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The Conception of Brown

Brown v. Board of Education (1) is celebrated throughout the nation on its fiftieth anniversary as having changed the face of America, and is called the country's most significant twentieth century decision. Most analysts seem to hail Brown for what it has already done. I do not join that school of thought. Brown has flowered the growth of a large black middle class, but whether this group can seize levers of economic power to prevent its members from being reduced to the working poor when the economy sours, a status most of them occupied before Brown, is a critical question for future resolution. Officialdom can no longer have a hand in ordering, fostering, or maintaining racial discrimination or color barriers of any kind. Yet old habits and practices of racial stereotyping, patronization of white supremacy, and the subordination of people of color still define the country. Only if the veil that presently separates the white world from that of people of color comes down will Brown have effected its full potential. I was born in Florida, but my family was part of the first great migration of blacks from the rural hobbling South to the less restrictive urban North. Six weeks after giving birth to me, my mother took me to Newark, N.J. to reunite with her husband and family. My parents were among the first generation of blacks born free. My father died suddenly after a year's residence in Newark. My mother had above average educational skills for a black woman of her era. She could read and write, and she kept up with the news by close reading of local newspapers, augmented in time by radio and television. It had been a crime to provide slaves with access to educational skills and therefore the first generation of free blacks was largely illiterate. My mother had not planned to work outside the home, but as her husband had died leaving her children to raise, she had to seek outside employment. Being an indifferent cook, her only income-producing alternative was washing other peoples' clothes. When I was about twelve years old our economic fortunes improved, enabling us to afford a middle class lifestyle. I was an excellent test-taker, which at the time was considered evidence of intellectual talent. Thus, I was skipped through grammar school, finished high school at age sixteen, and moved on to college at Lincoln University. I later attended law school at Howard University and then Columbia Law School for a Masters in Law degree. The year at Columbia was not the unalloyed joy I had hoped it would be. The head of the graduate law school program denigrated whatever evidence of scholastic capability I had shown in college and law school because the institutions I had attended were not on Columbia's level. By contrast, a number of colleagues from small law schools in Ohio, Washington State, and Oregon were received with open arms. The First Amendment fascinated me, and in my master's thesis I explored the extent to which preservation of this amendment was needed to maintain a democratic society. I chose as my faculty advisor Noel Dowling, because we had used his case book in my constitutional law class. Had I known that Dowling was from Alabama, I might have paused to reconsider. Dowling had only negative comments on my thesis, but I would not let him get away without questions. "What are your suggestions?" I would ask. He would proffer none. This was his first time dealing with a putative black intellectual on a one-to-one basis. Believing that blacks were deficient in intellectual ability, his first approach was to discourage me so that I would drop out. Instead, I forced him to re-examine his own integrity. He approved the partially completed thesis, allowing me to proceed in securing the Masters in Law degree. After praising me for my fortitude and refusal to be discouraged, he said revealingly: "I hope you don't think I made negative remarks about your work because I am from Alabama." I had been headed for the academy, but the Columbia experience was unsettling. …