[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 72 (Wednesday, May 14, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H4126-H4127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 COMMEMORATING 49TH ANNIVERSARY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION DECISION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PAYNE. Mr. Speaker, I, too, rise today to commemorate the 49th 
anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the 
separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896.
  A young girl by the name of Linda Brown attended the fifth grade at 
public school in Topeka, Kansas. After being denied admission to a 
white elementary school, the NAACP took up her case along with similar 
ones in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. All five cases 
were argued together in December 1952 by Thurgood Marshall, who headed 
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at that time. Mr. Marshall, born in 
Maryland, educated at Douglass High School, went on to Lincoln 
University, a small black college in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and then 
graduated with honors and applied to the white University of Maryland 
law school. He was denied admission. Howard University accepted him, 
and he graduated at the top of his class, passing the bar exam, taking 
up private practice and specializing in civil rights cases.
  At 26, he was hired by the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and one of 
his

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first civil rights cases was a successful effort to gain admission for 
a young black man to the University of Maryland, the very institution 
that denied Thurgood Marshall admittance 2 years earlier.
  The unanimous 1954 decision ruled all school segregation 
unconstitutional. W.E.B. du Boise wrote, ``I have seen the impossible 
happen. It did on May 17, 1954.'' The Brown decision did not come out 
of nowhere, and it was far from the end of the story. The decision was 
a climax of a long series of NAACP court victories, many won by chief 
counsel Thurgood Marshall, that had slowly laid the legal groundwork 
for school desegregation. In some schools it had an immediate powerful 
effect. By 1958, desegregation was under way in a number of Southern 
school districts. Both white and black peoples were going to school 
together. Black children in Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore, Maryland; 
and Washington, D.C., sat in classrooms beside white children as did 
African-American students in certain counties in Missouri, Arkansas and 
West Virginia.

                              {time}  2145

  In Louisville, Kentucky, the school system became a national model of 
school desegregation.
  But most southern jurisdictions strenuously resisted desegregation, 
encouraged by the Supreme Court ruling a year after the Brown decision 
that the transition need only to take place with all deliberate speed. 
States and counties passed more than 145 laws to hold off desegregation 
altogether. The Georgia legislature, for example, decided to withhold 
State funds from any school that enrolled students of both races. 
Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed all public schools from 1959 to 
1964 when it was forced to reopen the schools by the Supreme Court.
  And yet the clock could not be turned back. From the late 1950's to 
the mid 1960's, one previously white school after another grudgingly 
admitted its first black students, from nine black teenagers in 1957 
who endured harassment and threats to attend Central High School, where 
Federal troops were brought out by President Eisenhower, to Air Force 
veteran James Meredith who in 1962 became the first black student to 
enroll in the University of Mississippi.
  School segregation based on race received its final blow in 1969, 
when an exasperated Supreme Court overturned its ``all deliberate 
speed'' ruling and ordered full desegregation immediately. A few years 
later, Federal courts began ruling that school segregation based on 
residential patterns, de facto segregation, should also be remedied as 
de jure was done by law. Sometimes the way this was done was by busing 
of students to other schools. In some cases, though, buses filled with 
black students became magnets for mob violence, especially in South 
Boston where white residents stoned buses carrying little black 
children in 1974.
  Even within seemingly integrated public schools, subtle mechanisms 
often continued to divide race. Standardized tests, for example, are 
thought by many educators to be culturally biased in favor of white 
middle-class students. Yet groupings by ability or tracking was often 
based on that such test or on sometimes faculty teachers' expectations. 
In addition, so-called white flight became a pattern in urban centers 
as white students left suburban areas and went to private schools.
  So as we are here, we fight for integration even in my State of New 
Jersey where a thorough and efficient education was granted by 
everyone. Our governor, Jim McGreevey, is attempting to turn the clock 
back to ask the courts to relieve the State from the thorough and 
efficient education, and we will fight to see that that law is not 
overturned.

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