WWTscript

"We Were There" Script - Brown v. Board of Education
//"We conclude that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”.// When Chief Justice Warren read those words from the Supreme Court Decision of Brown v. Board of Education, we knew that the spark for the Civil Rights Movement had been lit. It was a long time coming, and the words were sweet music for the millions of African Americans in the South, like us.

Public schools had been segregated in the South since the Civil War, and the schools for blacks were in no way equal to those for whites. Thurgood Marshall, one of the lawyers on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued that the segregated schools gave blacks a //“badge of inferiority”.// Little Linda Brown’s case would be the center of the fight to remove this badge.

Linda was a 7 year old girl who went to school in Topeka Kansas. We can clearly remember how her father, Oliver, told her story in the local court. He said how Linda had to walk through a dangerous train swithing yard, wait for a bus in all types of foul weather, climb on the bus that was often late and spend another 30 minutes on the bus to get to her all black school, sometimes waiting a half an hour before the doors openend. The problem? The local white school, called Sumner School, was only 7 blocks away.

The district court decided that separate schools were constitutional as long as they were equal. Because of the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” doctrine would be hard to overturn. It would take someone, somehow, to prove that segregated schools resulted in an inferior education for black children – that separate was unequal. That’s exactly what the NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall, set out to do.

We followed the trial through our friends at the NAACP. Prior cases had been argued and won for integration of universities, but none for public schools in the South. The case was actually a collection of similar cases about the unfairness of segregated schools. By putting the cases together, the issue was much larger, and affected more students.

I remember reading the arguments of both sides as they presented to the Supreme Court. The opponents of integration argued that the Constitution did not require white and African American children to attend the same schools, and states should be left free to regulate their own affairs. More importantly, they said that segregation was not harmful to black people.

Marshall and his colleagues stated that the Supreme Court had misinterpreted the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Equal protection of the laws did not allow for racial segregation. The Fourteenth Amendment allowed the government to prohibit any discriminatory state action based on race, including segregated public schools. Psychological testing showed the harmful effects of segregation on the minds of African American children.

In his closing argument, Marshall argued that the only way the court could uphold segregation was if they convincingly believed that blacks were inferior to whites and that they should be kept in conditions close to slavery. He concluded with "//And now is the time, we submit, that this court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for//". We knew that he was the right man for our cause, and his powerful words resonated with the judges.

The lawyers had to argue the case twice before the Court could make a decision. The black community was on pins and needles when the decision was finally read by Chief Justice Warren on May 17, 1954. The Court had listened to Thurgood Marshall and made sure that the Consitition stands for equality. Chief Justice Warren spoke the words that we all wanted to hear - ”//'separate but equal' has no place//". In their unanimous decision, the Court overturned the Plessy decision from a half century before and set the stage for our future fights for justice and equality. I can still remember the New York Times remarking that “the //Court, the guardian of our national conscience, has reaffirmed its faith—and the undying American faith—in the equality of all men and all children before the law."//

We know the fight is not over. Southern states will be slow to comply with the Court's decision, and few formerly segregated schools will be integrated quickly, even though the court has ruled that integration should happen "with all deliberate speed". But the Brown decision is a “potent catalyst of ambitions social change”. The Court will Brown as a precedent in other civil rights cases to end separate but equal beyond the classroom. The decision will be the true springboard for the Civil Rights Movement, since we now have the power of the Supreme Court behind us.