In this segment I want to talk about the Civil Rights Movement,
post-World War II through the late 1950's.
And so we'll take it from the Brown vs. Board decision
through to the Little Rock Crisis.
Now, just a bit of a reminder here that
much, by 1954, when the Brown decision comes down,
much had already taken place in the United States.
It's improper, I think, to consider or think of the
Civil Rights Movement
as starting in the 1950's, or starting with Brown.
And in a previous segment, I tried to make that case.
And I want you to remember
that groups like the NAACP were actively working
through legal channels to challenge the segregation
and inequality that existed in the United States, and predominately, remember,
had focused their efforts
on professional education; graduate work,
and graduate schools. It's also worthwhile to remember
and contextualize the Civil Rights Movement in terms of the Cold War.
Remember that the Cold War
was not just a battle of the Soviet Union and the US, but
it was seen as a battle of ideology,
of worldviews. And one element of that was
a notion of human rights, that the United States
was better at protecting human rights. It had that tradition of
the rhetoric of liberty and freedom, and
that mission of the city on a hill. Understand how difficult it becomes
to make that argument worldwide:
to people in Africa or Asia, in the third world, in particular,
that United States upholds these values when
it's clear here, domestically, here in the US,
that African-Americans and other people, in fact,
are being treated as second-class citizens, are being denied some very
basic human liberties.
So, automatically this issue of Civil Rights is caught up
in the Cold War fervor. And you can sort of, I think you can begin to see that,
as you look to Harry Truman in particular.
And Truman, remember, in the late 1940's, begins to act
as no other president really had done since,
since reconstruction to actively promote
desegregation. Not only had he
created his commission on Civil Rights, that really set the agenda for
the federal government over the next 20 years, but in 1948
he uses his executive powers to desegregate the U.S. military.
And just a few years before, during World War II,
in fact, blood that was donated for
the wounded, and for casualties, blood was segregated
in the US military. You had segregated units in the military.
By the time you get to Korea, think about it, 1950 to 1953,
by the time you get to Korea, you have integrated units.
And so the United States military actually leads the way
in this drive for greater equality,
and, frankly, desegregation. But we look to Brown, and Brown is an important decision
of the Supreme Court. In 1954...
1954, the court
rendered a decision that would essentially strike down
the 1896 decision of the Court, the precedent of the court,
in Plessy vs. Ferguson, and we talked about that one
a little bit earlier. Now, if you remember, in Plessy...
just as a kind of review here... in Plessy,
the court had determined that separate treatment,
so long as it was not unequal treatment,
was acceptable under the Constitution. Homer Plessy had wanted to ride in a particular
car for which he'd bought a ticket,
but was denied that opportunity, and he sued
claiming that his rights as a citizen of the United States
had been trampled upon simply because of race. And the court said,
that's okay, so long as the treatment is equal.
That little bit, that little connection, is what makes Brown
so important.
There are some things you want to understand about about Brown.
First of all, it's not simply one case,
because the full title will be Brown vs. Board of Education
of Topeka Kansas,
it was not just Topeka. It's a number of scattered cases
around the country. A number of these cases,
though, had a kind of common theme.
And it involved distance, I just want to speak to this very briefly.
It was not uncommon for African-American students,
or other students, for that matter,
there's a Hispanic element of this case, but
it's not uncommon for African-American students, for instance, that there's a
good example in South Carolina,
of course there's a similar one in Topeka, to have to go further,
to endure more duress get to school
than white children would have to endure.
In Topeka, for instance, it was a matter of having to walk,
or travel, about a mile to get to an African-American designated school.
And during the walk you're bypassing a much closer white school to do it.
There's no reason other than race why the African-American child should not be
able to attend that closer white school. That was the argument of the parents.
For one thing, if you're a parent,
you understand, you know, how much more dangerous it can be the further
a child has to travel.
In South Carolina, for instance, it's a notion of distance
around a body of water and bussing,
school buses, and transportation not necessarily being readily available.
So, in essence, in the most dire circumstances,
you're making it much more difficult for one group of people, one group of
children,
and we're talking about children, here, one group of children to
get an education.
And if we all value education, it's difficult to find any way to defend
that unless one holds in one's mind certain ideas about race,
and the lack of necessity for free providing education, public education,
for particular children.
So the Brown case goes through the courts, and it comes to the Supreme Court.
And they render their decision then in 1954.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had been the previous governor of
California,
nominated and approved under Eisenhower, and,
formerly, had been a Republican, the same governor who had been involved with
the internment of Japanese citizens
from California during the Second World War.
The thought was--by the way, his name was Earl Warren,
I guess I should throw that in--but the thought was
that Warren, because he was a Republican and a Republican nominee,
would be relatively conservative in his judicial views on the court.
It turned out to be quite different and in fact,
Warren will play an integral role in leading the court in the Brown decision
to a unanimous decision
that reverses Court precedent.
The NAACP had decided,
by the late 1940's, to shift away from this total focus on,
sort of, professional education, and graduate education,
to looking at K-12, kindergarten through 12th grade.
The argument that's made by lawyers no less than Thurgood Marshall,
and the lawyers of the NAACP, will be
that separate treatment is inherently
unequal,
that what separation produces,
not merely in practice, not merely in practical terms, but in theoretical,
abstract terms, that the very
idea of separation
imbues the group that is separated out
with a sense of inferiority.
