February 25, 2015 • 29 mins
Though the Brown v. Board ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, it didn't suddenly solve the segregation problem and end racism in the United States.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuffy missed in History class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Trac B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So of our
three episodes on segregation that we're doing this month, this
is the one that's probably the most familiar to the
(00:23):
most people. Uh. Sometimes when we do things that are
immediately familiar to folks, people feel like we've wasted their
time somehow. But talking about Brown versus Board of Education
without talking about the aftermath of it would be seriously incomplete.
So even though a lot of this is going to
be familiar to some people from classes on American history
(00:43):
or the American civil rights movement, it really is necessary
to talk about this part of Brown versus Board of
Education also, So our last installment on this ended after
Brown versus Boards arguments and re arguments. The case returned
to the Supreme Court for some direct shin on how
to implement the previous decision, and Chief Justice Earl Lawren
(01:05):
urged school systems to end segregation quote with all deliberate speed.
So states and school boards had to find a way
for the children who were attending segregated schools, which at
this point was almost fort of the school children in
the United States to attend integrated ones instead. But that
second decision, which came to be known as Brown two,
(01:27):
was really really just the beginning of the struggle to
end school segregation. It was a battle that was fought
all over the United States, not just in the South,
and it went on well well after what we think
of as the end of the Civil rights movement. And UH,
just as a couple of caveats from the beginning, there
are things that happened during this period that we are
(01:48):
not going to talk about because this is basically thirty
years of history that we're trying to fit into one episode. Uh.
We also definitely know that segregation laws targeted population besides
just African Americans, but that's really the context of what
we're talking about today. So there there were laws that
segregated Mexican children and Japanese children and Chinese children, but
(02:12):
we're really talking about the ones that segregated black children today.
So here's how the opinion of the Supreme Court in
Brown two, which was issued on May thirty one, began.
The Delaware case that cited as an exception, UH involved
a lower court ruling against segregation. Just the heads up there,
racial discrimination and public education is unconstitutional, and all provisions
(02:37):
of federal, state, or local law requiring or permitting such
discrimination must yield to this principle. The judgments below, except
that in the Delaware case, are reversed and the cases
are remanded to the district courts to take such proceedings
and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion
as are necessary and proper to admit the parties to
(02:57):
these cases to public schools a racially non discriminatory basis
with all deliberate speed, School authorities have the primary responsibility
for elucidating, assessing, and solving the varied school local school
problems which may require solution and fully implementing the governing
constitutional principles. Courts will have to consider whether the action
(03:21):
of school authorities constitutes good faith implementation of the governing
constitutional principles. Later on, Chief Justice Earl Warren talked about
using the phrase with all deliberate speed rather than something
more immediate like forthwith, because there were some very very
real obstacles to schools integrating. From a practical standpoint, they
(03:42):
had to consider, how would school systems redistrict and how
would they make sure that these new districts were integrated,
And what would they do if faculty or staff positions
turned out to be redundant, and what if gaps appeared
that ment systems needed to hire more people. On top
of that, the court couldn't take get for granted that
school systems would operate in good faith when it came
(04:03):
to integration, so integration plans had to be court approved,
and that was of course going to be a time
consuming process. There was also the fact that a lot
of the schools that black students had been attending were
frankly not fit to be used. So, for example, in
Prince Edward County, Virginia, which was where one of the
brown versus Board cases had originated, the school for black
(04:25):
students had no restrooms at all, and it was so
overcrowded that some students were attending classes in literal shocks
outside of the building, as well as an old school bus.
So school systems were having to figure out how to
have enough space for people and facilities that actually we're
fit to be used. So, needless to say, integration was
(04:49):
definitely not as simple as flipping a switch and saying okay,
everyone goes to the same school now. But this idea
of deliberate speed also meant that there wasn't really a
tough timeline to follow, and there wasn't a deadline for integration,
and that gave white communities that did not want to
integrate a whole lot of leeway and time to kind
of dig in their heels. We're going to talk about
(05:12):
how they dug in their heels after a brief word
from a sponsor. So as schools started integrating, there were
definitely school systems that, once they were ordered to do
so by the Supreme Court, integrated and they did so
without a lot of overt incident, and to be clear,
without a lot of overt incident kind of means that
(05:33):
there were not massively violent protests on the school grounds.
It was pretty much standard that the black students who
started attending majority white schools routinely faced discrimination, harassment, and violence,
and not just from their peers but also from parents
and other adults. Uh The same level of harassment was
true for leaders in those school systems who had worked
(05:55):
toward integration. They faced the same kind of backlash from
the greater community. But in many places, resistance to brown
Versus Board was direct and overt. White parents picketed and protested,
others pulled their children out of school rather than having
them go to an integrated school. Politicians built their campaigns
(06:16):
around maintaining segregation. George Wallace of Alabama famously arranged his
gubernatorial race around keeping schools segregated, and in his inaugural
address announced quote segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Various
state governments tried to argue that the states had the
(06:38):
right to protect its citizens from unconstitutional actions on the
part of the federal government, and part of this argument
was the idea that, in spite of the Supreme Court's ruling,
Brown versus Board was in fact unconstitutional. Some school systems
found ways to keep up the appearance of integrating while
simultaneously maintaining segregated schools. They made virtually unpassable exams that
(07:02):
black students had to pass before transferring. We've seen things
like this happened before in our total rights discussion. Or
they allowed parents to choose which school their children would attend,
banking on the idea that white parents would keep their
children in white schools, which were generally better, while black
parents would keep their children in the schools that were
intended for black children, simply because they were afraid of retaliation.
