Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 17, 1994 TAG: 9405170096
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LINDA R. MONK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Brown specifically overturned the 1896 ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson, which allowed segregated public facilities as long as they were equal for both whites and blacks. In reality, despite the "separate but equal" doctrine, government services for blacks were hardly ever equal to those for whites.
In fact, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People developed a legal strategy for challenging segregation that began by enforcing "separate but equal." The NAACP realized that truly equal segregated facilities would be far more costly to society than integrated ones. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, won several cases in which blacks were admitted to all-white graduate schools because the black schools were inferior and could not be made equal. The next step was challenging segregated elementary and secondary schools.
That step was taken in Brown. Wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren for the unanimous court: "To separate [schoolchildren] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."
Of course segregation did not end immediately. The Supreme Court held hearings on how best to implement Brown and in 1955 declared that the decision should be carried out "with all deliberate speed." Unfortunately, many school districts were more deliberate than speedy.
Brown provided the legal impetus for a massive civil-rights movement. African-Americans had long sought to end discrimination, but Brown gave them the legal toehold they needed. Still, it was not enough. Widespread resistance to Brown was overcome not just because of the U.S. Supreme Court or federal marshals, but because thousands of everyday people - people like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer - risked their lives to demand equality under the law. For that reason, Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign of nonviolence was just as important to Brown's ultimate triumph as Thurgood Marshall's legal strategy.
The person who most changed my life during the civil-rights struggle was not Marshall or King, but a young black girl named Sandra Gross. In a 1969 case involving the Mississippi schools, the Supreme Court declared that "all deliberate speed" had come to an end and that public schools should be desegregated "at once." Only then, in 1970, was my Mississippi grade school finally integrated .
Sandra Gross was in my seventh-grade English class. Our teacher divided the class into teams to re-enact the story of Rip Van Winkle. I was particularly excited by the assignment because I directed a drama troupe that had already performed several plays for the school. When the teacher chose me captain of one team, I immediately picked the members of my troupe to be on it.
The teacher had neglected to designate any of the black students as captains; when the selection process was over, they were left unpicked at the back of the room. Realizing her mistake, she immediately assigned one black student to each group. Sandra Gross had the misfortune to be assigned to mine.
I was angry that my troupe had been invaded by anyone, but I was also a very racist little 12-year-old. Growing up poor and white, I was taught that black people were lower than me in social status. I held on to the belief that at least I was one rung up from the very bottom.
I tried to impress that fact on Sandra Gross. I criticized her speech, her grammar, her clothes, her looks. I tried to subordinate her to me in a hundred ways. She obviously didn't like it, but she didn't go away. She stuck it through. Her very presence was a rebuke to me.
My attitudes didn't change right away. It was more a slow metamorphosis, in which Sandra Gross and hundreds like her were the catalysts. Before my school was integrated, I never had much contact with black people. Our family was too poor to afford domestic help, and no black families lived near us. School was where I was finally able to learn about blacks as people, not as caricatures, and it was a painful learning process. By the time I was in the 10th grade, classmates who had known me earlier could see the change.
I am profoundly grateful for that change. I know how important the Brown decision was for African-Americans, but I know even more so how important it was for me. I shudder to think what kind of person I would have become if Sandra Gross and others had not dared to confront my delusions. And I am deeply ashamed.
It's tempting to try to rationalize the shame away: I was only a child; I was just doing as I had been taught. Yet there were other children like me who did not react as I did. That knowledge continues to haunt me. I know all too well that I am not "naturally" an enlightened person. I had to learn better.
So did our nation. While we declared that "all men are created equal," we enslaved our African sisters and brothers. Even after 250 years of slavery and a civil war, our nation still had a lot of learning to do. Another 100 years of oppression led to Brown and the civil rights movement. And that was only 40 years ago. As a country, we'd often like to pretend that in those 40 years we've resolved the legacy of the previous 350.
It's hard to face the worst about yourself, to know your own capacity to inflict suffering - as an individual or as a nation. But such acknowledgment is the only path to redemption. Thanks to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. and Sandra Gross, I know firsthand.
Linda R. Monk of Alexandria is author of "The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide," which won the American Bar Association's Gavel Award.
by CNB