In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

51 FLORIDA 9 Becoming a Legal Troublemaker Michael Allan Wolf I grew up in a society stained by lawlessness. My hometown, Lakeland, Florida, dubbed “Citrus Capital of the World” by local promoters, is situated near the center of Interstate 4, the highway that runs across the midsection of the Sunshine State. As I was born in December 1952, I have no recollection of the Brown I and II decisions when the Warren Court announced them during my toddlerhood. What I do recall—and quite vividly—is the yawning gap between the law in the books and the law in practice that had a strong impact on my life and worldview even after I left my hometown for college in the fall of 1970. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the signs and shackles of American apartheid defined the landscape of Central Florida. The 1960 U.S. Census reports that the population of the county in which Lakeland sits was about 18 percent African American. Whites and African Americans were educated at separate schools, ate at separate restaurants, attended separate movie theatres, and sipped from separate water fountains. Sometimes the label “Colored” appeared on a bathroom door; most of the time even small children needed no sign to know which public services were set aside for those with darker skin. The white and African American parts of town were literally divided by railroad tracks, and my family and our friends rarely had reason to visit that part of Lakeland that lacked essential and decent public amenities. By their words and actions, my parents—both born and raised in the North—taught my siblings and me that racial segregation was a shameful practice . Still, almost our only social interaction with nonwhites was between our extended family and the adults and children of the extended African American family that worked as our housekeepers and landscapers. As Jews in a small Southern city, we were keenly aware of the resentment and even hatred that many of our neighbors felt for religious and racial outliers. Despite the significant social and economic gaps that separated our two family circles, we had in common the majority’s prejudice and distrust. I wrote “almost our only social interaction” because my brother and I still remember that, for some curious reason, children of both races were permitted to swim together in the city-owned pool in the late 1950s. These African 52 De Jure States and the District of Columbia American children would not join me and other whites in public school in meaningful numbers until officials closed the doors of all-black Rochelle High School in 1969. The presence of a very few token children of color who appeared in the white schools before that time only accentuated the hypocrisy of the situation. For a decade and a half, from 1954 to 1969, Lakeland’s children and adults, white and nonwhite, knew that the law in the books said that the city’s separate and unequal public school system was illegal. But the law in practice said otherwise. Local and state legislators, school officials, judges, police officers, and prosecutors defied the law, and there was no loud outcry from the media, business leaders, local college professors, or, perhaps most disappointingly, the bar. As I made my way through elementary and high school, the failure of public officials to heed Brown helped bring into focus other lawless aspects of my community. The Supreme Court’s decisions invalidating official prayers and Bible reading in public schools appeared in the summers preceding my fifth and sixth grades (1962 and 1963), which should have meant the end of these and other examples of church-state commingling that in large part defined our public school day. For example, before Schempp and Engel introduced expanded boundaries for the Establishment Clause, at Cleveland Court Elementary School classroom recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was commonplace, my classmates and I were rewarded with star-shaped stickers for memorizing the King James version of the Twenty-third Psalm, and membership in the Glee Club meant proclaiming to the world that “Christ the Savior is born.” Nevertheless , by the time I reached high school, the overtly Christian and Jewish religious readings that had disappeared a few years before were creeping back, read by students over the loudspeaker as meditations for the beginning of the school day. In what I look back now on as my first experience as a legal troublemaker, I confronted the school administration...

Share