(07:25):
School officials presented clearly unworkable integration plans to the courts,
knowing that the courts would reject these plans and that
they would have to start all over maintaining the segregation
while they were coming up with a new plan. The
endule a CP wound up having to argue court cases
all over the country, and while the Supreme Court had
remanded cases back to lower courts, these courts did not
(07:48):
always work in the spirit of the Supreme Court's ruling.
So when Briggs versus Elliott, which was one of the
five Brown Versus Board cases, came back up in a
lower court, the found the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation,
but it had not mandated integration. And this kind of
underhanded pushback from the lower courts was really widespread and
(08:10):
it went on for years. In another segregation case, a
federal district court for the Southern District of Georgia found
that it's jur jurisdiction was outside of Brown versus Sports jurisdiction,
and that was in nineteen sixty three, almost the decade
after the thing had come out in the first place.
(08:31):
At the federal level, nineteen senators and seventy seven House
members issued quote the Southern Manifesto, which was read into
the Congressional record on March twelfth of nineteen fifty six.
The Southern Manifesto condemned the Supreme Court's decision on Brown
versus Board, and it read, in part, the Original Constitution
does not mention education. Neither does the Fourteenth Amendment nor
(08:54):
any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the
Fourteenth Amendment clearly showed that there was no intent that
it should affect the systems of education maintained by the states.
The very Congress which proposed the amendments subsequently provided for
segregated schools in the District of Columbia. The Southern Manifesto
also included themes that became really common in the greater
(09:17):
context of the Civil rights movement. Another quote from it
is quote, without regard to the consent of the governed,
outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our
public school systems. If done, this is certain to destroy
the system of public education in some of the states.
In nineteen fifty seven, One of the most famous moments
(09:39):
of the backlash against school integration took place in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Little Rock School Board had announced its intent to
comply with Brown Versus Board on Maw nineteen fifty four,
and the Federal Court had approved its plan to do
so about a year later. It was a phased integration plan,
with full integration to be completed by nineteen sixty three.
(10:00):
And September of nineteen fifty seven, nine black students were
set to enroll in Central High School in Little Rock,
but the governor, Orville Faubus, sent in Arkansas National Guard
troops to keep them from doing so. The school board
asked the court for a delay in integrating the school,
and the court refused, and this led to a battle
(10:21):
with the governor and the Arkansas National Guard on one
side and the federal court on the other. When the
students finally entered the school on September, it was through
an angry mob of white protesters, and then a riot
broke out that sent the students back home again. President
Eisenhower deployed federal troops to try to restore order and
(10:42):
to protect the students. All of this played out on
national television much like when the government had sent in
troops to protect newly freed slaves and ensured that they
were granted the right to vote after the Civil War,
this federal intervention further stoked tensions in the South. The
governor's actions in this case also became part of a
(11:03):
whole other Supreme Court case, Cooper versus Aaron, which upheld
Brown versus Board and condemned the governor's actions. And this
example is really just one of many high profile examples
during the journey of integrating schools. Um It happened at
public schools and colleges all over the South, with troops
(11:24):
having to escort black students into previously all white schools.
By nineteen sixty, so at this point, five years after
Brown two, the outlook was bleak. In spite of new laws,
federal orders, and the presence of troops, schools in many
places were still segregated, and Black children, their families, and
white supporters were facing everything from harassment to violence on
(11:48):
a day to day basis. There were protests all over
the place, but very little actual integration was being done
in the school systems that had resisted so far. The
Supreme Court became increasingly direct and its instructions that school
systems integrate. In Prince Edward County, Virginia was back in
front of the Court again in nineteen sixty four, having
(12:11):
closed its schools entirely rather than integrate them. The Court
ordered the county to reopen its schools, and Justice Hugo.
Black said, quote, there has been entirely too much deliberation
and not enough speed. Still, more segregation cases got all
the way to the Supreme Court in the late nineteen sixties,
(12:31):
with the Court reiterating over and over the schools had
to integrate because black children had a constitutional right to
the same education as white children. And finally, and in
the later nineteen sixties, there was gradual progress, and it
ran alongside many of the other key moments in the
civil rights movement. But progress was extremely slow, and many
(12:56):
school systems found that as white families had moved away
from neighborhood where black people lived, in a migration known
as white flight, logical school district lines yielded schools that
were still segregated, and this led to the advent of bussing.
In ninety one, the Supreme Court heard the case of
Swan versus Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education on the subject
(13:17):
of bussing. Charlotte City schools, which overwhelmingly had black students,
had merged with Mecklenburg County students, and the students in
Mecklenburg County were more predominantly white. The school system proposed
several plans to integrate these schools, but most of them
still wound up with many black students still in majority
black schools. So in the end, the solution that they
(13:40):
came up with was to bus students from majority black
neighborhoods to the white schools. There was really a lot
more going on with the Supreme Court ruling, but in short,
the Supreme Court upheld bussing for the purposes of school integration.
Also part of this ruling was the idea that any
school that was overwhelming only one race was suspect, not
(14:02):
just schools where segregation had been required by specific law.
This and other court cases meant that suddenly schools in
the North, which had not specifically passed laws requiring segregated schools,
but we're operating in a de facto segregated state, now
had to integrate as well. So I think that the
(14:23):
the integration struggles in the South get the most attention
and a lot of civil rights classes. But then when
you get into school systems meeting school system outside of
the South needing to integrate through bussing, there was some
really similar, similar looking protests that broke out that gets
a lot less attention. As an example, in Boston, bussing
(14:48):
led to a full scale crisis in nineteen seventy four.
