Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America

4. Maintaining Racial Segregation in Schools and Neighborhoods from Brown to the 21st Century

119 4 Maintaining Racial Segregation in Schools and Neighborhoods from Brown to the 21st Century “Hatred that rages in souls and suddenly loses its immediate object does not disappear without a trace.” —Anonymous, 19911 FA L S E N OT I O N S O F white superiority/black inferiority fueled white desires for racial isolation that were supported by laws and case decisions beginning with Reconstruction. As blacks fought for integrated schools, housing, and public accommodations, white resistance increased. Most blacks would not be separated without resistance, and many whites would not cease creating policies and practices geared toward ensuring white isolation . While the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,2 prohibiting state-mandated racial segregation in public schools, gave progressive Americans hope that racial isolation would be eradicated, not only in education but in all aspects of American society, this hope was misplaced. Unfortunately, Brown and its progeny neither altered notions of racial hierarchy nor prevented black separation. Racial hierarchy and isolation did not end with the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954, as commitment to both was evident even from the highest elected officials in the country. As president, Dwight Eisenhower explained , “[Segregationists] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, black bucks.”3 President Eisenhower spoke these words to Chief Justice Earl Warren at a White House dinner in 1954.4 Seated next to Warren was former presidential candidate and one-time congressman, Solicitor General John W. Davis, whom Eisenhower praised as a “great man” and one of the nation’s most able lawyers.5 It was not idle chitchat. Davis had argued more than 120 Sustaining the Paradigm 140 cases before the Court, most recently on behalf of southern school officials defending the right to exclude black children from white schools.6 Meanwhile, Warren, with the rest of the Court, was deciding the fate of those schools in Brown.7 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back There are two Brown cases, Brown I, decided in 1954,8 and Brown II, decided in 1955.9 The Brown cases involved a constitutional challenge by black primary school children segregated by the state due to their race. The Court in Brown I declared that racial segregation in public schools, at least when mandated by law, violates the principle of equality contained in the United States Constitution.10 The Court rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy11 on the basis that segregated schools were “inherently unequal.”12 Unlike segregated train cars, segregated schools created a sense of inferiority among black school children that time could not undo.13 The Court in Brown II declared that the black school children were entitled to attend a desegregated school.14 The Court empowered local school boards to implement the desegregation remedy and local federal courts to supervise the plans, all to be done “with all deliberate speed.”15 The Court’s striking down of school segregation came as a surprise to many. Separate but equal had been the law of the land since the ruling in Plessy in 1896, over half a century earlier.16 The NAACP was asking the Court to strike down more than fifty years of practice built around that precedent, a precedent set by the very same court of law. In discussing Brown I with the other justices, Chief Justice Warren admitted that “[t]he more I read and hear and think, the more I come to conclude that the basis of the principle of segregation and separate but equal rests upon the basic premise that the Negro race is inferior. . . . If oral argument proved anything, the arguments of Negro counsel proved that they are not inferior.”17 Justices William Douglas and Sherman Minton felt the same; the latter “saw segregation as the South’s ‘invidious’ response to abolition and a substitute means for whites to degrade blacks in the absence of slavery.”18 These striking admonishments, acknowledging the real purpose of segregation , no doubt played a role in the Court’s decision. Yet, Brown I referenced none of them. Rather than acknowledge that segregation laws were premised on white superiority, the Brown I court focused solely on the Maintaining Racial Segregation 121 psychological effect segregation had on blacks.19 On the basis of testimony produced at trial, the Court...