The Broken Promise Of Brown

By Julian Bond

Editor’s Note: This speech was presented May 15 at an
NAACP education summit in Topeka, Kan.

Fifty years ago this past April , Martin Luther King,
Jr. preached his first sermon as the new pastor of
Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25
years old.

One month later, on May 17, 1954, the United States
Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education,
unanimously declared that segregated schools violated
the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.

Two months later, on July 17, 1954, construction began
at Disneyland. Sadly, today Brown’s promise is still
lost in fantasy land. The Magic Kingdom remains closed
to children of color in America.

There can be no mistake-those 50 years since Brown have
seen the fortunes of black America advance and retreat,
but the decision is always cause for sober celebration,
not impotent dismay.

We celebrate the brilliant legal minds who were the
architects of Brown v. Board ; we celebrate the brave
families who were its plaintiffs; and we celebrate the
legal principle that remains its enduring legacy-that,
in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the
doctrine of separate but equal has no place."

That the quest for meaningful equality-political and
economic equity-remains unfulfilled today is no
indictment of past efforts. It is testament to our
challenge.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark
decision, it is easy to cast a cynical eye on the
status of school desegregation in America today-or the
sorry state of race relations-and minimize the
significance of Brown. That is a grave mistake, for
Brown -by destroying segregation’s legality, gave a
nonviolent army the power to destroy segregation’s
morality as well.

Thus it is no coincidence that this year we also
celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of the
1964 Civil Rights Act-the most sweeping civil rights
legislation before or since, and our democracy’s finest
hour.

We look back on the years between Brown and the passage
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with some pride. In those
years, Brown’s anniversary became a celebratory
signpost, as major events focused on commemorating the
date. The year after Brown, Rosa Parks sat down to
stand up for her rights, and the Montgomery bus boycott
began. Martin Luther King’s first national address was
at a 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage on the third anniversary of
Brown at the Lincoln Memorial. Later that same year the
Little Rock Nine successfully integrated Little Rock’s
Central High School. Sit-ins at segregated lunch
counters burst out across the South in 1960, followed
by the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the forcible
integration of Ole Miss in 1962. In 1963 alone, the
year that King-fresh from the battlefields of
Birmingham-told the nation of his dream at the March on
Washington, there were more than 10,000 anti-racist
demonstrations.

King was the most famous and well known of the modern
movement’s personalities, but it was a people’s
movement. It produced leaders of its own; but it relied
not on the noted but the nameless, not on the famous
but the faceless. It didn’t wait for commands from afar
to begin a campaign against injustice. It saw wrong and
acted against it; it saw evil and brought it down.
Those were the days when women and men of all races and
creeds worked together in the cause of civil rights.
Those were the days when good music was popular and
popular music was good. Those were the days when the
president picked the Supreme Court and not the other
way around. Those were the days when we had a war on
poverty, not a war on the poor. Those were the days
when patriotism was a reason for open-eyed
disobedience, not an excuse for blind allegiance. Those
were the days when the news media really was "fair and
balanced" and not just cheerleaders for the powerful.

But those were not "the good old days."

Then, the American social order was rigidly stratified
and racially codified. In those days, "[t]he law, the
courts, the schools, and almost every institution...
favored whites. This was white supremacy." Martin
Luther King described it in 1962. He said then:

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and
fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at
whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse,
kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro
brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in
the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly
find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as
you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why
she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just
been advertised on television, and see tears welling up
in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to
colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority
beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her
beginning to distort her personality by developing an
unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you
have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who
is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored
people so mean?" when you are harried by day and
haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro,
living constantly on tip-toe stance, never quite
knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner
fears and outer resentments; when you are forever
fighting a degenerating sense of ’nobodiness’-then,"
King concluded, "you will understand."

You would understand that most southern blacks then
could not vote. Most attended inadequate, segregated
schools, if they went at all, and many attended only a
few months each year. Most could not hope to gain an
education beyond high school. Most worked as farmers,
or semi-skilled laborers. Few owned the land they
farmed, or even the homes in which they lived.