The Court had ordered that the schools to be integrated
through bussing, and all across the city black students were harassed,
spit on, and threatened as they rode the bus to school.
And this was kind of another phased integration program. So
this went on for a long time. White school students
(15:11):
started boycotting schools, and white families who could afford to
moved out of Boston into suburbs that were more predominantly white. Finally,
the Supreme Court heard a Detroit bussing case called Milliken
versus Bradley. Detroit's urban center was overwhelmingly black, and its suburbs,
which were a separate school system, tended to be overwhelmingly white.
(15:35):
In order to maintain integration, students would have had to
be bussed from one school system to another. In a
five to four decision, the court ruled that bussing children
across municipal lines, when those lines had not been specifically
created to enforce segregation in the first place, was quote
wholly impermissible and outside the bounds of what Brown versus
(15:57):
Board had intended and as far as integration in and
so this dismantled bussing efforts and some of the most
segregated cities in the United States, because the only way
to create a school that was integrated was to literally
move students from one community into a completely different community
to go to school. Third, Good Marshal, who we talked
(16:17):
about in our previous episode, had at this point become
the first African American Supreme Court justice in the United States.
In his dissenting opinion, he said, quote our nation, I
fear will be ill served by the Court's refusal to
remedy separate and unequal education. For unless our children begin
to learn together, there is little hope that our people
(16:38):
will ever learn to live together. The practice of bussing
did continue. I know that there was bussing in my
school system that I grew up into sort of fine
tune the balance of racial mix in one school and
the other, but it didn't continue in the more extreme
way that had been proposed in Detroit. So consequently, in
(16:59):
a lot of places, as white families kept moving into
more predominantly white suburbs, schools slid back into being more
and more segregated as a result, and in a lot
of ways, integration remains a struggle in the United States.
As neighborhoods become overwhelmingly one race or another, the same
thing happens to the schools. So there are school systems
(17:21):
all over the US in which maintaining integration would involve
bussing children long distances from different school systems altogether. As
a as a side note, I was at Fernbank, which
is a science museum in Atlanta one time, and it
was during the week because I had the day off,
and a class of students came into the to the
(17:43):
Imax theater who watching Imax movie and it was a
black class and the teachers were also black. And I
looked at the person next to me and I was like,
is there segregation still in Atlanta? Like I was completely
floored by this because the where I grew up was
not as nearly as large as Metro Atlanta is so
(18:04):
the neighborhoods were not like large enough to yield an
entire school that was largely segregated. Uh. This was like
a wake up call for me as a total grown
human being. Uh, that there are still schools that are
effectively as segregated as they were in the fifties because
of how neighborhood lines run, which is contributed to by
(18:27):
all kinds of other socioeconomic factors. Yeah, there are a
lot of a lot of, um, like you said, a
lot of factors in the mix. And it is a
little bit startling when you see that, uh for the
first time. Well, and similarly startling is that even in
schools that aren't overwhelmingly one race or another, a lot
of classrooms become effectively segregated because African American students are
(18:52):
disproportionately represented in lower level classes and upper level classes
often are overwhelmingly full of white students. And this, again
is because of a number of socioeconomic factors. Uh. And
that is definitely what I saw in my own public
school uh experience also, which you know ran from the
mid eighties until the early nineties. Yeah. And there are
(19:15):
also some both implicit and explicit discrimination elements happening there
that create that sort of classroom level segregation. It's it's
a very complex web to try to unravel, and you
can't point to any one specific thing, but they are
all factoring and contributing. What is not the cause, and
I want to say this clearly is an inherent lack
(19:37):
of worth in anyone who's attending school. And as as
as we think about that for a second, let's take
another brief moment for a word from a sponsor, so
to return to Brown versus Board and kind of circle
back around to where we started, specifically in terms of
the schools that yielded those first five cases that went
(19:57):
before the Supreme Court. Here is what happened. Uh in Topeka, Kansas,
which was where Brown Versus Board started. The desegregation process
did start in nineteen fifty five, but in nineteen seventy nine,
one of the original attorneys, Charles Scott Jr. Sued to
have the original case reopened because the pattern of segregation,
as we just talked about before the break had re
(20:20):
emerged in a lot of the schools in Somerton in
Clarendon County, South Carolina, which was the focus of the
Briggs versus Elliott case. Schools were integrated in nineteen sixty
five in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which was where Davis
versus the County school Board of Prince Edward County uh started.
(20:42):
As we alluded to earlier, that school system closed its
schools entirely from nineteen fifty nine until nineteen sixty four
rather than integrate. Overwhelmingly, this meant that black students in
that school system had no way to receive an education.
