[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 61 (Tuesday, May 17, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   SIMPLE JUSTICE--BROWN VERSUS BOARD OF EDUCATION 40 YEARS AGO TODAY

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, today we commemorate the 40th anniversary 
of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown versus Board of Education. 
Forty years ago today, the Nation's highest Court spoke in one clear, 
unanimous and ringing voice that the Constitution's guarantee to every 
person of the equal protection of the laws prohibits official school 
segregation in the Nation's public schools. Brown was more than just a 
judicial decision--it was a powerful call to redeem the promise of the 
Constitution and remove the stain of racism from the fabric of our 
society.
  The legal battle that produced the Brown decision was a heroic one. 
The battle was led by Thurgood Marshall, the brilliant lawyer who 
headed the NAACP's team of lawyers and who later served with such 
magnificent distinction himself on the Supreme Court. Justice Marshall 
was aided by one of the best legal teams ever assembled: William T. 
Coleman, Jr., who later served brilliantly as Secretary of 
Transportation; Louis Pollak, Robert Carter, and Constance Baker 
Mottley, all of whom went on to serve with great distinction on the 
Federal bench. Two other outstanding lawyers on the team were James 
Nabrit and Jack Greenberg. Their goal was to abolish the hateful Jim 
Crow laws that existed throughout much of the Nation, and with Brown 
and the cases that followed it, they succeeded.
  Today is a day to remember one of the greatest triumphs in our 
judicial history, and to honor the people who turn the dream of justice 
for millions of our people into a constitutional reality.
  A recent article by Patricia J. Williams which appeared in the 
Nation, which is entitled ``Among Moses' Bridge-Builders,'' describes 
the history of the decision, and its continuing legacy, in the lives of 
the Brown children. Although their names will be forever attached to 
the cause of desegregation, the Browns insist that they not be made 
into icons, that it is the struggle of all African-Americans that 
deserve to be remembered and honored. The article is a moving and 
thoughtful account. I commend it to my colleagues, and I ask unanimous 
consent that it may be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From the Nation, May 23, 1994]

                      Among Moses' Bridge-Builders

                       (By Patricia J. Williams)

       When The Nation asked me to write an essay on the fortieth 
     anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I felt as though 
     I were being called to the grandest project of my career. 
     This is the case, after all, that shaped my life's 
     possibilities, the case that, like a stone monument, stands 
     for just about all the racial struggles with which this 
     country still grapples. When The Nation also suggested that a 
     conversation with the Brown family might be the focal point 
     of such an essay, I actually got nervous. The symbolic 
     significance of the case had definitely made them Icons of 
     the Possible in my mind: Oliver Brown, now deceased, whose 
     name is first in a list of many others and whose name, as a 
     result, became the reference for all subsequent generations 
     of discussion; Leola Brown Montgomery, Oliver Brown's widow; 
     Linda Brown Thompson, the little girl (formerly a teacher for 
     Head Start and now program assistant for the Brown 
     Foundation) on whose behalf Oliver Brown sued; the middle 
     daughter, Terry Brown Tyler; and Cheryl Brown Henderson, the 
     youngest daughter and also an educator.
       ``Don't make icons of us,'' was just about the first thing 
     out of Cheryl's mouth, when she finally responded to the 
     gushy messages I left on the answering machine at the Brown 
     Foundation, the organization she founded and heads. But . . . 
     but . . . , I said, distinctly crestfallen.
       ``It was pure accident that the case bears our name,'' she 
     continued, with no chance for me to argue about it. ``It's 
     just a name, it could have been a lot of people's names. It's 
     not our case. Ask us about the Brown Foundation.''
       The foundation is an organization dedicated to ``setting 
     the record straight,'' as Cheryl Brown Henderson put it. 
