The effects of Brown: personal and historical reflections on American racial atavism.

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN WITH A PERSONAL STORY. I WAS BORN IN 1941 IN Houston, Texas, but shortly after my birth my mother and I left the state to join my father in Oakland, California. Before I was born my father had come to California in search of employment. Our family was part of the World War II migration of black people out of the Southwest to California to work in the war industries. After living in Oakland and Alameda, we moved in 1945-46 to Berkeley, where I began my primary education. In 1946 I was enrolled in Columbus Elementary School in West Berkeley. At Columbus I was introduced to integrated education. The school's student body was Asian American (Chinese and Japanese), black, Caucasian, and Mexican American. Here I began my lifelong commitment to what later came to be called integrated education.

At Columbus I learned in an environment that made clear that no racial or ethnic group had a monopoly on intelligence, since in my classes there was a wide range of intellectual abilities that cut across racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Sadly this educational idyll came to an end in 1949 when my mother died, and I was sent to live with my grandmother in Sugar Land, Texas, then a small town southwest of Houston. This was a traumatic event because I had never attended a segregated school or lived in a town where the public sphere was de jure segregated. These new social contexts required a great deal of adjustment.

What I recall of the school in Sugar Land was that the first, second, and third grades all occupied the same room. The books were discards from the white schools and, in some instances, had both covers and pages missing. All of the students were required to purchase notebooks, pencils, and other educational materials. This was a new experience for me because in California the state provided paper, pencils, and all of the other educational equipment students needed. In Sugar Land the teaching in the school was poor. The teachers were not very well prepared, and the instructional environment was not conducive to learning. I think the poor attitude in the classroom reflected an awareness on the part of a number of my peers that education was not going to improve their socioeconomic position. Other than the teachers in the school and the minister of the Baptist church, Sugar Land did not have a black middle or professional class in the late 1940s. I do not recall ever meeting a black lawyer or doctor during my one-year stay in the town. There were no professional role models for black children to emulate, no libraries where they could go after school to read, no trips to museums or to the opera or symphony, and no public discourse of ideas. Besides the teachers and minister, the other two people in the black section of the town who satisfied the economic criteria for middle-class status in Sugar Land were the two older black women who ran the honky-tonks/brothels in the "quarters." In short, intellectual stimulation in Sugar Land was non-existent. W. E. B. Du Bois aptly described towns like Sugar Land as places of "enforced ignorance." (1)

Had I remained in Sugar Land I would, like my male peers, have gone to work in the Imperial Sugar Refinery, become a hustler, or joined the military. Because the town had a state prison farm, the omnipresence of black male prisoners was inescapable, and incarceration seemed to be the main occupation of most black men. The career prospects for black women were also bleak. Other than as schoolteachers, it was rare to see black women professionals. A combination of poor segregated education, misogyny, and a black cultural tradition hostile to black female achievement limited black women's occupational prospects. They became either housewives, domestics, or a combination of both. Fortunately, unlike my male and female peers, I had other options when I returned to California in 1950. I was enrolled once again in Columbus Elementary School, and I went on to complete my primary and secondary education in the Berkeley public schools. I then attended California State University, San Francisco, and received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. I will always remember my year in Texas because it was there that I developed an interest in history. In Sugar Land I read the Old Testament and a history of the state of Texas. This was also where I developed my interest in the history of race and comparative racial formation.

I wanted to know why black people were treated so badly. Like Richard Wright I asked my grandmother and other relatives why Negroes were segregated. All of the older people were addressed by their first names, and younger blacks were called boys or girls. I never heard a black adult addressed as Mr., Mrs., Sir, or Madame. Even more perplexing was the inability of older Negroes to explain the history of segregation. They could never detail the origins and history of segregation. That some white people were prejudiced and life was not fair for blacks were the only answers you could get out of adults. In retrospect segregation was treated as if it were somehow normal or naturalized. My older relatives did not like the way they were treated in Texas but seemed to have no expectation that the situation would change. My parents' answer to segregation had been to migrate west in search of a better life and opportunities. But Texas had a strong hold on my father. When tipsy he would say, "Negroes were treated better there than any other place in the states." I do not know if this was an older black man coming to terms with his past or a yearning for the mother, brothers, and sisters he had left behind. What I do know is that my brother James and I had a different perception of life in Texas; in brief, we hated it.

I came away from this experience understanding that black was somehow marked as un-American in Texas and by extension the South in general. When we sang, for example, "My Country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty" in grade school, I often wondered if this lyric included black people. As a child and teenager, I did not have the proper analytical tools to understand second-class citizenship and its origin, structural meaning, and place in American history. I acquired this knowledge in college and graduate school where I came to understand what the late J. Saunders Redding meant in 1951 with his book title On Being Negro In America. (2) It was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott, and Little Rock that crystallized my historical understanding of racial oppression in the United States.

