Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education

3 The Wall

21 3 The Wall Kate Nace Day It was 1957. I was eight years old. My father had just joined the faculty of a Canadian university. He was a professor of anatomy and physiology and a research scientist. He had a wonderful lab at the university, graduate students from around the world, and funding for summer research as well. We spent our first summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he would conduct his research for the remaining summers of my childhood. That first summer, my father bought an old wooden outboard motorboat. He often took us out with him, teaching the lessons of the sea, how to read the tides, winds, currents, and back eddies of the small string of islands that flow off Woods Hole. As we cruised down along the islands one afternoon, my father pointed out a line of stone walls. He loved to teach and I was used to listening. He told me that all the Elizabeth Islands were criss-crossed with these wonderful, elegant stone walls that carved the islands from rocky shore to smooth beaches, through sheep grazing fields and across scrub pine and oak. There are no paved roads on any of these islands even today; then, there were sheepherders and there were horses, but very few houses and buildings. My father pointed out these wonderful rocky walls and asked whether I noticed something different about them—different than what I noticed about the rest of the island. I said no, I didn’t. They were grey and they were beautiful and the island was green and grey and beautiful. My father told me they were man-made; he said nature had not placed them there. And then he told me that it remains a mystery today why the stone walls are there. The white settlers who took over the islands had no written history of why the islands are carved with walls. These stone walls remain the markings of some unknown human purpose. My father thought it odd that I didn’t know the difference between that which he saw as natural and that which is man-made. That fall, when we were in Canada, my father would go off to his lab. In the evenings, he would come home with his students. They filled our very small house that was already filled with four children, a mother, a grandmother, and a dog—students from England, from Scotland and Poland, from Czechoslovakia ; there were students from Hong Kong and there were students from Africa. I did not yet know that man had made walls between the races. 22 The Context—Skin Color andWalls But that winter, we watched the television images of what has come to be called “massive Southern resistance.” I am ashamed to say that I don’t remember the faces of the black children walking up the schoolhouse steps, or stepping down off buses. I remember the angry white faces, the ugly face of white racism. I remember what my father said to me: “Race science made the color line and the color line is man-made. There is no moral significance to the color of one’s skin.” Thirty years later, when I started law teaching, I was intrigued by how something of no moral significance had come to dominate our lives and control our destinies. My father had shown me that walls carved the islands and taught me that there were sources you can turn to that will illuminate the mystery. I turned to Zora Neale Hurston and John Hope Franklin, Toni Morrison and W. E. B. DuBois, Judge Julia Cooper Mack and Justice Thurgood Marshall —all the voices of men and women of color who illuminate the lies and myths and images that went into the construction of the color line. I taught Race and the Constitution; I wrote about white shame; I tried to keep Brown alive, not an empty symbol of some sentimental hope. I tried never to forget the ugly face of white racism. I tried. Life is short. Voices, perhaps, live on. My father retired and lived again in Woods Hole. Early one fall, he and I headed out down along the islands. It was a still afternoon and a light fog hung over the water. We rode in silence. Before we headed in, he pulled into one of those island coves and slowed the engine. “Beautiful,” he said and smiled. As we headed in, he turned, took a long look back...