     ``I'm afraid that a lot of people believe the lawsuit to be 
     something that happened as a very isolated incident, when in 
     fact there were many, many cases that preceded it. We're 
     talking about public school cases that began back in 1849, 
     and, in Kansas, began in 1881.'' I knew that, of course--``of 
     course'' only because teaching the history of civil rights is 
     a big chunk of what I do for a living. I'm even someone who's 
     always complaining that too often the civil rights movement 
     has been too neatly condensed into a few lionized 
     personalities, rather than understood as a historical stream 
     of events. But still--this was different somehow, this was 
     Brown, after all, and here I was in the presence of Legend 
     Incarnate and, well, inquiring minds do want to know. Of 
     course, I didn't quite put it that way. I just asked them 
     to share the sustained insight and privileged perspective 
     that residing inside the edifice of great moments in 
     social history might bring.
       ``Our family came to Kansas for the railroad in 1923,'' 
     said Mrs. Leola Brown patiently, apparently quite used to 
     cutting through the exuberent excesses of questions with no 
     borders, never mind answers. ``A lot of the early African-
     American and Hispanic residents of Topeka came for employment 
     purposes. The headquarters of the Santa Fe railroad were 
     here. There were decent wages and you could be part of a 
     union and have job security, those sorts of things.''
       ``When did you join the N.A.A.C.P.?'' I pressed, longing 
     for detail about what, at odd moments, I caught myself 
     thinking of as ``our'' story. ``Were there any significant 
     events in your life that precipitated your involvement in the 
     case against the school board?''
       ``We joined for no specific incident. It was in 1948 or 
     '49, something like that. There was nothing specific. It was 
     everything. We were discriminated against in all phases of 
     life. We couldn't go to the restaurants or the shows, or if 
     we did, we had to sit in a certain place, we had to go 
     through a certain door to get there . . . '' she trailed off. 
     ``It wasn't only about the schools, you see, it was about all 
     of the things that were against us, all the rejection and 
     neglect, all the things we could not do here.''
       As Mrs. Leola Brown spoke, describing conditions that 
     affected millions of blacks as well as her family, I 
     understood why her daughters were so insistent on my not 
     making this story into an exceptional one. It was a story 
     that couldn't, shouldn't be made into private property; it 
     was an exemplary story, but far from unique.
       My family too joined the N.A.A.C.P. not because of a great 
     event but because of all the ordinary daily grinding little 
     events that made life hard in the aggregate. I knew the back 
     of the bus stories, the peanut gallery stories, the baggage 
     stories, the having to go to the bathroom in the woods 
     stories--the myriad, mundane, nearly invisible yet 
     monumentally important constraints that circumscribed blacks, 
     and not only in the South.
       My father, who grew up in Savannah, Georgia, during the 
     1920s and '30s, remembers not only the inconveniences but the 
     dangers of being black under Jim Crow. ``You had to be 
     careful of white people; you got out of the way, or you'd get 
     hurt, immediately. If you saw a white person coming, you got 
     off the sidewalk. Don't make too much noise. Know which side 
     of the street to walk on. You were always conscious of the 
     difference. The big conversation in all `colored' homes 
     was just that, color. It affected everybody.''
       ``That's exactly why Brown is indeed `our' story,'' advised 
     a friend of mine who, being fifteen or so years older than I, 
     was old enough to have worked for N.A.A.C.P causes and gone 
     on enough marches to have worn out many pairs of shoes. ``The 
     civil rights movement was all about ordinary people who 
     weren't necessarily on the road to Damascus. If some lent 
     their names, other lent their backs, or their expertise or 
     their lives. It was life-threatening work after all, so 
     nobody did it to get their name up in lights; you did it 
     because there was no alternative. Neither fame nor anonymity 
     existed as issues per se--that's come later, as the country 
     seems to have sorted out who it going to remember and what it 
     will forget. It was about group survival. You were always 
     thinking about what would make it better for the children.''