But on the other hand, the white students wound up
attending private schools thanks to their nations from segregationists and
(21:05):
other parts of the South. The state of Delaware, which
is where GiB Heart at All Versus Belton at All
and GiB Heart versus Bulah had taken place, had actually
begun desegregating schools in nineteen fifty two. However, as white
families moved into exclusively white communities, a pattern of segregation
re emerged, leading to a federal court ordered bussing program
(21:28):
in nineteen seventy six. Another case, which was part of
all this, but which we haven't talked about so far,
was Bowling versus. Sharp, and that was a case that
started in the District of Columbia, and it made its
way all the way to the Supreme Court, separately from
Brown versus Board, and before Brown versus Board, the Supreme
(21:49):
Court ruled unanimously in nineteen fifty two that segregation denied
black students in the District of Columbia do process, and
that's the right that's guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment to
the Constitution. Even though it had already been decided before
Brown versus Board first reached the Supreme Court, Bowling versus
Sharp was included in the rearguments that were about how
(22:10):
to proceed with integrating the schools. And although the Washington
d C. Schools themselves did comply with the Supreme Court's decisions,
as we've seen in so many other cases, white families
started moving out of Washington d C. By the nineteen seventies,
there were really not very many white students left in
the Washington d C schools at all. More than of
(22:32):
the student body in Washington, d C. Was black. Many
of the people who had been involved in these cases
wound up having to flee the states where they lived
for their own safety. Reverend J. A. Delane, the High
School principal who helped bring the first suit in Briggs
versus Elliott, fled the state for his safety after his
house was shot into and then set on fire. Barbara
(22:55):
Rose John's the Prince Edward County High School student who
led the strike that launched protests about the conditions at
the school for black students before Brown Versus Board fled
the state of Virginia as well. We would really be
vermiss if we did not talk about some of the
ways that the Brown Versus Board legacy played out that
were not strictly about the issue of school segregation. Even
(23:19):
though it sparked a huge backlash in black communities, Brown
Versus Board was overall met with a sense of joy
and vindication. There was some debate about whether it was
a good idea to force the issue, and there were
definitely people who didn't want their children to have to
attend school somewhere that they obviously were not wanted. But overall,
(23:39):
the nation's highest court had, in a very public way
and in what felt too many people like the first
time ever, found in favor of African Americans equal rights,
and that was caused for celebration. Although the civil rights
movement was already under way when Brown Versus Board reached
the Supreme Court. The decision really helped propel the move
(24:00):
meant further as people built on the Supreme Court ruling
in favor of equality to launch protests and other areas
of life, such as desegregating lunch counters and buses and
bus terminals, and in protecting people's voting rights. Other monumental
moments in the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott,
the Greensboro lunch counter sit ins, and the Freedom Rides,
(24:23):
all have some roots in Brown versus Board, and so
does civil rights legislation signed by President's Dwight D. Eisenhower
in n seven and Lyndon Johnson in nineteen sixty four.
So today, overwhelmingly, if you asked a typical person whether
Brown versus Board was the right decision, overwhelmingly the answer
would be yes, because school segregation was wrong and discriminatory,
(24:46):
and the idea that at that point the Supreme Court
would have ruled in favor of discrimination, as it did
in Plessy versus Perguson is abhorrent to a lot of people.
But then when you look at the idea of const
stitutional law, it's a whole other matter. Ron versus Board
did look at the question of how segregation related to
(25:06):
the Constitution. When the case was re argued, the Fourteenth
Amendment was a major focus, but ultimately the idea of
segregation as inherently discriminatory and damaging was a major major
part of the decision, and the decision had immediate direct
applicability to the lives of an overwhelming proportion of the
US population. It materially changed the way most people lived.
(25:29):
This set a new precedent in the world of the
Supreme Court and civil rights. There were definitely major civil
rights rulings before this and after this, but this is
really the one that changed in a huge way and
in a way that a lot of people at the
time seriously objected to. That changed the way people lived. Um,
(25:51):
which is why even though the decision itself at this
point most most people are like, yes, obviously we should
we should have ended segregation. Yes. Uh. The precedent for
what that meant in terms of other court cases and
how much like how big steps the court could take. Uh,
it was a starting point for a lot of debate
(26:11):
about that. Do you also have a little bit of
listener mail. I knew, as with last time, our listener
mail is both brief and kind of chipper because this
episode is a little bit on the longer side, and
also the material is uh not the happiest material. So
this is from Sophie, and Sophie says, Hi, Tracy and Holly,
(26:32):
I love your podcast, but I wanted to share a
slightly disturbing experience I had while listening to your Six
Impossible episodes. I was listening to the podcast on my
iPod and it was during the Robert the Haunted Doll section.
You had just talked about how people often experienced technical
failures around Robert and how a lot of people write
him letters of apology for taking his picture without his permission.
(26:53):
I'm a fairly skeptical person, so at that point I
was thinking that the whole story sounded like urban legend.
When my iPod, which had a full battery, suddenly and
inexplicably died and we started. I'm not saying I suddenly
believe in ghosts, but I would like to apologize to
Robert for listening to a podcast about him without his permission. Uh, Sophie,
(27:15):
and then Sophie says it would be awesome if we
did an episode on the whaling ship at Essex and
I think I responded to Sophie to say, there is
one in the archive, hooray, and don't really really don't.
As I was working on that episode, I was like,
I don't really believe in all this thing with the
doll being unlucky, but I had that tiny seed of
(27:37):
doubt in the back of my mind. I'm also a
skeptical person, but I was getting ready to go on
vacation and I was like, what if my vacation is
ruined because of Robert the Doll? So ask his permission
to do that episode, Lady. I did not. I'm sorry, Robert,
we're talking about you behind your back. Uh. If you
(27:58):
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(28:18):
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(28:41):
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(29:05):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuffy missed in History class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Trac B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So of our
three episodes on segregation that we're doing this month, this
is the one that's probably the most familiar to the
(00:23):
most people. Uh. Sometimes when we do things that are
immediately familiar to folks, people feel like we've wasted their
time somehow. But talking about Brown versus Board of Education
without talking about the aftermath of it would be seriously incomplete.
