The Brown decision: its long anticipation and lasting influence.

THOUGH IT WAS LONG IN COMING AND SURPRISINGLY FAR-REACHING IN ITS influence, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision was not unanticipated. In the decades following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), African Americans and their white allies slowly pushed toward the day when that ruling would be overturned. Most African American people understood that the Plessy case, which legalized "separate but equal" facilities and cleared the way for other Jim Crow restrictions, would eventually be ruled unconstitutional. They believed in and understood this hopeful outlook just as so many African Americans in the antebellum era had believed and understood that America would in time have to dismantle its system of racially based chattel slavery. In 1896, only about thirty years following slavery's demise, African Americans were still very much in a struggle to be "free" indeed--free in establishing economic independence, free in political participation, and free in setting and choosing their social circumstances. The Plessy decision further limited their lives and served to remind them that their actions could be circumscribed by the will and whims of white Americans. Despite the daunting limitations, African Americans held on to the hope that Plessy, like slavery, would be removed sometime in America's future.

Within the boundaries of segregation, black Americans created strong institutions that would one day help them in their battle against unjust oppression. During the early twentieth century, they built organizations, staged campaigns, and protested in individual circumstances. Blacks also cultivated alliances with those white Americans who believed that segregation was wrong and that the laws operated unjustly toward a group of people who deserved equality and who had belatedly been protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (the so-called Reconstruction Amendments). Looking to the day when the effects of Plessy would be dismantled, African Americans established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and 1910. Its leaders included descendants of white abolitionists and, in the person of W. E. B. Du Bois, a key proponent of an equal and just society. In 1911 activists set up the National Urban League, whose founders also included both black and white Americans seeking economic equality for blacks who had relocated to urban areas. In this dark time of their history, African Americans continued to build on to educational institutions that today we refer to as historically black colleges and universities. Black leaders understood that educated people were a must in the struggle to create a more equal situation for African Americans. Moreover, they recognized that if life circumstances improved for black people, the entire nation would benefit. Thus, blacks reminded all Americans of their interdependence.

With a reputable list of organizations--including some specifically led by women like Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women (which still operates in the twenty-first century)--African Americans continued to mount a tremendous force against Plessy, its legalization of Jim Crow laws, and all the practices and traditions surrounding segregation. Academic work by black scholars contributed to the growing movement in crucial ways. A telling moment that helped black people to appreciate the long-lasting impact of the Plessy decision came with the publication of studies showing that black children would choose white dolls over black ones, an indication that segregation was causing black children to dislike their own image. Some argued that black children, through segregation and discrimination, had even come to hate themselves by internalizing the hatred that many whites felt toward black people in general. The studies about dolls by Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark played a significant role in convincing the members of the Supreme Court that segregation no longer had a place in American society, not even in the American South.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, handed down a ruling that would begin to dismantle the Plessy decision of over fifty years earlier. The Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka by a unanimous vote and declared that "separate but equal" educational facilities were "inherently unequal" and that segregation in public schools was therefore unconstitutional. Though the decision addressed only one aspect of the discrimination against black people, education, Brown would prove to have a strong psychological impact on African Americans. For a people and their allies who had spent more than fifty years working to dismantle Plessy, the Brown decision meant that for the first time since 1896 white people--at least all those who supported Jim Crow laws--were placed on the defensive. The law at last stood on the side of Americans who wanted to see black children attend schools of their choice rather than the often ill-equipped facilities previously set aside for black children. Of course, poorly funded segregated school systems left many black children ill prepared to compete in American society for jobs, gain further education, or reach a more equal footing with white Americans in other measurements of quality of life. Brown marked the beginning of a larger struggle to overcome the ongoing effects of Jim Crow.

Because of Brown, African Americans grew more willing, even eager, to take greater risks to challenge other aspects of discrimination in American society; Brown prepared their minds to expect an end to general discrimination sooner rather than later. For example, Brown gave a boost to participants in the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955 and 1956. Prompted by Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat to a white man in the section of the Montgomery bus reserved for blacks, the boycott came only a little over a year after the Brown decision. One victory seemed to beget another when the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that segregated busing in Montgomery was unconstitutional.

The move toward desegregation faced strong opposition from some whites. Ironically the Supreme Court rulings prompted opponents of desegregation to organize and rally their forces in ways similar to the tactics used by African Americans during the previous half century. In the earlier years, with the law clearly on the side of segregationists, whites who supported Jim Crow laws had no urgent need to build organizations to maintain the status quo. They relied on segregation ordinances to keep black people "in their place," with the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and 1920s available to use extralegal force when necessary. After the Brown decision, whites hurriedly organized groups such as the White Citizens' Councils (which originated in Indianola, Mississippi, in July 1954). Within a short period of time, the membership of the various independent state Citizens' Councils reached an estimated total of more than two hundred thousand, and the groups made various proposals intended to protect segregation as it existed prior to 1954.

Having fought segregation and discrimination for much of the nation's history, African Americans faced these dreaded obstacles with new vigor after 1954. In direct response to the Brown decision, Daisy Bates and nine African American students set out to follow the mandate of the Court by desegregating Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Little Rock closed its schools the following year, but when they reopened in the fall of 1959, victorious African Americans were enrolled. In the process, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to keep the peace and protect the children. The dramatic two-year episode illustrated to Americans and the world that people of African descent in the United States interpreted "with all deliberate speed" (the pace of school integration dictated by the Court) to mean that blacks would have to continue to work actively throughout the country to destroy the evils of segregation and discrimination wherever they could be found.