This was a massive system of racial preferences, a vast
affirmative action plan for whites—enforced by
law and terror. It had one name and one aim-to crush
the human development of a whole population. It began
with slave-catching in Africa, and it continues on to
the present day.

Only by acknowledging the name, nature and scope of the
problem can we measure the magnitude of our
successes-and the costs of our failures.

The day Brown was decided, the NAACP held a news
conference to announce an ambitious new agenda. To
Thurgood Marshall, Brown was the Magna Carta of black
America, a declaration of our rights. School
segregation would be eliminated, he thought, within
five years. He was right about the former; he was
obviously wrong about the latter.

Within a year, in Brown II, the Supreme Court allowed
desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed."
For the first time, the Court had declared a right and
delayed its implementation.

Three months after Brown II , Emmett Till, who was
nearly my age, was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for
whistling at a white woman. His death and the black
newspapers that came into my Pennsylvania home created
a great vulnerability and fear of all things southern
in my teenaged mind. When my parents announced in 1957
that we were relocating to Atlanta, I was filled with
dread.

Emmett Till’s death had frightened me. But in the fall
of 1957 a group of black teenagers encouraged me to put
that fear aside. These young people-the nine young
women and men who integrated Central High School in
Little Rock, Ark.-set a high standard of grace and
courage under fire as they dared the mobs who
surrounded their school.

Here, I thought, is what I hope I can be, if ever the
chance comes my way.

The chance to test and prove myself did come my way in
1960, as it came to thousands of other black high
school and college students across the South. First
through the sit-ins, then in Freedom Rides, and then in
the voter registration and political organizing drives
in the rural South, we joined an old movement against
white supremacy that had deep, strong roots; for many
of us, however, it was the recent Brown decision that
had created the opportunity for young people to play
active roles, to seize and share leadership in the
movement for social justice.

Brown was the movement’s greatest legal victory. It
changed the legal status of black Americans, and
ironically made challenges to the established
movement’s narrow reliance on legal action possible.

As Richard Kluger has written: "Not until the Supreme
Court acted in 1954 did the nation acknowledge it had
been blaming the black man for what it had done to him.
His sentence to second class citizenship had been
commuted; the quest for meaningful equality-equality in
fact as well as in law-had begun."

I believe in an integrated America;integrated
jobs, homes and schools. I believe in it enough to have
spent most of my life in its elusive pursuit. I think
it is a legal, moral and political imperative for
America—a matter of elemental justice, simple
right waged against historical wrong.

As Jack Greenberg, one of the attorneys for the Brown
plaintiffs, put it: "The other side’s briefs talked
about federalism, separation of powers, textualism.
Ours talked about right and wrong."

And black and white. Brown was about black inequality,
what Lyndon Johnson called "the one huge wrong of the
American nation."

"The Supreme Court said nothing about Latinos until 19
years after Brown and there never was any significant
enforcement of desegregation for Latinos."

Today, "U. S. schools are becoming more segregated in
all regions for both African-American and Latino
students." By contrast, Asian students are the most
integrated. I not only have spent most of my life in
the cause of integration, in 1947-when I was seven
years old-I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit in rural
Pennsylvania against segregated schools. It never came
to trial. The school board had segregated schools by
giving students achievement tests which all blacks
failed and all whites passed, but when the two dumb
sons of the local white political boss failed the test,
they closed the black school, and all of Lincoln
University Village’s children went to a one-room school
together.

Last year I visited Berea College in Kentucky, opened
by abolitionists as an integrated school in 1855. It
was closed by the Civil War, but opened again in 1866
with 187 students-96 blacks and 91 whites. It dared to
provide a rare commodity in the former slave states: an
education open to all-blacks and whites, women and men.

One of those early students was my grandfather, James
Bond.

Like many others, I am the grandson of a slave. My
grandfather was born in 1863, in Kentucky; freedom
didn’t come for him until the 13th Amendment was
ratified in 1865.

