Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 17, 1994 TAG: 9405170094
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ANTHONY LEWIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There is a certain skepticism now about the Brown decision. After all, it is said, race remains the American dilemma. Blacks as a group still suffer enormous disadvantages. What difference did it make?
But the skeptics have forgotten, or never knew, what it was like in the South back then. As Andrew Young remarked to Robin Toner of The New York Times recently: ``People don't realize how bad things were. They can't imagine.''
In 1954, and still 10 years later, black Americans were kept from voting in Mississippi, much of Alabama and Louisiana and parts of Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. In some communities, a black who tried even to register risked his job, his home, his life.
Throughout the Deep South, blacks were forbidden by local law to enter most restaurants or other places of public accommodation. They were barred from ``white'' hospitals and ambulances. A Birmingham ordinance forbade them to ride in ``white'' taxis: a rule that was considered an extreme example of petty apartheid in Johannesburg.
The Brown case was about public schools; the Supreme Court held that segregated education was ``inherently unequal.'' But the message was far more profound. From now on the constitutional guarantee of ``the equal protection of the laws'' would mean just that.
``Among other things the Brown decision sent a message to blacks,'' Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general for civil rights from 1961 to 1964, said last month at a conference at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. ``Students like John Lewis simply knew their time had come.''
John Lewis was the founder and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which protested against racial oppression with amazing courage. Today he is a congressman from Georgia.
``This country is a different country now,'' Lewis told the Kennedy Library conference. ``It is a better country. We have witnessed a nonviolent revolution.''
In 1964, Lewis noted, there were fewer than 100 black elected officials in all the Southern states. Today there are nearly 7,000. Forty members of Congress are black. One is from Mississippi: something utterly unimaginable in 1964.
To achieve that result required a combination of legal, social and political action. The white Southern political structure resisted the desegregation orders of the courts with success for years.
As late as 1960, six years after the Brown decision, not a single black child was in a public school or even a state university with whites in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi or Virginia. The courts could not end legally enforced racism alone.
What happened was that protests, and brutal suppression of those protests by white officials, aroused the conscience of Americans who had not known or cared much about segregation. President Kennedy made the first speech ever from the White House calling racism a moral issue. President Johnson pressed for action.
The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in jobs and public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, as it was enforced, opened the voting rolls and transformed Southern politics.
That is what Lewis meant by a nonviolent revolution. It really was that: a revolution in the law of race relations as decisive as the transformation we have just witnessed in South Africa.
To note this anniversary, and celebrate it, is not to overlook the injustice and inequalities that remain. Too many black American children are born into a ghetto life that stacks the odds overwhelmingly against them.
But what America did accomplish was remarkable. Roger Wilkins, who is as aware as anyone of the task that remains, wrote in The Nation magazine that the Brown decision brought enormous social change.
Segregation ended, and ``blacks moved into positions undreamed of in the pre-Brown world - chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quarterback in the NFL, mayors of major cities ...''
For blacks in the middle class, many barriers are down. The terrible reality that remains is the underclass. That is a crisis not for blacks alone but for all of us.
Anthony Lewis is a columnist for The New York Times.
New York Times News Service
by CNB