       I pressed the Browns about this centrality of segregation 
     in people's lives. Segregation affected most aspects of daily 
     life, they explained, but they noted that the situation in 
     Kansas was not exactly like what was going on in many 
     Southern states. The neighborhood in which the Browns lived, 
     for example, was fully integrated at the time the suit was 
     initiated, and unlike many children even today, Linda Brown, 
     in the wake of the case, was able to finish her education at 
     integrated schools. The Browns describe most of the 
     neighborhoods in Topeka as having been pretty stable over 
     time--although the Browns' old neighborhood and the all-white 
     school that was the object of the suit no longer exist. ``The 
     highway has come through.'' Although Topeka did undergo some 
     of the divisive and segregating effects of urban renewal 
     programs, the Browns say Topeka did not undergo major 
     upheavals during the 1960s, as did most Northern cities where 
     white flight changed ``urban centers'' into ``inner cities'' 
     overnight.
       How, I asked, does one reconcile the racism that produced 
     the rigid school segregation in Topeka yet permitted people 
     to live side by side? ``You have to understand Kansas 
     history,'' said Cheryl Brown Henderson. ``The ear that won 
     the state the name of `Bleeding Kansas' was born out of the 
     battle about whether it would be a slave state or not. . . . 
     When Kansas became a free state, it became a kind of promised 
     land for people of African descent. They started moving in 
     great numbers westward, and out of the South.'' She described 
     the struggle to integrate schools as well over a hundred 
     years old, typified by such compromises as when ``the Kansas 
     legislature in the 1870's enacted a law saying that if you 
     were a community of a certain size, you could have segregated 
     schools, but if you were a small community, and it was not 
     economically feasible to have a school for, say, three 
     children--then you could not segregate on the basis of race. 
     This has always been a place of great contrasts and 
     contradictions.''
       Kansas is indeed unique in history, but it is not alone in 
     the peculiarity of its contradictory attitudes about race. 
     Perhaps part of the difficulty in reviewing the years since 
     Brown with anything like a hopeful countenance is that we as 
     a nation have continued to underestimate the complicated and 
     multiple forms of prejudice at work in the United States. 
     Segregation did not necessarily bar all forms of racial 
     mixing; its odd, layered hierarchies of racial attitude were 
     substantially more complicated than that. My grandfather, for 
     example, was a doctor who owned many of the houses in the 
     neighborhood where he lived. ``Dad's tenants were white, 
     Irish,'' says my father. ``But I never even thought about 
     where they went to school. We all lived kind of mixed up, but 
     the whole system made you think so separately that to this 
     day I don't know where they went to school.'' There is an old 
     story that speaks to the profundity of these invisible norms: 
     Three men in the 1930s South set out to go fishing in a small 
     boat. They spent the morning in perfectly congenial and lazy 
     conversation. At lunchtime, they all opened their 
     lunchbuckets and proceeded to eat, but not before the two 
     white men put an oar across the middle of the boat, dividing 
     them from their black companion.
       The continuing struggle for racial justice is tied up with 
     the degree to which segregation and the outright denial of 
     black humanity have been naturalized in our civilization. An 
     aunt of mine who is very light-skinned tells of a white woman 
     in her office who had just moved from Mississippi to 
     Massachusetts. ``The North is much more racist than the 
     South,'' she confided to my aunt. ``They don't give you any 
     credit at all for having white blood.'' This unblinking 
     racial ranking is summarized in the thoughts of James 
     Kilpatrick, who stated the case for Southern resistance in a 
     famous and impassioned plea:
       For this is what our Northern friends will not comprehend: 
     The South, agreeable as it may be to confessing some of its 
     sins and to bewailing its more manifest wickednesses, simply 
     does not concede that at bottom its basic attitude is 
     ``infected'' or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner 
     rebelliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of 
     truth in this whole controversy: Here and now, in his own 
     communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, 
     plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for 
     that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted 
     judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a 
     race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the 
     white race, as a race.
       This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are 
     not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as 
     such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the 
     proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it.