He and his mother were property, like a horse or a
chair. As a young girl, she had been given away as a
wedding present to a new bride, and when that bride
became pregnant, her husband-that’s my great-
grandmother’s owner and master-exercised his right to
take his wife’s slave as his mistress.That union
produced two children, one of them my grandfather. At
age 15, barely able to read and write, he hitched his
tuition-a steer-to a rope and walked across Kentucky to
Berea College and the college took him in.

My grandfather belonged to a transcendent generation of
black Americans, a generation born into slavery, a
generation freed from servitude by the Civil War, a
generation determined to make their way as free women
and men. From Berea, he studied for the ministry,
married, and had six children-one of them my father,
Horace Mann Bond.

My father graduated from Pennsylvania’s Lincoln
University and earned a doctorate in education from the
University of Chicago. For him, too, education was a
means to a larger end-the uplift of his people and the
salvation of his race. How fitting, then, that he would
be asked to help the NAACP in its legal campaign
against school segregation-the campaign that culminated
in Brown v. Board of Education .

When Brown was before the Supreme Court, both its
presenters and the Justices who heard it understood
clearly its historic potential. In an unusual, but not
unheard of procedure, the case-actually four cases
combined, from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and
Delaware-was argued first in the 1952 term and reargued
the next. A fifth case, from Washington, DC, was argued
separately.

Among other issues, the Court struggled with the
meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, that portion of
the Constitution adopted after the Civil War,
guaranteeing equal protection of the laws, as well as
due process. In the earliest cases defining the
Fourteenth Amendment, the Court had said:

"It ordains that no state shall deprive any person of
life, liberty or property without due process of law,
or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws. "What is this but declaring
that the law in the States shall be the same for the
black as for the white; that all persons, whether
colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of
the States, and, in regard to the colored race, for
whose protection the amendment was primarily designed,
that no discrimination shall be made against them by
law because of their color?"

>From this hopeful beginning there emerged, only a few
years later, the disgraceful doctrine of "separate but
equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson .

In "laboring with the doctrine for over half a century"
before Brown, the Supreme Court examined how "separate
but equal" applied in a number of contexts, including
education. But not until Brown was the continuing
validity of the doctrine squarely presented.

In scheduling Brown for re-argument, the Court asked
the lawyers to prepare written responses to five
questions, two of them dealing with the history of the
Fourteenth Amendment and public education. The lawyers
turned to historians and constitutional experts,
including my father, for assistance.

While C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin were
studying post-Reconstruction policies regarding race
relations in the South and Alfred Kelley and Howard J.
Graham were working on the intent of the framers of the
Fourteenth Amendment, my father was researching the
intentions of the ratifying states with respect to
school segregation.

Some scholars, like Henry Steele Commager, declined to
help the NAACP in this work; they believed the facts
would not support the NAACP’s position. My father knew,
however, that both the historical record and the
political goals could be pursued without sacrificing
either. In the end, the Court regarded the historical
evidence as "inconclusive," a "draw," which may have
meant victory for the NAACP. It may have allowed the
Court to overcome Plessy’s flat statement that Congress
condoned segregation. Free to look for guidance
elsewhere, the Court was able to speak for what one
historian has called "the American conscience."

Perhaps, having done the right thing by denouncing
"separate but equal," the Court then felt free to delay
the implementation of what it had announced. Whatever
the reason, the phrase "with all deliberate speed" was
added to the lexicon of ignominious judicial
pronouncements less than a year after one of the most
shameful judicial doctrines had been discarded.

