The Prairie Landscape

Keep Learning: Brown v. Board 50 Years Later: Conversations on Integration, Race, and the Courts

Brown and Beyond; Framing the Decision in Historical Context
By: Barbara Ransby, Associate Professor, African American Studies & History University of Illinois at Chicago

Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed in the struggle for racial justice in America. It was not, however, either the beginning or the end of that struggle. May 17, 2004 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Supreme Court decision that paved the way for the desegregation of public schools and facilities. The second Brown decision, handed down a year later, addressed the issue of implementation and reminded supporters that the battle was far from over. While the 1954 ruling effectively overturned the 1896 Plessy decision that justified Jim Crow segregation with the mandate of "separate but equal," it was the 1955 decision, known as Brown II, that introduced the term "with all deliberate speed," allowing local school systems to move slowly rather than immediately with their desegregation efforts. Still, the Brown decision was a legal landmark. Under the leadership of Justice Earl Warren, a liberal Californian, for one of the first times since Reconstruction the court took a stand on the side of racial equality.

Graduate student George McLaurin sits in an anteroom apart from the other students while attending his first class at the University of Oklahoma in 1948. (NAACP Collection, Library of Congress)

On May 17, 1954, a tall, tired but confident Thurgood Marshall, the man who would one day become the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, walked into the highest court in the land and made a compelling case for a greater degree of racial justice in America’s schools. As a part of a four-year legal effort to confront segregation head on, Marshall and over two dozen lawyers and 200 litigants had been hard at work. The idea was to directly confront the notion of "separate but equal" since the reality was that things had never been equal, even though they were indeed quite separate. An earlier strategy demanded that local officials at least accommodate black citizens with comparable facilities and resources. However, beginning in 1950 the civil rights leaders contended that as long as the races were forcibly segregated, equality would remain a pipe dream. The goal of Brown then was not simple integration but desegregation as a means to greater equity and access, including the ability to participate in the political process from which the majority of blacks was thoroughly excluded in the 1950s.

It is difficult for the current generation of young people to remember a time when every aspect of life was colored by race. Public restrooms, movie theatres, cemeteries, restaurants, buses, trains, and everything else you can imagine were labeled "whites only" and "colored" throughout the South, and more subtle forms of Jim Crow practices penetrated the North as well. Brown sent a signal that the country was ready to change all that. At least that is what the lawyers and litigants hoped when they walked out of the courtroom that day. Although the victory would prove limited, still, Brown was a step forward for a nation and a people. But the story of Brown did not begin and end on the steps of the Supreme Court or with the cast of characters that argued and decided the case. The story is much larger and longer than that.

The two decades that preceded Brown were a period of tumultuous struggle in communities throughout the South. The struggles were not always dramatic but there was a steady push and pull between those who wanted to look backward toward the slave past and those who envisioned a more hopeful future. The 1940s witnessed enormous growth in the membership of the NAACP, the leading civil rights organization of the day and the prime catalyst behind the court cases that led up to Brown. People joined the organization in record numbers and in local communities throughout the country African Americans and their allies pushed for economic justice and first-class citizenship. During the war years many took up the slogan "Double V," victory against fascism abroad and racism at home. Those activists and agitators included teachers, miners, maids, porters, students, and journalists, and their efforts set the stage for the 1954 victory. Latinos, Native Americans, immigrant and women’s rights groups added their voices and numbers to the demand for a more inclusive democracy and helped to infuse meaning into Brown over the course of the decades that followed.

Protester wearing a desegregation sign outside Mecklenburg Co. School Board, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1961. (Charlotte Observer File Photo)

Fifty years after Brown we live in a very different world; however, some fundamental challenges remain. Tens of thousands of children live below the poverty line and many cannot afford the cost of a college education. And perhaps most ironically, more than a generation after Brown, over half of all black and latino children attend schools that are majority minority.

All over the country civil rights and legal organizations, schools, and civic groups will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision in a variety of forms and venues. In the state of Illinois, the Illinois Humanities Council has convened a group of individuals and organizations to plan a series of programs to help recollect, reflect on, and re-imagine the possibilities that surrounded the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 (see Statewide Calendar of Events, next page). A part of remembering that moment in time fairly and fully requires that we look beyond May 17, 1954 and beyond the courtroom. Brown was a part of a larger chronology of civil rights and racial justice campaigns. The IHC committee has planned a series of commemorative programs that invite us to think about Brown in the broadest terms possible, from its impact on the arts to the international context in which it occurred.

History is not static. We revive, re-color, and re-assess our collective past with each passing anniversary, commemoration, and generation. Five decades after Brown we engage history with our own contemporary dilemmas and look for clarity in the past, some margin of consensus in the present, and most importantly a greater confidence about the future.

Download the High School Curriculum and Teacher's Guide on the history, meaning, and legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.