"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth." --Mahatma Gandhi

Jean

I was born in 1931 in Boston, MA. Mama was a Washingtonian but daddy relocated our family to Boston after they were married. Mama taught school but spent most of her time at home raising my seven siblings and me. Daddy was an Episcopal minister. He graduated valedictorian at Bishop Pane Divinity School in Virginia. He and Uncle Don married two sisters, both of whom died shortly after childbirth. Uncle Don eventually died too, but not before seeing his son become a Justice in the Supreme Court of Tennessee. I remember the time he made my sister Jackie cry when he cut off her braid. Another time, he got it into his head to put salt in the sugar and cut holes in the sheets hanging out on mama’s line. How that boy came to be a judge, I won’t ever know.

Daddy and mama always expected my siblings and me to do well in school. Jackie got straight A’s. She used to tell our friends, “I like gettin’ A’s!” She graduated valedictorian from Canton High and became the first woman, white or black, to attend Radcliffe College. After Jackie graduated, Canton’s administrators tried their best to prevent another black person from graduating with perfect marks. My other sister, Pam, was just as bright and went to medical school. Michael, my brother, eventually became an engineer.

Growing up, I spent every summer at grandmamma’s house in D.C. She lived near the K-Street Park off of Pennsylvania Ave by Georgetown University. After grandmamma died, mama went back home to reclaim her house. I was thirteen at the time. At the end of that summer, daddy put me on a train to Washington with my kitten and a suitcase of clothes. When I got to Washington, mama told me that I had to go to high school with my cousins. Now I had just come out of summer school at the all-white Girl’s Latin School in Boston and wasn’t too keen on going back to school. Not just yet anyhow. But things being how they were, I didn’t have much of a choice. Mama used to say, “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” In my case, she was right.

In September of 1944 I entered Dunbar High School. On the first day of classes, mama walked with me up to the school. I’d only seen a few buildings quite so large in my entire thirteen years on this earth. An enormous staircase protruded from the front of the building and its towers soared as if to represent the heights of academic achievement its students were expected to reach. I closed my eyes and wished that I was at home playing baseball with my brothers. Mama, sensing my unspoken desire, began to reassure me that Dunbar would give me the best education anywhere. When I opened my eyes I didn’t hear another word more. For at that moment, Dunbar’s doors opened and out marched the most handsome brown men in uniform I had ever seen! For a moment, I stood awestruck. Suddenly, attending Dunbar didn’t seem so bad after all.

The students that I met came from all over the District of Colombia just to attend Dunbar. Some families even moved to Washington from out of state in order to give their children a Dunbar education. Armstrong and Cardozo were across the street. Armstrong was a technical high school and Cardozo was a business high school. There was also Phelps Vocational for Boys and Martha Washington Vocational for Girls. All of the schools in D.C. prepared students for college. Dunbar prepared students for the best. Myra Manningly and Billy Eckstine were two of my earliest friends. Myra’s daddy was the principal of Cardozo and she always wore gorgeous clothes. Billy went to Armstrong. He had a voice like a dream. One day, just before my sixteenth birthday, Myra asked me if I’d ever been kissed. When I said no, she replied, “Jean Mitchell! You mean to say you ain’t been kissed yet and you’re near sixteen!” Mama said I could on my sixteenth birthday. Charlie, who sat in front of me in physics, was the first boy that I kissed. I liked the way the back of his neck looked in his collared shirt. He’s the one that I eventually married. Paul Newberry was Charlie’s friend. He and his friends sported pompadours and wore their hair every which way. Julian Cook was the editor in chief of the Newsreel, our school newspaper. By the beginning of my sophomore year I had found my niche in orchestra and on the swim team. I became the first girl to ever earn a varsity letter.

At Dunbar, most of us were poor because Washington was still a segregated society. But compared to black folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line, we were pretty well off. In Washington, most black folks were kept at the level of GS1 and GS2, the bottom clerical jobs. Only a few blacks had professional jobs. Some of my classmates came from D.C.’s black upper class. Their parents were doctors, hair dressers, lawyers, principals, teachers, and funeral parlor attendants. The vast majority of us were the children of Washington’s cooks, maids, messengers, ministers, and busboys. In school, none of us really thought about class. Some kids came to school wearing the latest fashions but most students were more preoccupied with color and hair. During lunch the kids would sing about blow hair, straight hair, and light skin. Some of the lighter kids would taunt the darker ones singing:

“Your hair is nappy!
Who’s your pappy?
You som’ ugly chile!”