The Court, a year after announcing its decision on the
merits, ordered the nation to make haste slowly in
desegregating the system of separate and unequal
schools. The defendants were required, in a masterpiece
of ambiguity, "to admit to public schools on a racially
nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the
parties in these cases. "

For the first 10 years after Brown, the emphasis was
more on "deliberate" than on "speed." The focus was on
dismantling the dual school systems in the South, the
products of de jure segregation, and in southern
accents, all deliberate speed meant any conceivable
delay. Actual integration was more a legal fiction than
fact. President Dwight Eisenhower had lobbied Chief
Justice Warren to rule for the Southern states and
segregated schools; he never endorsed the Brown
decision, and the resistant white South, emboldened by
his rectitude, reacted with evasion and delay. Their
tactics included violence, expansion of private
schools, state support for fleeing white students,
proposals to abolish public education, repeal of
compulsory attendance laws and the long-discarded
theories of interposition and nullification. Prince
Edward County, Va., simply closed its public schools
for five years, believing that uneducated children were
preferable to integrated ones. Where massive resistance
failed, aggressive resistance succeeded.

By the end of 1964,10 years after Brown , more than 97
percent of all Southern black children still attended
segregated schools. There was far too much deliberation
and far too little speed.

When the ’64 Civil Rights Act was being debated and
finally became law, most in the civil rights community
concentrated on the public accommodations section of
the Act-on lunch counters and restaurants, and on
provisions affecting employment discrimination.

Overlooked, for many, were provisions of the Act
dealing with education, and overlooked today is how
important the Act could have been in making Brown’s
promise a reality.

When Congress was debating the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
in all of Alabama, only 29 black students attended
formerly white schools, only nine in South Carolina,
and none in Mississippi.

The four years following the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 represent the only period in the 50-
year-history of Brown when there was active support for
desegregation from both the executive branch and the
courts.

For the first time, under a southern president, Lyndon
Johnson, the federal government began to take an active
role. This period saw the percentage of black children
in school with white ones more than quadrupled, rising
from 3 to 13 percent.

But still there were costs. Surrendering to caution,
the integration process became a one-way street as a
few black students and fewer black teachers and even
fewer administrators were admitted to formerly all-
white schools. Thousands of black schoolteachers lost
their jobs as black and white schools merged. Lost too
was history-revered school names, mottoes, mascots,
traditions. Plaques, trophy cases, school
colors—all the artifacts that honored black
achievement disappeared. Black students found
themselves in formerly all-white school buildings that
retained the character and identity acquired in the
segregated past-Booker T. Washington High School
vanished; Robert E. Lee High School persevered.

In President Lyndon Johnson’s last year in office, the
federal government reviewed 28 communities for
compliance with desegregation guidelines; in President
Richard Nixon’s first year, the figure dropped to 16.
By the second year it stood at 15; the third year at
11; the fourth year at 9; the first year of his second
term at 1, and by the next year, the number dropped to
none. The years 1968-73, however, represent the most
active period of Supreme Court intervention on behalf
of school desegregation. The court that 13 years
earlier had been content to see desegregation proceed
"with all deliberate speed" ordered segregation removed
"root and branch" in 1968.

To that end, it permitted busing in 1971.

Johnson’s commitment to civil rights had sustained
enforcement efforts in the South in the face of
widespread white opposition. When Republicans captured
the White House, the process was politicized, and the
principle sanction available to enforce desegregation,
cutting off federal funds, was renounced.

Within months of Nixon’s election, what was then known
as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare
(HEW) was under orders to end the threat of funding
cutoffs as a prod to integration; enforcement was
transferred from HEW to the Department of Justice,
which under Attorney General John Mitchell, argued in
the Supreme Court for less desegregation, not more,
establishing a pattern adopted by the Ford, Reagan and
Bush administrations.

Nixon’s HEW Secretary took the extraordinary steps of
writing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to say
that desegregation plans prepared by his own
department’s experts form Mississippi would cause
"chaos, confusion and catastrophic educational
setbacks."

The Carter administration attempted to revive fund
cutoff enforcement. Cut-off action was begun in Kansas
City. But the only limiting amendment adopted by
Congress to the ’64 Civil Rights Act was pushed by
liberal Democrats Thomas Eagleton of Missouri and
Joseph Biden of Delaware, when schools in their home
states faced desegregation efforts.

The Reagan administration launched an attack on school
desegregation. They invited school districts to reverse
existing desegregation orders and intervened in court
cases even where school boards had not requested it.
They asked the Supreme Court to authorize tax
exemptions for private segregated schools. They settled
cases with remedies that had failed elsewhere. They
eliminated the major desegregation aid program.