So even though a lot of this is going to
be familiar to some people from classes on American history
(00:43):
or the American civil rights movement, it really is necessary
to talk about this part of Brown versus Board of
Education also, So our last installment on this ended after
Brown versus Boards arguments and re arguments. The case returned
to the Supreme Court for some direct shin on how
to implement the previous decision, and Chief Justice Earl Lawren
(01:05):
urged school systems to end segregation quote with all deliberate speed.
So states and school boards had to find a way
for the children who were attending segregated schools, which at
this point was almost fort of the school children in
the United States to attend integrated ones instead. But that
second decision, which came to be known as Brown two,
(01:27):
was really really just the beginning of the struggle to
end school segregation. It was a battle that was fought
all over the United States, not just in the South,
and it went on well well after what we think
of as the end of the Civil rights movement. And UH,
just as a couple of caveats from the beginning, there
are things that happened during this period that we are
(01:48):
not going to talk about because this is basically thirty
years of history that we're trying to fit into one episode. Uh.
We also definitely know that segregation laws targeted population besides
just African Americans, but that's really the context of what
we're talking about today. So there there were laws that
segregated Mexican children and Japanese children and Chinese children, but
(02:12):
we're really talking about the ones that segregated black children today.
So here's how the opinion of the Supreme Court in
Brown two, which was issued on May thirty one, began.
The Delaware case that cited as an exception, UH involved
a lower court ruling against segregation. Just the heads up there,
racial discrimination and public education is unconstitutional, and all provisions
(02:37):
of federal, state, or local law requiring or permitting such
discrimination must yield to this principle. The judgments below, except
that in the Delaware case, are reversed and the cases
are remanded to the district courts to take such proceedings
and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion
as are necessary and proper to admit the parties to
(02:57):
these cases to public schools a racially non discriminatory basis
with all deliberate speed, School authorities have the primary responsibility
for elucidating, assessing, and solving the varied school local school
problems which may require solution and fully implementing the governing
constitutional principles. Courts will have to consider whether the action
(03:21):
of school authorities constitutes good faith implementation of the governing
constitutional principles. Later on, Chief Justice Earl Warren talked about
using the phrase with all deliberate speed rather than something
more immediate like forthwith, because there were some very very
real obstacles to schools integrating. From a practical standpoint, they
(03:42):
had to consider, how would school systems redistrict and how
would they make sure that these new districts were integrated,
And what would they do if faculty or staff positions
turned out to be redundant, and what if gaps appeared
that ment systems needed to hire more people. On top
of that, the court couldn't take get for granted that
school systems would operate in good faith when it came
(04:03):
to integration, so integration plans had to be court approved,
and that was of course going to be a time
consuming process. There was also the fact that a lot
of the schools that black students had been attending were
frankly not fit to be used. So, for example, in
Prince Edward County, Virginia, which was where one of the
brown versus Board cases had originated, the school for black
(04:25):
students had no restrooms at all, and it was so
overcrowded that some students were attending classes in literal shocks
outside of the building, as well as an old school bus.
So school systems were having to figure out how to
have enough space for people and facilities that actually we're
fit to be used. So, needless to say, integration was
(04:49):
definitely not as simple as flipping a switch and saying okay,
everyone goes to the same school now. But this idea
of deliberate speed also meant that there wasn't really a
tough timeline to follow, and there wasn't a deadline for integration,
and that gave white communities that did not want to
integrate a whole lot of leeway and time to kind
of dig in their heels. We're going to talk about
(05:12):
how they dug in their heels after a brief word
from a sponsor. So as schools started integrating, there were
definitely school systems that, once they were ordered to do
so by the Supreme Court, integrated and they did so
without a lot of overt incident, and to be clear,
without a lot of overt incident kind of means that
(05:33):
there were not massively violent protests on the school grounds.
It was pretty much standard that the black students who
started attending majority white schools routinely faced discrimination, harassment, and violence,
and not just from their peers but also from parents
and other adults. Uh The same level of harassment was
true for leaders in those school systems who had worked
(05:55):
toward integration. They faced the same kind of backlash from
the greater community. But in many places, resistance to brown
Versus Board was direct and overt. White parents picketed and protested,
others pulled their children out of school rather than having
them go to an integrated school. Politicians built their campaigns
(06:16):
around maintaining segregation. George Wallace of Alabama famously arranged his
gubernatorial race around keeping schools segregated, and in his inaugural
address announced quote segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Various
state governments tried to argue that the states had the
(06:38):
right to protect its citizens from unconstitutional actions on the
part of the federal government, and part of this argument
was the idea that, in spite of the Supreme Court's ruling,
Brown versus Board was in fact unconstitutional. Some school systems
found ways to keep up the appearance of integrating while
simultaneously maintaining segregated schools. They made virtually unpassable exams that
(07:02):
black students had to pass before transferring. We've seen things
like this happened before in our total rights discussion. Or
they allowed parents to choose which school their children would attend,
banking on the idea that white parents would keep their
children in white schools, which were generally better, while black
parents would keep their children in the schools that were
intended for black children, simply because they were afraid of retaliation.
(07:25):
School officials presented clearly unworkable integration plans to the courts,
knowing that the courts would reject these plans and that
they would have to start all over maintaining the segregation
while they were coming up with a new plan. The
endule a CP wound up having to argue court cases
all over the country, and while the Supreme Court had
remanded cases back to lower courts, these courts did not
(07:48):
always work in the spirit of the Supreme Court's ruling.