The Brown decision, like the Emancipation Proclamation, was a portentous legal document because it set in motion a broader social process that would undermine the edifice of white supremacy in America. Although most American historians teach the Brown case as though it were sui generis, it was not. The challenge mounted by thirteen black families in Kansas was preceded in the twentieth century by three other cases attacking segregation in public schools. These assaults on segregated learning were brought by Chinese American and Mexican American parents. The first case, Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), was initiated in Mississippi by the father of Martha Lum who wanted his daughter to attend a white rather than a black school. The Lums argued unsuccessfully that it was unfair to require their child, being of Chinese descent, to attend a black school. Lum was more than a desegregation case; it was also an effort at racial repositioning. Because they were not black, the Chinese Americans resented having to educate their children with black children. The law of American citizenship after 1870 recognized only two categories of citizenship, black and white, and anyone who did not fit into the category Caucasian was black. The cases involving Mexican American children came before the courts in 1931 and 1946. Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District was brought by parents living east of San Diego in 1931. They challenged the placement of their children into a separate school. Legally people of Hispanic heritage were Caucasians in the United States, but many local school districts in the West and Southwest segregated Mexican American children officially on the grounds of hygiene but unofficially on the grounds of race. They were also segregated, like black children, because white people thought Hispanic children would not benefit from a liberal arts education. For white Californians higher learning was a prerogative of whiteness. Mexican Americans won the Alvarez case, though it only affected the local schools. They also enjoyed a similar success in 1946 in the Mendez v. Westminister School District decision that overruled segregated education in California. (3) The Lum, Lemon Grove, and Alvarez cases indicate how complicated the issue of race had become since the Plessy decision in 1896. The United States was no longer a nation in which black and white were the sole racial signifiers of nationality. Having fought a war to defeat fascism, the American republic now had to confront its own racial malformities and injustices. American white supremacy was not dead, but it now would face a challenge, like slavery, that was both national and international. Brown was part of a worldwide rethinking about race, and when viewed from this perspective, it cannot be seen as an exercise in American exceptionalism.

Brown constituted a shift from the traditional position of the Supreme Court on racial matters. After the 1883 repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Court's stance had been that the judiciary, laws, and courts could not change the racist cultural practice of the United States. American law was constructed to protect white people. White was not a biological category, as Caucasians in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century assumed, but a legal category created and sustained by discriminatory laws and extralegal violence. Novelist Charles W. Chesnutt understood this in 1889 when he wrote his powerful essay "What Is a White Man?" In this wonderful piece, Chesnutt detailed the central role the law has played in the construction of whiteness and white privilege in the United States. (4)

Brown nullified a tradition of jurisprudence that protected whiteness by sanctioning segregated schools in Kansas and twenty other states. In doing this, Brown overturned the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which had formalized the practice of state-mandated racial discrimination called Jim Crow. In requiring states to create separate but equal public facilities and institutions, Plessy created the illusion that blacks were treated equitably in the United States. But like most reactionary social, political, and cultural practices, Plessy rested on a number of dubious assumptions, the most obvious being the idea of black racial inferiority. It also contributed to the white American fantasy that black people were happy with Jim Crow. Segregation, like apartheid in South Africa, was a combination of wishful thinking, on the part of whites, about racialized subjects and a system of brutal naked power.

As a key component of the legislation that came to be called civil rights law, Brown was part of the unfinished business of Reconstruction. The ruling was a major step in the racial modernization of the American Republic. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on May 17, 1954, "it reaffirmed," as Cheryl Brown Henderson has written, "that all of the citizens of this country were entitled to the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution." (5) Brown provided the impetus for the desegregation of American public education and other facets of the public sphere. The United States had emerged from World War II a white supremacist state. Black people were either de jure or de facto segregated throughout the country. When viewed in this context, the South was not an aberration but the most extreme example of an American civil religion that proscribed people because of their color. If in the East, West, and Midwest black people were tolerated but not the equals of whites before the law, in the South they were a pathogen contained within the asylum of de jure segregation. In the South blacks were economically, politically, and socially under the control of whites. Malcolm X once described the constitutional state of affairs that made state-sanctioned racial discrimination possible as one in which the Constitution was in a "state of a coma." Indeed, the Constitution since the rise of de jure segregation in the 1890s had been comatose when it came to the rights of black people. This is what C. Vann Woodward meant when he described the post-Reconstruction period of American history as a time when equality was a "deferred commitment." (6)

