“SEPARATE IS NOT EQUAL” — Ending School Segregation

by Linda Thieman

Several years ago, I landed an assignment from a children's magazine to do a story on Brown v. Board of Education.  I believe I got the assignment because I tracked down the family of Oliver Brown for an interview.  Being as yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, I thought I'd run this article again here on Blog for Iowa.

This story is relevant to members of Democracy for Iowa today for several reasons, one being that it illustrates so clearly that whereas great change CAN be affected, it often takes decades of hard work and an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes organization.  As I recall from my interview with Cheryl Brown Henderson, she was upset with the usual press (and history book) pieces that portrayed her father as the lone party in this particular fight against segregation, and she was dedicating her life, in part, to setting the record straight.

In 1950, Oliver Brown, a minister from Topeka, Kansas, paid a visit to his neighborhood school–Sumner Elementary.  He went there with a friend, who would serve as a witness, and with his seven-year-old daughter, Linda.  When Rev. Brown tried to enroll Linda at Sumner, he was told his daughter could not go to school there.  The reason:  Sumner was an all-white school, and Linda Brown was African American.  So Linda was forced to make the long, daily trek to Monroe Elementary, an all-black school in another part of town.

Oliver Brown was not alone in standing up to racial discrimination in the Topeka elementary schools.  “It wasn't just us,” says Cheryl Brown Henderson, Brown's youngest daughter.  In fact, the Brown family was part of a well-organized plan to formally challenge the laws of school segregation.  Ultimately, Oliver Brown lent his name to the most important decision ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court.  This landmark, 1954 decision was called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In Brown, the Court outlawed segregation in the nation's schools.  Chief Justice Earl Warren explained: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race…deprive the [minority] children of equal educational opportunities?”  The historic conclusion:  “We believe that it does….”

The Brown victory was long in coming.  “We were not the first to file suit,” states Henderson, co-founder and executive director of the Brown Foundation.  The first legal challenge to school segregation was filed in Massachusetts in 1849.  In 1896, however, along came a Supreme Court decision that did great damage to the fight to end segregation in schools.  Surprisingly, the case had nothing to do with schools at all.  This case was called Plessy v. Ferguson.  Homer Plessy was a Louisiana shoemaker who considered himself “one-eighth colored.”  An 1887 Florida law required separate railroad cars for whites and “coloreds.” This law quickly spread throughout the South.  Plessy, the railroads, and a group of black businessmen from New Orleans, decided to fight this unfair law.  Plessy bought a train ticket, stepped into a “whites-only” railroad car, and was promptly arrested.  The Supreme Court ruled against Plessy.  They said that segregation was acceptable as long as “equal” accommodations were provided for both races.  In practice, however, “separate but equal” did not exist.  Accommodations for blacks were usually far worse than those for whites.

Brown v. Board of Education was the end result of a six-year-long school integration program.  This plan was designed and carried out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  The NAACP asked for the help of Oliver Brown and twelve other African American parents from Topeka, representing 20 children.  These parents tried to enroll their children in all-white neighborhood schools.  Once refused, the parents reported back to the NAACP with the proof.  Along the road to the Supreme Court, four other cases from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were combined to form the case known as Brown.

The 1954 Brown decision overturned the 1896 Plessy decision.  The Court ruled that separate schools cause emotional scars in minority children; because of this, “separate” can never be “equal.”  Today, the Brown Foundation works to keep this landmark decision alive.  They provide scholarships to minority students who want to be teachers, and they offer traveling displays about Brown to schools.  In addition, through their partnership with the National Park Service, they work to preserve the history of Brown.  Their first project:  the preservation of the old Monroe Elementary building, the former all-black school where Linda Brown and countless other African American children received their primary education.