So when Briggs versus Elliott, which was one of the
five Brown Versus Board cases, came back up in a
lower court, the found the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation,
but it had not mandated integration. And this kind of
underhanded pushback from the lower courts was really widespread and
(08:10):
it went on for years. In another segregation case, a
federal district court for the Southern District of Georgia found
that it's jur jurisdiction was outside of Brown versus Sports jurisdiction,
and that was in nineteen sixty three, almost the decade
after the thing had come out in the first place.
(08:31):
At the federal level, nineteen senators and seventy seven House
members issued quote the Southern Manifesto, which was read into
the Congressional record on March twelfth of nineteen fifty six.
The Southern Manifesto condemned the Supreme Court's decision on Brown
versus Board, and it read, in part, the Original Constitution
does not mention education. Neither does the Fourteenth Amendment nor
(08:54):
any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the
Fourteenth Amendment clearly showed that there was no intent that
it should affect the systems of education maintained by the states.
The very Congress which proposed the amendments subsequently provided for
segregated schools in the District of Columbia. The Southern Manifesto
also included themes that became really common in the greater
(09:17):
context of the Civil rights movement. Another quote from it
is quote, without regard to the consent of the governed,
outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our
public school systems. If done, this is certain to destroy
the system of public education in some of the states.
In nineteen fifty seven, One of the most famous moments
(09:39):
of the backlash against school integration took place in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Little Rock School Board had announced its intent to
comply with Brown Versus Board on Maw nineteen fifty four,
and the Federal Court had approved its plan to do
so about a year later. It was a phased integration plan,
with full integration to be completed by nineteen sixty three.
(10:00):
And September of nineteen fifty seven, nine black students were
set to enroll in Central High School in Little Rock,
but the governor, Orville Faubus, sent in Arkansas National Guard
troops to keep them from doing so. The school board
asked the court for a delay in integrating the school,
and the court refused, and this led to a battle
(10:21):
with the governor and the Arkansas National Guard on one
side and the federal court on the other. When the
students finally entered the school on September, it was through
an angry mob of white protesters, and then a riot
broke out that sent the students back home again. President
Eisenhower deployed federal troops to try to restore order and
(10:42):
to protect the students. All of this played out on
national television much like when the government had sent in
troops to protect newly freed slaves and ensured that they
were granted the right to vote after the Civil War,
this federal intervention further stoked tensions in the South. The
governor's actions in this case also became part of a
(11:03):
whole other Supreme Court case, Cooper versus Aaron, which upheld
Brown versus Board and condemned the governor's actions. And this
example is really just one of many high profile examples
during the journey of integrating schools. Um It happened at
public schools and colleges all over the South, with troops
(11:24):
having to escort black students into previously all white schools.
By nineteen sixty, so at this point, five years after
Brown two, the outlook was bleak. In spite of new laws,
federal orders, and the presence of troops, schools in many
places were still segregated, and Black children, their families, and
white supporters were facing everything from harassment to violence on
(11:48):
a day to day basis. There were protests all over
the place, but very little actual integration was being done
in the school systems that had resisted so far. The
Supreme Court became increasingly direct and its instructions that school
systems integrate. In Prince Edward County, Virginia was back in
front of the Court again in nineteen sixty four, having
(12:11):
closed its schools entirely rather than integrate them. The Court
ordered the county to reopen its schools, and Justice Hugo.
Black said, quote, there has been entirely too much deliberation
and not enough speed. Still, more segregation cases got all
the way to the Supreme Court in the late nineteen sixties,
(12:31):
with the Court reiterating over and over the schools had
to integrate because black children had a constitutional right to
the same education as white children. And finally, and in
the later nineteen sixties, there was gradual progress, and it
ran alongside many of the other key moments in the
civil rights movement. But progress was extremely slow, and many
(12:56):
school systems found that as white families had moved away
from neighborhood where black people lived, in a migration known
as white flight, logical school district lines yielded schools that
were still segregated, and this led to the advent of bussing.
In ninety one, the Supreme Court heard the case of
Swan versus Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education on the subject
(13:17):
of bussing. Charlotte City schools, which overwhelmingly had black students,
had merged with Mecklenburg County students, and the students in
Mecklenburg County were more predominantly white. The school system proposed
several plans to integrate these schools, but most of them
still wound up with many black students still in majority
black schools. So in the end, the solution that they
(13:40):
came up with was to bus students from majority black
neighborhoods to the white schools. There was really a lot
more going on with the Supreme Court ruling, but in short,
the Supreme Court upheld bussing for the purposes of school integration.
Also part of this ruling was the idea that any
school that was overwhelming only one race was suspect, not
(14:02):
just schools where segregation had been required by specific law.
This and other court cases meant that suddenly schools in
the North, which had not specifically passed laws requiring segregated schools,
but we're operating in a de facto segregated state, now
had to integrate as well. So I think that the
(14:23):
the integration struggles in the South get the most attention
and a lot of civil rights classes. But then when
you get into school systems meeting school system outside of
the South needing to integrate through bussing, there was some
really similar, similar looking protests that broke out that gets
a lot less attention. As an example, in Boston, bussing
(14:48):
led to a full scale crisis in nineteen seventy four.
The Court had ordered that the schools to be integrated
through bussing, and all across the city black students were harassed,
spit on, and threatened as they rode the bus to school.
