50 years later, Brown remains unfulfilled

Could you imagine the excitement of black communities across America on May 17, 1954, the day the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision and declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional?

Imagine the euphoria of black parents across the country who dreamed of something better for their children and insisted that education was the best way to improve their circumstances.

Imagine their joy as they realized that their children would no longer have to attend dilapidated schools and read from second and third hand books.

Imagine the excitement of those whose lives had been defined by the humiliating insistence that they were less than, and having this view structured in the very order of things.

Imagine their joy at the possibility that the Court's decision constituted a death sentence to Jim and Jane Crow.

But we know what followed. We know the court refused to call for a "forthwith decree" — an order that desegregation should begin immediately. Instead, the justices ruled in Brown II that the schools should be desegregated with "all deliberate speed. "We know of the ritualized violence that followed the court decision: Mobs of whites throughout the South randomly attacked African Americans with impunity because they knew they could get away with it.

The vicious murder of Emmett Till constituted a response among many white southerners to attempts to dismantle their way of life. In 1956, more than 100 congressmen from the South signed what was called the Southern Manifesto, rejecting what they took to be "the court's clear abuse of power. "And we are all familiar with Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 at Central High School, when Army troops had to escort nine black students passed an angry white mob. We know, in the end, that by 1964, almost ten years after the Brown decision, only two percent of black students in the South attended integrated schools.

I mention this only to remind us that the court's decision did not constitute a popular mandate. Many Americans, particularly in the South, viewed the decision with trepidation (an example of what many conservatives today deride as judicial activism). They were not convinced that the descendants of slaves warranted the status of citizen. Nor were they convinced that the continued segregation of African Americans fundamentally compromised American democracy. Instead, some wondered aloud about the threat posed by this disenfranchised minority.

We need to be clear, especially in these trying political times, that the court and the nation addressed issues of race as a result of grassroots struggle. The pressure from below helped create a climate that made the issues of desegregation, of civil rights politically palatable.

As a result, we witnessed the passage of important legislation in 1965, not just the Voting Rights Act, but the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which gave the Johnson administration the power to withdraw funds from segregated schools. We have the court in 1971 ordering the North Carolina school district of Charlotte-Mecklenberg to bus students to schools beyond their neighborhoods. And these efforts translated into recognizable gains.

But immediately there was an intense white backlash. White riots in Boston protested school busing and some called for an antibusing Constitutional amendment, all of which signaled what can be called the moral fatigue of the nation regarding issues of race.

By 1974, many white Americans were simply tired of addressing the plight of black folks. Instead they expressed concerns about safety and security, revealing that, for many, our nation's interests in its darker citizens did not stem from some fundamental commitment to transforming democracy and healing the wounds of a broken nation. Rather, theirs was a political calculation: a strategy aimed at containing the energies of a long-suffering people by incorporating a few of their desired aims and ends.

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In that year, 1974, the court overturned in Milliken I the metropolitan-area plan, which aimed to desegregate Detroit's inner city schools. The court believed and had us to believe that the schools of chocolate cities, like Detroit, Newark and Jersey City, could in fact be desegregated on their own. The vanilla suburbs were off limits. All of this reminds us that our nation has never genuinely committed to Brown. We know this, because when we look out on the millions of black students today we see them attending schools as segregated as those in 1969.

When we think about Brown fifty years later, what comes to mind? We know that the Reagan administration repealed the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972, the principal federal law used to spend public money on desegregation. We know about the resegregation cases of the 1990s and about the court's decision regarding the school program in Kansas City.

What has been the result? The percentage of blacks attending majority white schools in the South, which peaked in 1988 at 43 percent, has fallen to 31 percent nationally. We have witnessed, in effect, the failure of Brown.

So what does it mean to remember Brown fifty years? It means we must work even harder to make real the promises of democracy for everyone. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. GS 97 is an associate professor in the Department of Religion.