The Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education 60 years ago began when Oliver L. Brown, a welder, went to court because his daughter Linda could not attend Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kan., seven blocks from her home. The Supreme Court ruled definitively that “separate but equal” has no place in the American Constitution, that separate facilities are inherently unequal.
Sixty years later, residential patterns have resegregated many of our schools. First lady Michelle Obama speaking in Topeka noted “many young people in America are going to school largely with kids who look just like them. Too often, those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color, which too often lag behind, with crumbling classrooms and less experienced teachers.”
Brown overturned the ignominious Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the court ruled that separate but equal train facilities fulfilled the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Just as Plessy wasn’t solely about train cars, Brown wasn’t solely about schools.
Plessy legitimized legal apartheid in the United States. African Americans in the South were banned from using white public facilities, libraries, transportation, swimming pools, schools and more. With its decision in Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal had no place under our Constitution. It ended legal segregation not just in classrooms but also in all aspects of life.
After Brown, we had rights. We had to march and protest, sit-in, get arrested and risk our lives to affirm those rights, but we no longer had walls to limit our dreams. From Brown came the New South. From Brown and the Voting Rights Act came new possibility.
Yet, the end of legal segregation did not mean the end of discrimination. In our criminal justice system, African-American men are more likely to be stopped than whites, more likely to be searched if stopped, more likely to be charged if arrested, more likely to be prosecuted if charged, and, if convicted are hit with sentences that are on average 20 percent harsher than white men convicted of similar crimes.
Racial discrimination remains a battleground in America. The conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been systematically weakening civil rights laws from voting rights to affirmative action. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting from a Roberts’ decision, wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.”
And her position on the court to offer that dissent is a testament to how far we have come, and to the great transformation the Supreme Court helped to launch with its decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.
