Brown v. Board: The education of a nation

Michael E. Ross Reporter • Profile • E-mail

It was perhaps the signal judicial decision of the American century, the brightest dividing line between America's persistent antebellum sensibilities and its willingness to face the future, however uncertain, with all deliberate speed.

More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling outlawing state-sanctioned segregation in American public schools, a sampling of educators and authors found reason for celebration: The legacy of Brown is one of vast educational progress over two generations.

But old patterns of segregation persist. A survey of enrollment statistics reveals that, in several important ways, the school segregation Brown was enacted to end more than two generations ago remains a fact of life today, in some parts of the country worse now than it was at the time of the decisions.

Like all pivotal judicial statements, Brown has its origins in a human dilemma. In 1950, Linda Brown, a 7-year-old Topeka, Kan., schoolgirl generally unaware of racial animus, attended Monroe Elementary, a predominantly black school — forced to take an 80-minute trek that included a six-block walk through the potentially dangerous switchyards of the Rock Island railroad line, despite living closer to Sumner Elementary, attended by white students.

The NAACP, looking for a test case to use to fight segregation, got the Brown family to take Linda to Sumner and ask to register her as a student. When Linda was rebuffed, she became the lead plaintiff in the case that bears her family name. Other black families joined in the litigation, and in 1951 the NAACP requested an injunction banning segregation of Topeka's schools. 

Old world, new world
The Supreme Court, ruling on combined cases from Topeka, Kan., to Clarendon County, S.C., handed down the Brown decision on May 17, 1954. In one lightning stroke, Brown soundly repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that had long institutionalized the separate-but-equal doctrine in American life.

‘For African Americans, it divides American history into a B.C. and an A.D.’ — THEODORE SHAW NAACP Legal Defense Fund

The fundamental right to knowledge, information — in an increasingly complex age — was judicially reaffirmed to be one for all Americans. With Brown — literally a two-decision bombshell that spread into 1955 — the stage was set for no less than the future of the nation.

There was probably no other single decision that so starkly separated the old world from the new. Theodore Shaw, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, may have put it best in a recent story on Brown in The New York Times. “For African Americans, it divides American history into a B.C. and an A.D.”

Educational opportunities for minorities were at the heart of Brown v. Board, but the decision has another, wider educational dimension; the ruling ushered in another phase of America's own painful learning process on modern-day race relations. Even before the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Brown v. Board set the terms of engagement that would help form the philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement.

Black education was central to Brown, but the larger, wider mission of the ruling was the education of the nation. For all Americans, school was in, and there’d be no cutting class.

'A tale of two nations'
A survey of African-American scholars, authors and educators finds Brown's relevance in the national life dovetails, to some extent, with their own lives.

For David J. Dent, author of “In Black America,” a 2000 survey of the status and mood of black families, a variation of a Dickensian metaphor has applications. “We're really living a dichotomy now. It's a tale of two nations.”

“The avenues to success are there for many people, but not there for many others,” he said. “We're at the point when the questions regarding race and education are much more complicated, more a reflection of access — the kind of access some African Americans have and others do not.”

This perceived difference in the quality of life between African Americans is rooted in fact. If the statistics are to be believed, maybe another Dickensian phrase obtains — something about the best and worst of times.

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