Brown still doing its damage

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views May 17, 2004]

In a 1995 Issues & Views commentary, "The Issues is Economics, Not Who Likes You," we cited the views of several principal blacks -- all of whom offered negative opinions on the highly-touted Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Law professor Alex Johnson, declaring "Brown was a mistake," argued that integration should be a voluntary affair, not a practice forced by the state.

His words were echoed by Rev. Kevin Cosby, who once led a successful offensive against forced school busing in Louisville, Kentucky. Cosby recognized the importance of the loss of indigenous, black-run schools, along with the subsequent loss of other cultural institutions.

In a 1995 case involving forced integration (Missouri v. Jenkins ), Justice Clarence Thomas made reference to the Brown decision. He maintained that the notion should be put aside forever that an all-black school district is proof of the need for legal remedy. "At some point," wrote Thomas, "we must recognize that the judiciary is not omniscient, and that all problems do not require a remedy of constitutional proportions."

Now, after years of turmoil in the country's education system, and after the applications of some of the strangest judicial and legislative remedies, the courts continue to undermine efforts to restore neighborhood schools where administrators would not occupy themselves with racial head counting.

Thanks in part to the power appropriated in the ruling on Brown, the judiciary branch of government has become so important politically that court appointments are treated as a dead serious business by the country's political antagonists. Paul Craig Roberts, in "An Infamous Ruling," on the Lew Rockwell site, describes the impact of Brown:

Brown gave the judiciary the power to impose its morality on society, regardless of legislation or societal values. . . . It ushered in kritarchy -- government by judges. Kritarchy is fundamentally at odds with the separation of powers and the character of the American political system. Now that judges rule, the fight over Court appointments has become a life and death matter for the two political parties. Even worse, in place of good will and persuasion Brown substituted coercion as the basis for reform. . . .

James Reston commented that "the Court's opinion reads more like an expert paper on sociology." Columbia Law professor Herbert Wechsler, a consultant to the NAACP in the case, said that Brown would have to be "accepted on faith" as there was no constitutional principle that justifies the ruling. . . .

Although decided in the name of equality, Brown ushered in inequality before the law with the racial quotas and preferences that followed in its wake, in the end invading even freedom of conscience of the American people.

Thomas Sowell, in his syndicated column, "Half a century after Brown" (5/12/04), asks "Where has Brown v. Board of Education been positively harmful? " and answers his question by agreeing with Roberts' assessment of activist judges:

The flimsy and cavalier reasoning used by the Supreme Court, which based its decision on grounds that would hardly sustain a conviction for jay-walking, set a pattern of judicial activism that has put American law in disarray on all sorts of issues that extend far beyond racial cases. The pretense that the Court was interpreting the Constitution of the United States added insult to injury.

The Court got away with this, despite some calls for impeachment, because it was outlawing a set of racial practices that the country as a whole found abhorrent. If the Justices took a few liberties with the law and the facts, who cared?

After half a century of unbridled judicial activism on many fronts, we now know that victims of frivolous lawsuits and violent crime care, among others. And restoring law to our courts may take another 50 years -- if it can be done at all.

Some things once done can never be undone.

The existence of Brown, this most unconstitutional of court decisions, has become more important than ever to advocates and supporters of just about every socially-undermining and "progressive" movement. It is the foundation on which scores of "causes" are now constructed. Professor David Garrow, the liberal biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr., states outright that it is the Brown decision that makes it possible to get the courts to mandate homosexual marriage.

What about those blacks back in the 1950s and 1960s, who opposed the principles behind Brown ? The steamroller of integration flattened them and left them in the dust, as it did all other voices of dissent.

There were many blacks like author Zora Neale Hurston, who had grown up in all-black towns, and expressed shame at the implications of a court decision that sanctioned the social need for blacks to intrude themselves among whites . [See Hurston's comments.] Besides enduring the usual castigation of "Uncle Tom," such blacks were deemed to suffer from a "false nostalgia," a term used recently by Jesse Jackson in response to a man who dared to cite the positive aspects of his all-black school experience and criticized the destruction of black schools.

For black leaders and other elites who played dominant roles in selling the masses on integration-or-bust, it was and is still mandatory to maintain the conventional view on Brown and on forced integration in general. Everything that existed before blacks were included in the mainstream, these leaders teach, is to be condemned and discarded. Yet, not all blacks agreed with such teachings during the heat of the 1950s and '60s, nor do they all agree today.

Jonathan Tilove, in "Brown decision a dirge for black schools" (Times-Picayune, 5/16/04), writes about the other side of the story:

To many, Brown -- handed down May 17, 1954 -- was also a dirge for something precious and irreplaceable: a network of black schools almost sacred to those they served and wholly devoted in their belief in black ability and pursuit of black advancement.

"Brown was turned against us. We lost our schools," said Elias Blake Jr., who graduated in 1947 from Risley High School in Brunswick, Ga., and credits it with transforming him from an indifferent student, sights set no higher than a job at the local hotel, into someone who became valedictorian of his college class and ultimately president of Clark College in Atlanta. . . .

For those who knew or came to know these schools, recounting their story is a mission -- to more truly and fully record history, to render thanks and give credit where due. It is a remarkable tale of how black communities, under the thumb and under the radar of oppression, created schools that imbued black children with a sense of confidence and possibility in the very midst of a system determined to limit them. . . .

Today, the schools' successes resonate with more than historical interest. In the decades since Brown, an American dilemma of legally sanctioned, separate and unequal education was replaced by a stubborn gap in black and white educational achievement, endlessly calibrated and worried over. Brown's most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown's implementation destroyed. [See "Williston High."]

Glittering amid the ruins, the answers are straightforward: Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. What is astonishing, Siddle Walker said, is how many black children attended schools during segregation that delivered on these objectives, and how few do so now.

As early as the 1970s, economist Thomas Sowell, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was writing about "patterns of black excellence" at segregated schools like Atlanta's Booker T. Washington, which produced Martin Luther King Jr.; Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, which produced Thurgood Marshall; McDonough No. 35 in New Orleans, which produced the first black state superintendent of schools (California's Wilson Riles); and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. . . .

By 1899, students at Dunbar -- then called the M Street School -- scored higher on citywide tests than white students in Washington. Lawrence Graves, class of 1940, recalls that his homeroom of 32 boys produced nine medical doctors, one dentist, three judges and four lawyers. "All the rest were educators," said Graves, a retired District of Columbia principal. . . .

"Today it's a cliché, 'it takes a village to raise a child.' It's just a slogan. But it was not a slogan in my day," said Faustine Jones-Wilson, a former editor of the Journal of Negro Education, who in 1981 wrote about her alma mater in the book A Traditional Model of Education Excellence: Dunbar High School of Little Rock, Arkansas. . . .

Unfortunately, says Siddle Walker,* that rich, coordinated network of able black educators no longer exists. "You can't go back," she said.

Not only is there no going back, as we have seen over these past several days, the Brown decision has attained sacred status, with politicians eager to bask in its glow -- from sitting Presidents to aspiring presidential candidates. As it continues to do its damage in the courtroom, Brown now plays a major role in assisting the ambitious to publicize their anti-racist credentials -- a prerequisite for almost any career.

* [See Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press).]

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