Brown vs. Board of Ed and the mass movement for
education
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court
declared school segregation by "race" to be illegal. The case
of Brown vs. the Board of Education was based on the reality of
Linda Brown, a Black third grader in Topeka, Kan., who had to
walk a mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her
elementary school while an elementary school for whites was
only seven blocks away from her home.
Linda Brown's circumstances were multiplied hundreds of
thousands of times in the lives of other African-Amer ican
children, as well as Native American and Latino children.
In Prince Edward County, Va., children went to school in
flimsy shacks heated only by oil-drum stoves. Black students
had no textbooks, or used hand-me-down, outdated textbooks from
the schools for whites. They had little or none of the
amenities, like science equipment, of the white schools.
Despite this, African American teachers labored valiantly to
transmit their proud history of struggle to the students, who
continued the fight. At the Prince Edward schools in 1951,
students went on strike for two weeks to protest the terrible
conditions.
It was this militant action that led to a Virginia court
case that was also part of the Brown decision.
Separate and unequal
The Brown decision overturned an 1896 Reconstruction-era
Supreme Court ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson, that declared
segregation legal if there were "equal but separate
accommodations" for Black and white people.
The Plessy decision was part of an overall assault by the
U.S. ruling class on the "unfinished revolution" under way in
the South after the abolition of slavery--the attempt by freed
Black people to assert self-determination through economic and
political means.
Establishment of a free public school system in the South
was one element in this revolution.
In "Black Reconstruction," W.E.B. DuBois wrote: "The first
great mass move ment for public education at the expense of the
state, in the South," came from freed Black people, not
permitted by law to learn to read or write when enslaved. There
had been virtually no public schools for anyone in the South,
including poor whites. Schools began during the Civil War when
Black refugees and soldiers were taught in camps, and continued
to the establishment of public schools like those in Charle
ston, S.C., open to "all children without distinction of
color."
The old slavocracy segregated this embryonic integrated
public school system in order to divide the white and newly
freed Black working-class.
Defeating Reconstruction in the South, the former slave
owners violently forced themselves back into power and passed a
series of laws to return freed Black people to de facto
bondage. Northern capital joined hands with the Southern ruling
class, and the Plessy decision was the codification of this
racist strategy at the national level.
Determined resistance
The Brown decision, almost 50 years after Plessy, was a
tremendous victory over that racism. The decision came in the
middle of a period of intense reaction within the United
States. Only a few months after the ruling, a Black schoolchild
was lynched.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American visiting from
Chicago, was brutally killed and mutilated in Missis sippi. His
white murderers used the phony old pretext of alleged sexual
advances toward a white woman.
His assailants were acquitted. But the unrelenting
determination of his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, brought Emmett
Till's case to national attention.
The U.S. Justice Department just announced that it is
reopening prosecution of Till's murder, perhaps for some of the
same reasons that the Supreme Court ruled for Linda Brown 50
years ago-the need to whitewash "U.S. justice" to a world
increasingly skeptical of that idea.
Today the need comes from the horrific racist tortures of
Iraqis by U.S. soldiers. The pictures of white soldiers
smirking as they stand over tortured Iraqi instantly recall the
photographs of smiling whites at lynchings, or Till's murderers
laughing in the courtroom during their trial.
In the 1950s, racist repression in the South took the form
both of physical violence like that done to Till, and
institutional violence such as segregated schools. But African
Americans met repression with determined resistance before and
after the Brown decision.
This rising militancy, fueled by Black veterans returning
from World War II and the Korean War, was strengthened by local
organizing. This included the Montgomery bus boycott initiated
by African American women in Alabama, and the growing
anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and
Latin America.
These historic factors of struggle led to the unanimous
Supreme Court decision in Brown, even though at least one of
the justices, Hugo Black of Alabama, was affiliated with the Ku
Klux Klan.
Education for profit
Today, the elementary schools in Linda Brown's hometown of
Topeka are fully integrated--and staggering from insufficient
funds, particularly in districts with impoverished children of
color. Field trips and counseling are cut this year, perhaps
nurses and teachers next.
Legal access to public schools regardless of nationality
came with Brown, and then came a 50-year struggle to enforce
it. But money and support for quality education for children of
color did not follow from local, state, and federal
governments. In the South many local white-controlled school
boards stripped the public schools of books, equipment, and
buses to set up segregated whites-only Christian academies.
Activists are waging an intense legal struggle to adequately
finance public schools. But a 2002 decision by the Supreme
Court in favor of school vouchers will funnel money away from
the public education of poor school children, especially
children of color, into private schools they cannot afford to
attend, even with vouchers.
In the for-profit privatization promoted by the U.S. ruling
class, states are attempting to seize control of local schools
under the pretext of "low performance," and turn them over to
companies whose students perform substantially below standard
levels. In Philadelphia, where more than 80 percent of the
students are children of color, and 78 percent from low-income
households, a move to sell out the city's schools to such a
company was met by fierce community opposition and student
walkouts.
Education as class struggle
Fifty years after Brown, oppressed communities are fighting
not legal but economic barriers to the education of their
children. They are also still fighting for their right to
self-determination, to choose where and how that education can
best occur.
The state exists to protect the interests of the owning
capitalist class--and it never concedes without a struggle to
any change that would strengthen the working class. The state
never allocates without a fight a portion of capitalist profits
back to working-class and oppressed people who generate the
surplus value in the first place.
Brown was a concession wrung from the state by such fierce,
protracted struggle, and at the cost of many lives. The
continuing struggle for our children's education is part of the
on-going struggle for our class.
Reprinted from the May 27, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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