And this was kind of another phased integration program. So
this went on for a long time. White school students
(15:11):
started boycotting schools, and white families who could afford to
moved out of Boston into suburbs that were more predominantly white. Finally,
the Supreme Court heard a Detroit bussing case called Milliken
versus Bradley. Detroit's urban center was overwhelmingly black, and its suburbs,
which were a separate school system, tended to be overwhelmingly white.
(15:35):
In order to maintain integration, students would have had to
be bussed from one school system to another. In a
five to four decision, the court ruled that bussing children
across municipal lines, when those lines had not been specifically
created to enforce segregation in the first place, was quote
wholly impermissible and outside the bounds of what Brown versus
(15:57):
Board had intended and as far as integration in and
so this dismantled bussing efforts and some of the most
segregated cities in the United States, because the only way
to create a school that was integrated was to literally
move students from one community into a completely different community
to go to school. Third, Good Marshal, who we talked
(16:17):
about in our previous episode, had at this point become
the first African American Supreme Court justice in the United States.
In his dissenting opinion, he said, quote our nation, I
fear will be ill served by the Court's refusal to
remedy separate and unequal education. For unless our children begin
to learn together, there is little hope that our people
(16:38):
will ever learn to live together. The practice of bussing
did continue. I know that there was bussing in my
school system that I grew up into sort of fine
tune the balance of racial mix in one school and
the other, but it didn't continue in the more extreme
way that had been proposed in Detroit. So consequently, in
(16:59):
a lot of places, as white families kept moving into
more predominantly white suburbs, schools slid back into being more
and more segregated as a result, and in a lot
of ways, integration remains a struggle in the United States.
As neighborhoods become overwhelmingly one race or another, the same
thing happens to the schools. So there are school systems
(17:21):
all over the US in which maintaining integration would involve
bussing children long distances from different school systems altogether. As
a as a side note, I was at Fernbank, which
is a science museum in Atlanta one time, and it
was during the week because I had the day off,
and a class of students came into the to the
(17:43):
Imax theater who watching Imax movie and it was a
black class and the teachers were also black. And I
looked at the person next to me and I was like,
is there segregation still in Atlanta? Like I was completely
floored by this because the where I grew up was
not as nearly as large as Metro Atlanta is so
(18:04):
the neighborhoods were not like large enough to yield an
entire school that was largely segregated. Uh. This was like
a wake up call for me as a total grown
human being. Uh, that there are still schools that are
effectively as segregated as they were in the fifties because
of how neighborhood lines run, which is contributed to by
(18:27):
all kinds of other socioeconomic factors. Yeah, there are a
lot of a lot of, um, like you said, a
lot of factors in the mix. And it is a
little bit startling when you see that, uh for the
first time. Well, and similarly startling is that even in
schools that aren't overwhelmingly one race or another, a lot
of classrooms become effectively segregated because African American students are
(18:52):
disproportionately represented in lower level classes and upper level classes
often are overwhelmingly full of white students. And this, again
is because of a number of socioeconomic factors. Uh. And
that is definitely what I saw in my own public
school uh experience also, which you know ran from the
mid eighties until the early nineties. Yeah. And there are
(19:15):
also some both implicit and explicit discrimination elements happening there
that create that sort of classroom level segregation. It's it's
a very complex web to try to unravel, and you
can't point to any one specific thing, but they are
all factoring and contributing. What is not the cause, and
I want to say this clearly is an inherent lack
(19:37):
of worth in anyone who's attending school. And as as
as we think about that for a second, let's take
another brief moment for a word from a sponsor, so
to return to Brown versus Board and kind of circle
back around to where we started, specifically in terms of
the schools that yielded those first five cases that went
(19:57):
before the Supreme Court. Here is what happened. Uh in Topeka, Kansas,
which was where Brown Versus Board started. The desegregation process
did start in nineteen fifty five, but in nineteen seventy nine,
one of the original attorneys, Charles Scott Jr. Sued to
have the original case reopened because the pattern of segregation,
as we just talked about before the break had re
(20:20):
emerged in a lot of the schools in Somerton in
Clarendon County, South Carolina, which was the focus of the
Briggs versus Elliott case. Schools were integrated in nineteen sixty
five in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which was where Davis
versus the County school Board of Prince Edward County uh started.
(20:42):
As we alluded to earlier, that school system closed its
schools entirely from nineteen fifty nine until nineteen sixty four
rather than integrate. Overwhelmingly, this meant that black students in
that school system had no way to receive an education.