       Dealing with the intractability of this sort of twisted 
     social regard is what the years since Brown have been all 
     about. Legal remedy after legal remedy has been challenged on 
     the basis of assertions of not being able to ``force'' people 
     to get along, that ``social equality'' (or, these days, 
     ``market preference'') is just not something that can be 
     legally negotiated. One of the attorneys who worked on the 
     original Brown case, Columbia University School of Law 
     Professor Jack Greenberg, dismissed these arguments 
     concisely: ``You have to wonder,'' he says, ``how it is that 
     Plessy v. Ferguson, which made segregation the law for about 
     sixty years, didn't come in for the same kinds of attacks as 
     `special engineering.' ''
       Have you been disappointed by the years since 1954? I asked 
     Mrs. Leola Brown Montgomery. Of course, she said. And then 
     added, ``But I don't think that anybody anticipated the 
     country's response. The attorneys, the parents, we didn't 
     really understand the insidious nature of discrimination and 
     to what lengths people would go to not share educational 
     resources: leaving neighborhoods en masse because African-
     American children could now go to the school in your 
     neighborhood. Not offering the same kinds of programs, or 
     offering a lesser educational program in the same school--I 
     don't think anybody anticipated what we've ended up with * * 
     * But we're currently still in the midst of the country's 
     response, in my opinion.''
       Duke University School of Law Professor Jerome Culp has 
     observed that the litigators and activists who worked on 
     Brown in the early 1950s assumed at least three things that 
     have not come to pass: (1) that good liberals would stand by 
     their commitments to black equality through the hard times; 
     (2) that blacks and whites could come to some kind of 
     agreement about what was fair and just--that there was a 
     neutral, agreed-upon position we could aspire to; (3) that if 
     you just had enough faith, that if you just wished racism 
     away hard enough, it would disappear.
       ``Growing up,'' says my father, ``we thought we knew 
     exactly what integration meant. We would all go to school 
     together; it meant the city would spend the same money on you 
     that it did on the white students. We blacks wouldn't be in 
     some cold isolated school that overlooked the railroad yards; 
     we wouldn't have to get the cast-off, ragged books, We didn't 
     think about the inevitability of a fight about whose version 
     of the Civil War would be taught in that utopic integrated 
     classroom.''
       The Brown decision itself acknowledged the extent to which 
     educational opportunity depended on ``intangible 
     considerations'' and relied ``in large part on `those 
     qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but 
     which make for greatness.' '' Yet shaking the edifice of 
     education in general since 1954 has become vastly more 
     complicated by the influence of television, and the task of 
     learning racial history has been much confounded by the power 
     of mass media.
       ``We've become a nation of soundbites,'' says Cherly Brown 
     Henderson. ``That millisecond of time to determine our 
     behavior, whether it's behavior toward another individual, or 
     behavior toward a product we might purchase, or our behavior 
     with regard to what kind of housing or community we want to 
     live in--I really think we allow that millisecond to 
     determine far too much of our lives. When you take something 
     that short and infuse it with a racial stereotype, and no 
     other information is given, the young person looking at 
     that--even the older person who spends most of his time 
     watching television--that's all they know. How can you 
     expect them to believe anything else? They're not going to 
     pick up a book and read any history, do any research, or 
     talk to anybody that may in fact be able to refute the 
     stereotype.''
       In addition to stereotypes, perhaps the media revolution 
     has exacerbated the very American tendency to romanticize our 
     great moments into nostalgia-fests from which only the 
     extremes of Pollyanna-ish optimism or Malthusian pessimism 
     can be extracted. The Hollywood obsession with individual 
     charismatic personalities diminishes the true heroism of the 
     multiplicity of lives and sacrifices that make for genuine 
     social change. Such portrayals push social movement out of 
     reach, into the mythic--when in fact it emanates from the 
     realm of the solidly and persistently banal. For all the 
     biblical imagery summoned to inspire the will to go on with 
     the civil rights struggle in this country, if the waters have 
     parted at any given moment, perhaps it has been more 
     attributable to all those thousands of busy bridge-builders 
     working hard to keep Moses' back covered--just people, just 
     working and thinking about how it could be different, 
     dreaming big, yet surprised most by the smallest increments, 
     the little things that stun with the realization of the 
     profundity of what has not yet been thought about.
