In a long, storied history

For some reason I find myself thinking about Brown v Board of Education today.

On May 17, 1954, a decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. The landmark Brown v. Board decision gave LDF [Legal Defense Fund] its most celebrated victory in a long, storied history of fighting for civil rights and marked a defining moment in US history.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education occurred after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This campaign was conceived in the 1930s by Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of Howard Law School, and brilliantly executed in a series of cases over the next two decades by his star pupil, Thurgood Marshall – the man who became Legal Defense Fund’s first Director-Counsel and a Supreme Court Justice.

It was always a peculiar doctrine, of course. If equal, why separate? The answer was “Because you give us the squick, because we’re racists, because we’ve been raised that way, because of this country’s long history of highly active racism right down to enslavement and genocide.” That was the answer but it wasn’t entirely convenient to say it out loud, so the Supreme Court had to step in.

The lawyers marshalled expert witnesses to prove what most of us take for granted today, that state-enforced racial segregation in education “deprives [Black children] of equal status in the school community…destroys their self-respect, denies them full opportunity for democratic social development [and]…stamps [them] with a badge of inferiority.”

First there’s grasping the truth of that statement, and then there’s giving a damn about it. A lot of people didn’t give a damn then and too many still don’t give a damn now. Trump is encouraging and flattering the don’t give a damners because that’s who he is.

The gender wars are partly about a form of segregation, but it’s the obverse of the pre-Brown kind. Women don’t want spaces separate from men’s because we’re inferior but because we’re at a physical disadvantage. Little boys of course think that does mean girls are inferior, but some of them outgrow it.