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Still Unequal: A Fiftieth Anniversary Reflection on Brown v. Board of Education
- Radical History Review
- Duke University Press
- Issue 90, Fall 2004
- pp. 62-69
- Article
- Additional Information
Radical History Review 90 (2004) 62-69
[Access article in PDF]
Still Unequal:
A Fiftieth Anniversary Reflection on Brown v. Board of Education
Adina Back
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Media coverage of African American parents and children conducting school boycotts against segregated and inferior schools in Harlem and Brooklyn, New York, in the fall of 1958 (New York Amsterdam News, September 13, 1958). Courtesy New York Amsterdam News and the Jewish Women's Archive |
May 17, 2004, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This landmark decision, which ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, has rightfully become part of the nation's narrative of historic progress—a narrative punctuated by powerful and abundant iconic photographs of the modern civil rights movement. These include images of the victorious National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attorneys on the steps of the United States Supreme Court in 1954, as well as photographs of those who followed in their wake, fighting for school integration in the years after the Brown decision. Among the images ingrained in our collective memory are those of the Little Rock Nine, the brave high school students in Little Rock, Arkansas, who were the first to integrate Central High School in 1957. Far less familiar, however, are photographs of the Harlem Nine: nine African American women and their children who staged a school boycott in New York City in 1958 to protest the inferior conditions of the children's segregated schools. Indeed, few have ever seen a portrait of Judge Justine Polier, whose ruling in favor of the parents was hailed as the first northern decision against de facto segregation—that is, segregation by custom—in the public schools.1 Similarly, images of parent activists and civil rights lawyers in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and scores of cities outside of the South waging campaigns for school integration during the 1950s and into the 1960s are also missing from the mid-twentieth-century public iconography of the nation's battle for school integration. [End Page 63]
Click for larger view | Figure 2 Continued coverage of school boycotts in the New York Amsterdam News (September 13, 1958). Courtesy New York Amsterdam News and the Jewish Women's Archive |
The absence of recognizable images from the integration battles of the North seems a natural extension of our nation's willful amnesia about this chapter in the struggle for civil rights. Indeed, over the past decade, scholars, school reformers, and journalists have been documenting the rise of resegregation of America's public schools. Yet the notion of "dismantling desegregation," a term coined by scholars Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton, hardly applies to the North, as few schools outside of the South were ever integrated.2 A quick overview of New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, offers a case study for exploring the nostalgic tendency to emphasize certain historical aspects of the integration of public schools in the United States while ignoring others. [End Page 64]
In February 1954, three months before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Dr. Kenneth Clark, the prominent African American psychologist, publicly charged the New York City public schools with giving inferior and unequal education to the city's African American schoolchildren. He claimed that Harlem's public schools had not only not improved but had, in fact, deteriorated in the two decades since the 1935 Harlem riots. What Clark was drawing attention to was the continued impact of de factosegregation in the North. He was hardly the first to raise the issue of segregated schooling outside of the South. For decades, radical teachers, parents, and community and civil rights activists waged a series of grassroots and legal challenges to northern-style segregation. The 1954 Supreme Court decision, however, legitimized and fueled these campaigns.
High-level administrators within the New York City Board of Education initially attacked Clark's analysis. The attacks ranged from outright rejection of his characterization...