       My father muses: ``It's funny * * * we talked about race 
     all the time, yet at the same time you never really thought 
     about how it could be different. But after Brown I remember 
     it dawning on me that I could have gone to the University of 
     Georgia. And people began to talk to you a little different.
       The white doctor who treated my family in Boston, where I 
     grew up, ``used to treat us in such a completely offhand way. 
     But after Brown, he wanted to discuss it with us, he asked 
     questions, what I thought. He wanted my opinion and I 
     suddenly realized that no white person had ever asked what I 
     thought about anything.''
       Perhaps as people like my father and the doctor have 
     permitted those conversations to become more and more 
     straightforward, the pain of it all, the discomfort, has been 
     accompanied by the shutting down, the mishearing, the turning 
     away from the euphoria of Brown. ``It has become 
     unexpectedly, but not unpredictably, hard. The same thing 
     will probably have to happen in South Africa,'' sighs my 
     father.
       When Frederick Douglass described his own escape from 
     slavery as a ``theft'' of ``this head'' and ``these arms'' 
     and ``these legs,'' he employed the master's language of 
     property to create the unforgettable paradox of the ``owned'' 
     erupting into the category of a speaking subject whose 
     ``freedom'' simultaneously and inextricably marked him as a 
     ``thief.'' That this disruption of the bounds of normative 
     imagining is variously perceived as dangerous as well as 
     liberatory is a tension that has distinguished racial 
     politics in America from the Civil War to this day. Perhaps 
     the legacy of Brown is as much tied up with this sense of 
     national imagination as with the pure fact of its legal 
     victory; it sparkled in our heads, it fired our vision of 
     what was possible. Legally it set in motion battles over 
     inclusion, participation and reallocation of resources that 
     are very far from resolved. But in a larger sense it 
     committed us to a conversation about race in which all of us 
     must join--particularly in view of a new rising Global Right.
       The fact that this conversation has fallen on hard times is 
     no reason to abandon what has been accomplished. The word 
     games by which the civil rights movement has been stymied--in 
     which ``inner city'' and ``underclass'' and ``suspect 
     profile'' are racial code words, in which ``integration'' 
     means ``assimilation as white,'' in which black culture means 
     ``tribalism,'' in which affirmative action has been made out 
     to be the exact equivalent of quota systems that 
     discriminated against Jews--these are all dimensions of the 
     enormous snarl this nation has been unraveling, in waves of 
     euphoria and despair, since the Emancipation Proclamation.
       We remain charged with the task of getting beyond the stage 
     of halting encounters filled with the superficial temptations 
     of those ``my maid says blacks are happy'' or ``whites are 
     devils'' moments. If we could press on to an accounting of 
     the devastating legacy of slavery that lives on as a social 
     crisis that needs generations more of us working to repair--
     if we could just get to the enormity of that unhappy 
     acknowledgment, then that alone might be the paradoxical 
     source of a genuinely revivifying, rather than a false, 
     optimism.
       The most eloquent summary of both the simplicity and the 
     complexity of that common task remains W.E.B. Du Bois's essay 
     ``On Being Crazy'':
       After the theatre, I sought the hotel where I had sent my 
     baggage. The clerk scowled.
       ``What do you want?'' he said.
       Rest, I said.
       ``This is a white hotel,'' he said.
       I looked around. Such a color scheme requires a great deal 
     of cleaning, I said, but I don't know that I object.
       ``We object,'' said he.
       Then why, I began, but he interrupted.
       ``We don't keep niggers,'' he said, ``we don't want social 
     equality.''
       Neither do I, I replied gently, I want a bed.

       

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