Professor Erika George on Brown vs. Board
of Education
 A
Black Lawyer’s Reflections on the Legacy of Brown.
By: Erika George, Law Professor at the S.J. Quinney College of
Law, University of Utah
I am here today because half a century ago, the United States
Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Declaring
racial segregation in public schools an unconstitutional deprivation
of equal education opportunities, the Court in Brown
signaled the end of public and legally mandated racial separation
paving the way for the civil rights movement. In short, without
Brown, I simply could not be. Indeed, it chills me to
imagine where our society would be today had the Court failed
to formally bring to an end the legal doctrine of “separate
but equal.”
Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. In Plessy,
the Supreme Court rejected a Black man’s challenge to an
1890 Louisiana law mandating separate train cars for Blacks and
Whites and established the “separate but equal” doctrine.
The Plessy Court’s conclusion that separate but
equal facilities for Blacks and Whites did not violate the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment became the constitutional
justification for a brutal, deeply entrenched and violently enforced
system of racial Apartheid in America.
Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote the sole dissent in Plessy,
objecting that legally enforced segregation of the races would
mark Blacks with a badge of inferiority. His observations could
not have been more astute. Following Plessy, generations
of African-Americans would live and die under the indignities
of a proliferation of “Jim Crow” laws strictly and
violently enforced throughout the American South.
My parents, my grandparents, and my great-grand parents were
born into a segregated society sanctioned by a system of discriminatory
laws. My family was from Louisiana, where any resistance by an
African-American to the system of racial segregation intended
to relegate him or her to an inferior place in society was met
with brutality. When I was a child, my mother showed me the scars
she got as a child from a mob beating she suffered after playing
on the “wrong” (the Whites only) playground near her
home in Louisiana.
I was not born in Louisiana. I spent my childhood in Chicago,
after my mother’s repeated arrests for participation in
civil rights protests drove my parents up North. I am eternally
grateful to have been born into a different world, one made possible
in no small measure by the Court’s decision in Brown.
Brown did not bring about the world we live in overnight,
indeed after the ruling, various Southern legislatures passed
laws imposing penalties on anyone who attempted to implement desegregation
and enacted school closing plans that authorized the suspension
of public education to keep Black and White children separate.
Despite these obstructions, Brown did serve as a catalyst
for change. Arguably, the legal and social obstacles that many
Southern states erected in an effort to thwart integration served
as flashpoints for the subsequent student protests that launched
the civil rights movement.
Brown, coupled with the struggles and sacrifices made
by people who courageously stood up for their convictions and
advance the cause of social justice and equality, has brought
America closer to realizing its promise.
As we become an increasingly multiracial society, the benefits
of diversity and equality remain just as valid fifty years after
Brown – while we have made tremendous strides towards social
justice and equality, we still have quite a distance to go.
Utah Minority Bar Association
c/o Utah State Bar, Law & Justice Center
645 South 200 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84111-3834
mailto: umbalaw@utahbar.org
|
