutiny - was the exception, until 1970 when it adopted the same retrograde standard used in the Old South.)

Nor was this simply a naive or irrational fixation on racial classification. Being recognized as white was a precondition for everything from being able to sit on a streetcar or try on a hat to being able to escape debt peonage, hold a supervisory job, vote, or expect due process under the law.

In that context, appeals to "interracial cooperation," recognition of common humanity, overcoming bigotry and intolerance, and other efforts to treat racial oppression as the summary result of individual ignorance or character flaws don't just miss the point. They function perniciously to deflect attention away from public institutions. The history of Southern racial liberalism in this century - down to the Confederate Twins currently in the White House driven by precisely such saccharine quietism.

Race - or, more exactly, white supremacy - was a fundamental principle of social organization, a sine qua non of political, economic, and cultural life, enforced by state power.

Racial discrimination and enforced inequality have existed in varying degrees throughout the United States. Nowhere, of course, since Emancipation has official racism been so explicitly the foundation of public policy as in the Jim Crow South. Yet it is important to recall that the Jim Crow system could not have existed without the endorsement and direct support of the Federal Government.

This pattern of Federal collusion reached the height of irony when it was woven into the democratic rhetoric justifying the New Deal and World War 11. My father and his Army buddies have never stopped marveling at the hypocrisy that exhorted them to fight the racist Nazis in a segregated U.S. Army. Small wonder that my generation produced the slogan No Viet Cong ever called me |nigger.'

No less than Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow system rested on state terror. the system required forcible disfranchisement of black citizens. In Louisiana, for example, more than 100,000 blacks voted in the 1896 election. In 1904, fewer than 1,000 cast ballots. The system relied on official police power and paramilitary entities like the Ku Klux Klan. In that environment, distinctions between vigilante bands and government, between lynch law and trial by jury, are empty scholasticism.

Unlike Nazi Germany, though, Southern segregation was not monolithic. The vagaries of the Federal system allowed for variation, and the terms of racial etiquette differed from place to place. In some cities, blacks were barred from department stores. In others, the races could commingle. In some establishments, black shoppers could try on hats but not shoes. In others, the reverse rule might apply. In pre-boycott Montgomery, blacks entered the front of the bus, paid the driver, got off the bus, and re-entered at the rear. In New Orleans, blacks entered at the front, paid, then sat behind a For Colored Patrons Only sign. Unlike some cities, in New Orleans, the signs marking the black section could be moved back and forth.

I recall this variation vividly, from the point of view of a protected and therefore curious child. Going on pilgrimages to New Orleans first from New York, where there was no conspicuous Jim Crow, and then from Washington, which was a sort of intermediate zone, was baffling and fascinating. I remember my grandmother answering my questions on a ferry by explaining assertively that crazy people had to sit on the other side of the chicken wire. I recall her also berating and shaming a white zoo employee who insisted that the pony ride was off limits to my cousin and me. My grandmother's boldness is a bedrock trait of her character. But it also marks the latitude peculiarly available in a big, open city. It would have been a different story in Sunflower County, Mississippi - or in her native Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana.

This variation in the enforcement of white supremacy, despite what it might seem to imply about the regime's porousness, actually made life for black people all the more anxious and unpredictable. Going to an unfamiliar locale was fraught with danger, since all blacks were presumed to know the prevailing racial etiquette in complete detail, and ignorance was no excuse.

At the same time, the terror required to create and maintain the Jim Crow social order underscores its historical contingency. As a coherent social system, it persisted for only two-thirds of a century or so, depending on location. All of my grandparents were alive and cognizant before the complete erection of the wall of segregation. It was mainly demomolished before I could vote.

Black Americans and their allies forestalled Jim Crow for at least two decades after the end of Reconstruction. They challenged it in various ways for its entire duration.

After World War II, those efforts began to resonate with the concerns of elites anxious about America's international image as the Cold War developed. (University of Iowa professor Mary Dudziak has provided the definitive account of this phenomenon in Cold War Civil Rights.) The fact of the Nazi experience made America's official racism finally embarrassing to liberal sensibilities. The Brown decision is in part the product of that climate.

There are four more general points to be made in reflecting on Brown.

[paragraph] Government action is not only shaped by broader social forces; it also guides and shapes them. There is no effective politics - for black citizens or anyone else - that does not take account of and contest for the direction of the state.

[paragraph] Racial subordination is not a constant feature of American life. It has changed in response to pressures from above and below. We might only wonder, for instance, how different this society would be now - indeed, how different the very idea of race would be - if the Hayes-Tilden Compromise had not been struck, if the 1875 Civil Rights Act had not been struck down, or if Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissenting view had prevailed in Plessy v. Ferguson.

[paragraph] It is especially important now to remember that racial segregation was first and foremost a system of state-sponsored racial oppression. Despite contemporary nostalgia, there was no Golden Age of organic black community under Jim Crow. Black Americans did not choose segregation any more than Polish Jews chose to be herded into the Warsaw ghetto. Nor did they experience any greater autonomy in community life.

[paragraph] It is significant that the Plessy decision legitimizing segregation was handed down one year after Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech that proclaimed black acquiescence to Jim Crow. Now, as underclass rhetoric sweeps over public discourse, justifying one night-marish social policy after another, and candidates for Booker T. Washington's role are popping up in Chicago, Cambridge, and elsewhere, we should take heed. We've lived the tragedy, and that should help us avoid an even deadlier farce.