In other words, and I always try to do it this way, you know, kind of personalize it,
but if you put yourself in the position a parent or a child
of elementary school age, you can imagine
a child coming home from school one day;
you can't help but notice that he or she goes further to school, that it's more
difficult to get to school, but perhaps
can even notice...can't help but notice
that their school is not of the same quality.
The building's not the same. The grounds aren't kept the same.
And the fact is, it was often the case that,
most often the case that, per-pupil expenditures simply were lower,
much lower, for African-Americans, say, in the South,
than they were for white children in public schools.
But you can imagine this child coming home one day and asking a parent,
what's wrong with me? You know.
And anytime you see a child suffer that way, and
start asking those kind of questions, you all know as well as I do how difficult
that can be.
We know as adults that the world's not always fair, but it's awful hard,
awfully hard, to see a child experience that kind of unfairness
in their own lives.
Well, that's the argument, ultimately, that
the NAACP made, and it's the argument that swayed the Warren Court.
They determined that the educational policies
of the various states involved, and, more broadly, of
many school systems in the United States, were inherently unequal and contrary to
the 14th amendment, which guaranteed equal rights of citizenship.
Education was the responsibility of State and of the Federal Government.
And they went to the point of saying that even if equal facilities were
provided,
the very act of separating people based on race,
being exclusionary, was unacceptable
under the language of the Constitution
in the 14th amendment.
It's not dissimilar from someone in the law school, we talked about the cases
earlier about law and education.
You know, part of a college education is making contacts,
it's networking, it's getting to know people who, later on, may be useful as you
move up
professionally.
And if you're segregated, if you're excluded from those
relationships, or the possibility of having those relationships, then
you are at a severe disadvantage as you move forward
in life. That's the basic idea of the Brown decision.
The question, though, is what do you do about it? The Supreme Court has the power
to actually force
governmental entities to undertake certain actions of correction,
as well as private entities. But a year later the court came out
with, sort of, the second Brown decision,
or a caveat to the Brown decision having to do with enforcement.
And there's an interesting phrase that's used in
this court order, effectively,
that called for the desegregation of American schools.
The issue is one of time. How long do you have?
Does it need to be now? Does it need to be later? And this goes back to the whole
Civil Rights question. It goes back to Reconstruction.
It goes back to Frederick Douglass-- when is enough enough?
William Lloyd Garrison.
When, if something is mine by right, how long should I have to wait to have it?
If it's mine by right ought I not to have it now?
That's the question. The court's
answer to this question of when must desegregation be completed.
That answer was to use the phrase "with all
deliberate speed," which is a vague phrase.
And what that does is open the door for resistance.
In other words, the court didn't say, by next Tuesday, you must desegregate, now,
desegregate. The court, I think, sought
to allow school systems to develop plans for
a timely but reasonable sort of desegregation
in the Court's view. But, ultimately, they ended up opening the
door
to allow segregationists.
Those who wanted to keep the education system segregated,
allowing them to stall, to draw out the process just as long as they could,
because every day they can hold it off was another day you had segregation.
Eisenhower wasn't overly active.
Remember how he had worked behind the scenes with Joseph McCarthy
to sort of undermine McCarthy. He refuses to speak out
in support of the court's decision. He refuses to
undertake policy, or overt action, that would encourage,
or even force, school systems to act quickly.
In the interim we see the emergence, or the reemergence,
of a revived Ku Klux Klan.
And we know about the Klan from Reconstruction, from the 20's, and
here the clan emerges
again in the 1950's, in a major way,
as many working-class whites in particular seek to
use threats and violence and
other means to stop this process of desegregation.
But, we also see the emergence of something called the
White Citizens Councils.
And these White Citizens Councils
sprang up across the South, and, really,
different parts of the nation.
The White Citizens Council is known as the Uptown Klan. They basically wanted the
same things,
but there was a desire to disassociate the Citizens Councils
from the Klan and what the Klan represented.
The language is different. The White Citizens Councils occasionally, you know,
you'll hear talk of
race outright, but you'll often hear that talk couched in other terms.
Now, I want to be very, very careful here,
because it's accurate, but it's not
total, what I'm saying. And what I mean by that is,
the White Citizens Council might speak in terms of
federal authority and the relationship
of the national government to the state and
they might talk about such things as States' Rights,
as well as race. Now, granted,
the issue of States' Rights is still alive. There are still
issues of the federal organization and structure in our Constitution, certain
powers are designated to the states, others to the federal government,
but I think it's clear from the historical record
that you began to see a linkage between these terms,
certainly by the 1950's, in the rhetoric of
the White Citizens Councils. The express purpose
of these councils, and, ultimately, of the Klan was to prevent
this process of desegregation, both in education, and, more broadly, in society
from going forward. We also see
in the 1950's an exodus from the public schools,
as white parents, rather than see their children attend school
with kids of other races, chose to pull them out of school
and put them in private schools.
So what we end up with is not a clear
decision on the issue of segregation.
Rather, we end up with a decision on segregation, but an issue of
enforcement
that almost lends itself to
holding out, to expanding the process just as long as you can,
extending it as long as you can, And,
of course, that leads to a great deal of strife over the next
decade or two.