But on the other hand, the white students wound up
attending private schools thanks to their nations from segregationists and
(21:05):
other parts of the South. The state of Delaware, which
is where GiB Heart at All Versus Belton at All
and GiB Heart versus Bulah had taken place, had actually
begun desegregating schools in nineteen fifty two. However, as white
families moved into exclusively white communities, a pattern of segregation
re emerged, leading to a federal court ordered bussing program
(21:28):
in nineteen seventy six. Another case, which was part of
all this, but which we haven't talked about so far,
was Bowling versus. Sharp, and that was a case that
started in the District of Columbia, and it made its
way all the way to the Supreme Court, separately from
Brown versus Board, and before Brown versus Board, the Supreme
(21:49):
Court ruled unanimously in nineteen fifty two that segregation denied
black students in the District of Columbia do process, and
that's the right that's guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment to
the Constitution. Even though it had already been decided before
Brown versus Board first reached the Supreme Court, Bowling versus
Sharp was included in the rearguments that were about how
(22:10):
to proceed with integrating the schools. And although the Washington
d C. Schools themselves did comply with the Supreme Court's decisions,
as we've seen in so many other cases, white families
started moving out of Washington d C. By the nineteen seventies,
there were really not very many white students left in
the Washington d C schools at all. More than of
(22:32):
the student body in Washington, d C. Was black. Many
of the people who had been involved in these cases
wound up having to flee the states where they lived
for their own safety. Reverend J. A. Delane, the High
School principal who helped bring the first suit in Briggs
versus Elliott, fled the state for his safety after his
house was shot into and then set on fire. Barbara
(22:55):
Rose John's the Prince Edward County High School student who
led the strike that launched protests about the conditions at
the school for black students before Brown Versus Board fled
the state of Virginia as well. We would really be
vermiss if we did not talk about some of the
ways that the Brown Versus Board legacy played out that
were not strictly about the issue of school segregation. Even
(23:19):
though it sparked a huge backlash in black communities, Brown
Versus Board was overall met with a sense of joy
and vindication. There was some debate about whether it was
a good idea to force the issue, and there were
definitely people who didn't want their children to have to
attend school somewhere that they obviously were not wanted. But overall,
(23:39):
the nation's highest court had, in a very public way
and in what felt too many people like the first
time ever, found in favor of African Americans equal rights,
and that was caused for celebration. Although the civil rights
movement was already under way when Brown Versus Board reached
the Supreme Court. The decision really helped propel the move
(24:00):
meant further as people built on the Supreme Court ruling
in favor of equality to launch protests and other areas
of life, such as desegregating lunch counters and buses and
bus terminals, and in protecting people's voting rights. Other monumental
moments in the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott,
the Greensboro lunch counter sit ins, and the Freedom Rides,
(24:23):
all have some roots in Brown versus Board, and so
does civil rights legislation signed by President's Dwight D. Eisenhower
in n seven and Lyndon Johnson in nineteen sixty four.
So today, overwhelmingly, if you asked a typical person whether
Brown versus Board was the right decision, overwhelmingly the answer
would be yes, because school segregation was wrong and discriminatory,
(24:46):
and the idea that at that point the Supreme Court
would have ruled in favor of discrimination, as it did
in Plessy versus Perguson is abhorrent to a lot of people.
But then when you look at the idea of const
stitutional law, it's a whole other matter. Ron versus Board
did look at the question of how segregation related to
(25:06):
the Constitution. When the case was re argued, the Fourteenth
Amendment was a major focus, but ultimately the idea of
segregation as inherently discriminatory and damaging was a major major
part of the decision, and the decision had immediate direct
applicability to the lives of an overwhelming proportion of the
US population. It materially changed the way most people lived.
(25:29):
This set a new precedent in the world of the
Supreme Court and civil rights. There were definitely major civil
rights rulings before this and after this, but this is
really the one that changed in a huge way and
in a way that a lot of people at the
time seriously objected to. That changed the way people lived. Um,
(25:51):
which is why even though the decision itself at this
point most most people are like, yes, obviously we should
we should have ended segregation. Yes. Uh. The precedent for
what that meant in terms of other court cases and
how much like how big steps the court could take. Uh,
it was a starting point for a lot of debate
(26:11):
about that. Do you also have a little bit of
listener mail. I knew, as with last time, our listener
mail is both brief and kind of chipper because this
episode is a little bit on the longer side, and
also the material is uh not the happiest material. So
this is from Sophie, and Sophie says, Hi, Tracy and Holly,
(26:32):
I love your podcast, but I wanted to share a
slightly disturbing experience I had while listening to your Six
Impossible episodes. I was listening to the podcast on my
iPod and it was during the Robert the Haunted Doll section.
You had just talked about how people often experienced technical
failures around Robert and how a lot of people write
him letters of apology for taking his picture without his permission.
(26:53):
I'm a fairly skeptical person, so at that point I
was thinking that the whole story sounded like urban legend.
When my iPod, which had a full battery, suddenly and
inexplicably died and we started. I'm not saying I suddenly
believe in ghosts, but I would like to apologize to
Robert for listening to a podcast about him without his permission. Uh, Sophie,
(27:15):
and then Sophie says it would be awesome if we
did an episode on the whaling ship at Essex and
I think I responded to Sophie to say, there is
one in the archive, hooray, and don't really really don't.
As I was working on that episode, I was like,
I don't really believe in all this thing with the
doll being unlucky, but I had that tiny seed of
(27:37):
doubt in the back of my mind. I'm also a
skeptical person, but I was getting ready to go on
vacation and I was like, what if my vacation is
ruined because of Robert the Doll? So ask his permission
to do that episode, Lady. I did not. I'm sorry, Robert,
we're talking about you behind your back. Uh. If you
(27:58):
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, you can for history podcast that How Stuff
Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot
com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss
in History. Are tumbler is miss in History dot tumbler
dot com, and or on Pinterest at Penters dot com
slash missed in History. We have a spreadshirt store at
missin History dot spreadshirt dot com which is full of
(28:18):
t shirts and phone cases and things like that. If
you would like to learn more about what we talked
about today, come to our parent company's website, that's how
stuff Works dot com and put the word civil Rights
movement in the search bar, and you'll find how the
civil rights movement worked. If you would like to come
to our website, you can find every episode we've ever done,
including the Whaleship Essex, and you can include You can
(28:41):
find show notes for everything Holly and I have worked on. Uh.
You can also find a blog post about how to
find old episode you're interested in in the archive so
that you don't have to wait on Holly and Me
to potentially forget to answer your email. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com and missed in History dot com.
(29:05):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com. M
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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