Continuing to take the initiative, black people in America witnessed several other high-water marks in this battle against racial hatred. The list is quite long and came at a heavy price to black and white Americans. It includes the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker, the sit-ins begun in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the rise of other leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely Carmichael, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is hard to imagine any of these events had not Brown paved the way by strengthening the hope--and determination--for change. Contributing to all of the positive changes was the general sense of accomplishment felt by the many black and white citizens who believed firmly in equality for all Americans even as both blacks and whites were beaten, shot, and sometimes killed for holding on to that conviction. Many people sacrificed their lives along the way. We may never know, for example, the number of murdered black boys and men thrown into the Mississippi River alone. We do know of the infamous case of Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi in 1955.

Brown pushed open wider the door that had been cracked by the work of numerous black and white citizens during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those pioneering struggles took on greater meaning in the historical context of Brown. With Brown, supporters of desegregation and the dismantling of discrimination came fully to appreciate that if the law had been used to institute an unjust society, the law could and should be used to rectify that wrong.

Beyond its legal ramifications, the Brown decision also opened wider another door in American life: many white students began to appreciate the rich cultural heritage of their African American peers. The black youth of the 1950s had come out of a musical setting that included the Negro spirituals, blues, gospel, jazz, and big bands and that had been heavily influenced by great musicians who happened to have been African American. Of course, not all white youth appreciated this heritage because sometimes parents and other elders had taught them to shun black people and all that related to them. Part of whites' anxiety grew out of the fear that their children would perhaps grow to like African Americans to the extent of mixing with them socially and even marrying them at some point. Certainly, music became a social phenomenon enjoyed by young people without regard to racial boundaries, and it cleared the way for other forms of racial understanding.

As the world perspective of blacks and whites became more similar, partly due to Brown and its mandate for desegregation, white youth in the decade of the 1950s began to greatly enjoy music produced by African American singers and musicians. In the midst of Brown in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-1956, and the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957-1959, the American Bandstand television program came to life in Philadelphia in 1952 and was hosted by Dick Clark on a national network beginning in August 1957. Clark was aware that much of the music being featured was by black recording artists, and he insisted that the show be racially integrated. Thus American Bandstand presented America each week with visual images of black and white teenagers dancing together (socially mixed, as some people of that time would have put it) and demonstrated that such racial interaction would not destroy America. The youth loved the show and did not mind the integration of races. Add to this the fact that by the late 1950s most Americans owned a television (even when they might not have owned a refrigerator), and one can appreciate the vivid contrast between portrayals of white southerners violently attacking black students who wanted to integrate a Woolworth lunch counter and the images of white and black youth enjoying themselves while dancing and listening to the sounds of a singer like Jackie Wilson.

Cultural interaction continued to grow as the civil rights movement escalated toward greater victories for African Americans and thus all Americans. On the heels of the great success of American Bandstand came the beginning of Motown Records in Detroit under the leadership of Berry Gordy Jr. White youth grew to love Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson, the Marvelettes, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. The cultural appreciation increased with the subsequent popularity of groups like the Four Tops, the Temptations, and Diana Ross and the Supremes. Shared enjoyment of popular music has only continued to expand within the last thirty years, so much so that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the loud rap music coming from the car of an African American youth from the sounds enjoyed by young adults of any other ethnic background.

One of the lasting impacts of Brown, then, has been the opening up of cultural appreciation among all ethnic groups. But the cultural effects reached beyond popular entertainment by inspiring other American minorities to push for greater recognition of their rights. The Brown decision became a huge psychological boost for African Americans, who continued on the path of doing everything possible to eliminate racial separation and discrimination. Black people achieved many successful results despite the odds and violence against them and their struggle. Other ethnic groups then took notice of the civil rights movement; thereby, it provided encouragement for movements by Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and women to gain equality.

The Brown decision ultimately helps us to see that history links all Americans. Coming in 1954, the Court's ruling declared to America the same message that this country had broadcast to the world during World War II, that democratic principles can and must make things fight for everyone. In the global context, the Brown decision may seem extremely minute, but it did not come in a vacuum. It occurred in the context of a long struggle by African Americans for racial equality in America, and the decision itself helped to take the struggle to a higher level with greater participation. Coming while the United States was in the throes of the Cold War, the Brown decision and so many other episodes of the civil rights movement attracted international attention. On the one hand, segregation and racial violence clearly embarrassed a country that had fought to make the world safe for democracy. The rest of the world wondered whether America would practice at home what it preached abroad. On the other hand, there was the one fear weighing down the hearts and minds of so many white southerners--the worry that their children would have to be physically near black youth. White fears became reality with the gradual court-ordered desegregation of public schools (a process not even begun in some states until the 1960s), the popularity of American Bandstand and similar programs on television, and the widespread appreciation of black music by white teenagers. Within this political and cultural environment, the Brown decision had tremendous consequences. Unlike the Plessy case of 1896, Brown did not seek to close doors or separate people one from the other. It sought instead to open doors and spread opportunities; it has had a positive and long-lasting impact on American society and for people in other parts of the world. Nonetheless, Americans must not take for granted the desegregation that Brown facilitated; a recent study by researchers at Harvard University cautions that by some measures American schools are more segregated in the twenty-first century than they were prior to 1970. (1)

(1) Erica Frankenburg, Chungmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, "A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?" pp. 30-31, Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, January 2003, http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/reseg03/ AreWeLosingtheDream.pdf (accessed January 27, 2004).

MS. REED is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston.