(serious music)
- Brown vs. Board of Education has quite a long history.
In some measure, it actually stretches all the way
back to the 1896 Supreme Court decision
Plessy versus Ferguson,
where the Supreme court upheld a segregation law.
Afterwards it widely interpreted
as being Supreme court more or less acquiescing
to the legality of segregation.
In 1909 the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
was formed, the NAACP,
which became the premier civil rights organization
in America.
It actually initially focused
on racially-biased criminal prosecutions, lynching,
but beginning in the 1930s,
a couple of lawyers in particular
began to pay a lot of attention to school segregation.
One of those lawyers was Charles Hamilton Houston,
who was a 1922 Harvard Law School graduate,
and the other lawyer was Thurgood Marshall,
who was Charles Houston's student.
And in the 1930s,
Houston and Marshall began to litigate cases
involving schools
- Brown vs. Board of Education is actually a combination
of five different cases that the Supreme court put together
in order to consider laws in a variety of states
that restricted school attendance
by ethnoracial identification.
And there was an initial decision
saying that segregation by race was unconstitutional,
that it was inherently unequal.
And then there was actually a second decision, Brown II,
that then ordered they desegregate
with all deliberate speed.
Which sounds promising, as if it meant do this quickly,
But in fact, many states interpreted to drag their feet
and go as slowly as possible.
- The initial short-term reaction was something
that was called the Southern Manifesto
that protested against the ruling
as a usurpation of the constitution, as unconstitutional,
as a usurpation of local control over their schools
and also over their African-American populations.
White teachers were favored for jobs
and African-American teachers were
therefore the ones who were let go.
In addition, there was profound disrespect
for what the African-American teachers had achieved and did,
and frankly, there was a commitment in many places
to keeping both Black children
and Black adults in their place
as secondary and second class citizens.
In many of the schools that were
what's called de jure segregated,
so they were segregated by law
and they were serving African-American kids
and have African-American teachers
in many cases who were teaching there,
they taught a much more empowering curriculum
that taught about the value and the beauty
of being Black and about Black history and so forth.
And many of the newly desegregated white schools,
white school boards, superintendents and teachers,
were not really interested in adopting and supporting
and teaching that curriculum.
(warm music)
The decision around schools
and the forced desegregation of schools
then had ripple effects
across many, many other sectors of society.
- The women's movement, the disability rights movement,
the English language learners,
all these people invoked the mandate of equality
and inclusion and equal participation
in the public activities that make up America.
- I think it really was viewed
as being a tremendously important decision in and of itself,
and as a wedge for integrating,
or at least desegregating,
many other domains of our fair and public life.
- More recently, we've got LGBTQ activists
who've also picked up on that mandate
and carried the ball a bit further.
So we can't really imagine any of these groups
being able to have done what they did
without the precedent of Brown versus Board of Education.
(gentle music)