What distinguished the administrations of Ronald Reagan
and George H. W. Bush was their attacks on virtually
all components affecting segregation and discrimination
in American education.

After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the first
President Bush, then a House member, told his fellow
Texans, "The new Civil Rights Act was passed to protect
14 percent of the people. I’m worried about the other
86 percent."

The percentage of black students at majority white
schools in the South went from zero in 1954 to a peak
of 43.5 percent in 1988, proving there is nothing wrong
with Brown’s premise. It is Brown’s promise that has
been broken-betrayed by a failure of presidential
leadership, defeated by a lack of Congressional
oversight and action, ruined by a retreat by the
federal bureaucracy charged with enforcement, and
crushed by a series of unfavorable court rulings,
ranging from the adverse to the hostile.

When William Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court,
courtesy of Richard Nixon, all major desegregation
cases since Brownhad been unanimous. Rehnquist, as a
clerk to Justice Jackson during the Brown case, had
written a memo arguing that the Court should uphold
Plessy v. Ferguson . Then he lied about it at his
confirmation hearing. As a Justice himself, Rehnquist
cast the first dissenting vote in a post-
Browndesegregation case in 1973, setting the stage for
what would become a new anti-desegregation majority in
the 1990s after he became Chief Justice.

So today we have a Chief Justice who has consistently
opposed school desegregation and an Attorney General
who built his political career on attacking the efforts
of the federal courts to desegregate St. Louis and
Kansas City schools. As Missouri’s Attorney General and
then Governor, John Ashcroft continually attacked the
federal courts managing school integration in his state
and, when the courts found the state to be "the primary
constitutional violator," he fought to limit the
state’s contribution to the remedy the court imposed.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that when the current
state of school integration is examined, discouraging
results abound. If the years since Brown have not
succeeded in dismantling segregated schools, those
years have seen American preferences for segregated
education shrink. That constitutes modest achievement
for black Americans. For us and other minorities,
separate has never been equal, not then, not now.
America’s history tells us that has always been true.

There are few matters on which experts in any given
field agree. Educational experts, however, agree that
no school district in America has managed to create
equal education on a large scale in segregated schools,
be they black or Hispanic schools. This is not to say
that one- race schools are never successful. A few
are-particularly on the elementary level. But the
bottom line is that students who attend schools that
are segregated by race and income consistently rank
lower in educational achievement, especially at the
secondary school level. In short, the United States
can’t afford separate schools.

The educational damage done by racial segregation does
not grow from the relationship between blacks and
whites alone; it grows from the relationship between
blacks and whites and green. In America, the education
dollar follows the white child. The students who are
most likely to find themselves in schools of
concentrated poverty today are not white; they are
black and Latino.

Compared with poor whites, poor blacks are more likely
to live in neighborhoods where a high percentage of the
residents are poor. They interact mainly with others
who are poor, who share their disadvantage.

They live, squeezed together, in less-than- standard
housing, in neighborhoods denuded of essential
services. They shop at stores owned by merchants geared
to do business with a poor clientele. Their
neighborhoods are economically and racially segregated,
bereft of opportunity, out of sight and out of mind.

Their children attend schools only with other poor,
minority children. As the New Jersey Supreme Court
said, "They face, through no fault of their own, a life
of poverty and isolation that most of us cannot begin
to understand and appreciate." Fewer dollars in the
parents’ pockets mean fewer dollars in the school
board’s treasury. Children in high-poverty schools read
less, get lower grades and miss more days of school.

Economic and racial integration are preconditions for
equal opportunity. Once achieved, they permanently
alter the pattern of minority-majority relationships.

In cities where school integration exists, it is not
only the most visible form of desegregation, but the
only one that impacts personally on the lives of
millions of whites. This is why whites have so
strongly resisted it; it is also why blacks and other
minorities must continue to insist upon it.

