Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 17, 1994 TAG: 9405180064
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Virginia has played a role in much of that learning.
America has learned, for example, that racial bias wasn't (and isn't) a uniquely Southern phenomenon; indeed, that in some respects the South may have moved ahead of the rest of the nation.
Virginia, for example, is the only state in the Union that has elected a black person to its governorship. And while a component of residual racism no doubt was a factor in the low popularity with which former Gov. Douglas Wilder left office, it seemed less a factor than the similarly low popularity among whites with which, say, the black former mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, left office. In Wilder's case, a sour economy and a burning of intraparty Democratic bridges had more to do with it.
Black politicians hold office by the thousands throughout the South. The racial composition of Virginia's local governing bodies generally reflect that of the population; the composition of the General Assembly is somewhat disproportionate but not horribly so. Local school boards in the commonwealth come closer than in any other state to reflecting the racial composition of the population (though that may change as cities and counties switch to elected boards).
But Virginia also reflects another post-Brown lesson: Ending legal segregation is not the same thing as establishing an integrated society. In its political life, for example, the city of Roanoke is well-integrated; in its private life, housing patterns are strongly segregated. Housing-segregation patterns are strengthened locally and statewide by Virginia's system of keeping cities separate from the suburban counties around them.
Though the Board of Education in the case's title was in not-so-Southern Topeka, Kan., other school-desegregation cases subsumed under it - including one from Southside Virginia - were from the South. In any event, the Brown ruling spoke mainly to the South because that's where schools were segregated by law.
For a time, it looked as if the Brown decision would be just another law, like the sporadic attempts at outlawing discrimination in the North. Just what was "all deliberate speed," anyway? Virginia, to its everlasting dishonor, led stiff Southern opposition to desegregation with its policy of "massive resistance," one effect of which was that the state gave moral nourishment to the violent reactions in the Deep South.
Resistance in Southern courtrooms and statehouses took more than a decade to wear itself out. In Virginia, a particularly cruel ploy was closing public schools to avoid desegregating them: White children could go to "private" academies; black children had no schools to go to.
Ironically, an earlier Virginia ploy, equally cynical, had been to spend money on black schools in a vain effort to convince the courts that the schools, while separate, were equal. (Granted, not a lot was spent on the effort.)
In a sense, Brown missed the point. By focusing on the inherent unequalness of segregation, it underplayed the larger idea that it is an offense against liberty for government to treat citizens as members of a race rather than as individuals - regardless of whether the treatment is otherwise equal.
That in part reflects the limitations of judicial lawmaking. It must deal with precedent, in this instance the 1896 ruling that separate-but-equal was legitimate, and with the litigants' arguments, which dwelled on the issue of whether separate could be equal.
But blaming all the subsequent judicial (and, in time, legislative) race-consciousness on this aspect of Brown is mistaken. The stubbornness with which Virginia and other Southern states for years fought desegregation created an environment in which race-conscious solutions arose as remedies for racism.
by CNB