The response of a substantial number of white southerners to Brown was predictable. Like the majority of Afrikaners, who saw in the demise of South African apartheid the death of their way of life, white southerners perceived Brown as the work of the avatars of Satan. This perception grew out of the unexamined belief on the part of many southern whites that segregation was normal, if not eternal. Looking back to both my experience in Sugar Land and the South in 1954, I often think of Shirley Jackson's marvelous short story "The Lottery" as a metaphor for America and the South. Although Jackson was writing about a highly mechanized farming community in the twentieth century, the world she described was organized around an atavism. Jackson's agricultural community sacrificed a resident every year to ensure that the village's crops would be bountiful. (7)

America and the South's atavism was segregation in the postwar period. This primitive holdover sacrificed the lives and talents of black people. Segregation, as Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware have noted, turned "Negroes into a group of American untouchables, ritually separated from the dominant white population in almost every observable facet of daily existence." (8) There was something ironic about this because the United States fought World War II against the Nazi racial regime and became the self-proclaimed leader of the Western free world with a system of legally sanctioned racial practices that were anything but just. Segregation was both unjust and wasteful. It consigned a productive and valuable portion of the South's population to the margins of society, rendering them angry, bitter, and resentful. Within the white South, though, segregation was viewed as a variant of the positive-good theory of slavery. Jim Crow restrictions were beneficent and kind and created a space where blacks could exercise their limited abilities without having to compete with whites. In referencing slavery, I do not want to suggest that slavery and segregation were the same thing. They were not and did not occupy the same analytical and social space. Slavery was a vertical form of racial control, while segregation was a horizontal way of organizing racial interaction, as Howard N. Rabinowitz told us twenty-five years ago. (9) But I am suggesting that in this horizontal space the intellect of entire generations was sacrificed to white supremacy. As a response to the formal emancipation of blacks, segregation created the illusion of equality. It was this chimera that Brown shattered in 1954.

Before Brown southern whites lived with the illusion that Eugene "Bull" Connor gave voice to when he joked that blacks and whites "were not to segregate together." (10) The regime of race relations that Connor and other white racists defended suggests that sectors of the white southern population were isolated from the broader stream of world history in postwar America. These white people were in many ways willfully provincial. They did not know themselves, and they did not know black people. If segregation impaired black intellect and aspirations, it also damaged their oppressors, who lived in a world in which colonialism and the racism that sustained it were dying. I have often wondered how white southern men who fought in the European theater of World War II came away from that event and did not see a connection between the racial hocus-pocus of Nazism and the southern intellectual rationale for segregation. Both social science and the law as embodied in Brown reflected a paradigm shift in how the world was coming to think about racial equality. To argue that Brown constituted a form of social engineering was to be oblivious to the fact that Plessy was also a form of social engineering. Furthermore, Plessy was a blatant perversion of the very Constitution that white southerners idealized as a cornerstone of American liberty. The fact that separate and equal was legitimated by white power and attitudes made it neither normal nor just. The hysteria that greeted the Court's decision in 1954 suggests on some level that the white South understood this. Brown lifted everybody's sights in the South and contributed to the process of dismantling the system of legalisms that had made white a protected racial category since the ratification of the Constitution was completed in 1790.

Finally, social change is often painful and incomplete. In retrospect the Brown decision was one such moment in the history of the modern United States. The case did not resolve all of the problems attendant upon the racial modernization of our country and the South. Rather it laid the foundations, as noted earlier, for a process that created a better world. In this process people suffered: I say this having had to repeat the third grade once I returned to California.

(1) David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York, 2000), quoted on p. 6. I would like to thank Lisa Masterson, Sally McKee, Rosalind Rosenberg, and Nick Salvatore for reading an earlier draft of this essay.

(2) J. Saunders Redding, On Being Negro in America (Indianapolis, 1951).

(3) Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927); Mendez v. Westminster School District, 64 F. Supp. 544 (S.D. Cal. 1946), aff'd. 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947); Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Diego, Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District (1931).

(4) Charles W. Chesnutt, "What Is a White Man?" in Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler, Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches (Stanford, 1999), 68-73.

(5) Cheryl Brown Henderson, "Brown v. Board of Education at Fifty: A Personal Perspective," College Board Review, no. 200 (Fall 2003), 7.

(6) C. Vann Woodward, "Equality: The Deferred Commitment," in Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (3rd ed.; Baton Rouge, 1993), 69-88. The Malcolm X quotation is from a radio broadcast remembered by the author.

(7) Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" [1948], in Jackson, Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures, edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman (New York, 1968), 225-33.

(8) Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 28.

(9) Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978).

(10) Quoted in Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York, 2001), 50.

MR. WALKER is a professor of history and cultural studies at the University of California, Davis.