I recently heard Minnie Jean Brown reflect on her
experiences as one of the heroic Little Rock Nine who
integrated Central High School in 1957. Someone asked
why she kept coming back to school day after day,
despite daily harassment and intimidation that would
have driven most people away.

>From the ferocity of her enemies, she said, "I knew
there was something precious inside that school," and
she was more determined to get it than they were to
keep it from her grasp.

There are those who scoff at Brown as if the advantages
to black children were to be gained simply by sitting
next to white ones in a classroom, as if a skin-to-skin
transfer of knowledge and education could occur. These
critics miss the point of integrated schools.

They are, as one expert said, "truly radical." A public
educational system that is fully integrated and treats
minorities and whites equally is the antithesis of the
larger society, which is profoundly segregated and
unequal. The goal of putting minorities and whites in
the same classrooms is not only to equalize education,
but also to change the formative racial experiences of
the next generation.

Today minority children face inequalities in school
spending, and more-they face what Jonathan Kozol calls
"punitive testing and accountability agendas" imposed
by the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools have adopted a
"grill and drill curriculum" that substitutes learning
by rote and teaching to the test for the transmission
of critical thinking from teacher to pupil.

Our schools present two faces to American society. In
one, they are our most important democratic
institution, pathways to class mobility and
generational progress, and their success or failure
impacts the lives and prospects of millions of families
and children every day.

The other face is an instrument for reproducing the
class and race privilege of the larger society,
reinforcing the very inequality they are designed to
overcome.

On our present course, we are formalizing two school
systems: one filled with middle class children, most of
them white, and one filled with low-income minorities.
For too many, the latter schools have become a conveyor
belt to prison.

Our future as a nation depends on our willingness to
continue to reach into the racial cleavage that define
American society and change the racial contours of our
world.

In 1954, the Federal government’s brief in Brown argued
that school desegregation was a Cold War imperative, a
necessary weapon to win America’s battles overseas.
Current events give us the same imperative—to
prove to enemy and ally alike that our commitment to
justice is sincere.

What, then, is to be done? Do we continue to slide
backward toward Plessy and segregation, or can we make
Brown’s promise at last come true? The brave Americans
who fought and won Brown 50 years ago faced obstacles
we cannot imagine and had few resources and little
public support with which to do the job. We can do no
less.

This fall, we have the opportunity to elect a pro-Brown
president and Congress that will appoint judges and
enforcement officials who understand the Supreme Court
was right then and that the job is far from over.

We can revive the federal aid program of the Nixon and
Carter administrations that helped multiracial schools
deal positively with issues of race relations,
multicultural curricula, and more effective classroom
operation.

We can recruit young people, especially young people of
color, into the education profession, and insure they
receive full and fair employment opportunities from all
school districts, not just minority schools.

We can mount a real fight against housing segregation,
and insure minority parents and their children have
access to middle-class schools. We can use choice
programs-magnet and charter schools-if they are enacted
in a strict pro-integration mode, forbidding transfers
that increase segregation and rewarding those that
diminish it.

We can amend the No Child Left Behind Act and provide
financial incentives and positive recognition to
segregated suburbs that accept significant numbers of
minority students from failing schools.

When my grandfather graduated from Berea, he was asked
to deliver the commencement address. He said then:

The pessimist from his corner looks out upon the world
of wickedness and sin, and blinded to all that is good
or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human
race, bewails the present state of affairs and predicts
woeful things for the future. In every cloud he beholds
a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning an
omen of evil and in every shadow that falls across his
path a lurking foe." He forgets that the clouds also
bring life and hope, that the lightning purifies the
atmosphere, that shadow and darkness prepare for
sunshine and growth, and that hardships and adversity
nerve the race, as the individual, for greater efforts
and grander victories.

"Greater efforts and grander victories." That was the
promise made by the generation born in slavery a
century and a half ago. That was the promise made by
the generation that won the great World War for
democracy six decades ago. That was the promise made
by the generation that brought democracy to America’s
darkest corners four decades ago, and that is the
promise we must all seek to honor today.

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