But in the classroom, we were all treated the same. Our teachers expected us to do well and so we did. We received the books that the white schools threw out. But none of that mattered. We didn't seem to take much notice, for our teachers still demanded excellence. For the teachers and administrators at Dunbar, education was about the uplift of the race. Dunbar’s teachers and administrators had a mission and under segregation, they organized to accomplish it. I revered my teachers. My peers and I knew that they were the ones who would open the pathway for us. We were required to take four years of Latin, French, and German as well as biology, chemistry, calculus, and physics. I had Mr. Howell for German. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless I asked him in German. Charlie Lofton was our principal. He was a very nice man and had a brother who taught at Howard University. He wrote my graduating class a letter which I still have:

"Dear boys and girls,
The need of men and women in the world today with a high sense of values, a belief in the ideals of democracy, and the courage to meet those forces which challenge such values is greater than ever before. Go forth from Dunbar with determination to meet such challenges unfalteringly and fearlessly. I have faith that the class of ’48 will fulfill its responsibilities in raising the banner for a peaceful, brotherly, and enlightened world in which all who strive will redefine the nobler ideals of mankind."

Mrs. Brooks was Dunbar’s Assistant Principal during the time that I was there. She prided herself on etiquette and hygiene and demanded the same from her students. Ms. Masai taught music appreciation and Dr. Williams, the Dean of Boys, helped out on occasion. Mrs. Eberhart taught chemistry and was a large woman. At the end of the year, my class gave her a box of matches so that she could continue her experiments throughout the summer. Mrs. Thomas, my English teacher, was a wonderful woman. She introduced our class to a poem by Dudley Randall called “Booker T. and W.E.B.”:

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,
"It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?"

"I don't agree," said W.E.B.
"If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I'll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook,
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain."

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,
"That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house."

"I don't agree," said W.E.B.
"For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They'll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope's as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you've got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I'll be a man."

"It seems to me," said Booker T.--

"I don't agree,"
Said W.E.B.

The difference between Washington’s technical schools and Dunbar was the difference between heads and hands. From Dunbar, many students went north to Amherst, Dartmouth, and Harvard. Most of us stayed north of the Mason-Dixon Line since southern schools were still segregated. Those of us who didn’t attend a historically black college either went north or headed west to the University of Chicago, Oberlin, or Michigan. Students who attended Armstrong and Cardozo might still get to college. But at Dunbar, we were the talented tenth.

In 1954, desegregation decimated our beloved school. Dunbar’s former black administrators were replaced by whites who opposed integration and viewed us as inferior. Dunbar was the only school in Washington D.C. that the school board tore down...as if the building itself was a symbol of what we were.

Adelaide

At thirteen years old I decided that I would get the most out of life as possible. Nearly eighty years later, that’s still true. I come from four generations of Washingtonians. Daddy and his two sisters taught at Dunbar. Daddy was a brilliant man, slight in stature, and didn’t suffer fools lightly. He taught math and wasn’t afraid to say things folks didn’t want to hear. He graduated from Dartmouth and made an excellent teacher. In fact, Sterling Brown said Daddy was the best teacher he ever had.

Washington had one white superintendent who oversaw all of the schools in the district. Below him, there was a white administrator for the white schools and a black one for the black schools. I was old enough to remember when Daddy was passed over for the chairman of the math division. Daddy, being annoyed with the politics within this system, left the district schools and became the Comptroller at Howard University. At the time, he couldn’t have known that he was moving from one part of the fire into another. When Daddy stopped teaching at Dunbar, there were rules in Washington that allowed former teachers to reclaim their jobs within three years. At Howard, Daddy found that things weren’t moving as they ought to. Folks were getting paid more than they should have for jobs that didn’t require that kind of money. So daddy decided to return to teaching, for which he was still eligible. The district school board however, wanted nothing to do with Daddy when he returned. He sued Washington’s board of education and his case went to court. He lost and didn’t file an appeal. Instead, Daddy went into business and became the city’s first black Certified Public Accountant. Aunt Mary graduated from the University of Michigan and spent her whole life teaching at Dunbar. Her sister Otelia, who later received an honorary degree as a Dr. of Laws from Smith College, attended Smith, where I would later enroll, and taught at Dunbar for a short while. Aunt Otelia was a superb teacher and taught college oriented students at Armstrong after she left Dunbar.

I was born on November 27, 1919. At the time, Washington was a very complex city. It was segregated, but we could use public transportation which wasn’t allowed in places south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now segregation was a mixed bag. I wanted it to go because of what I saw it do to people and because of what it did to me. Regardless, many of us became inspired by the black doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and professors who surrounded us and showed us what was possible. The nature of Washington’s black community shielded my friends and me from the stark realities of a Jim Crow America. Rather than suffer the humiliation of sitting upstairs in a white theater, we went to the black ones. We simply avoided certain stores and the places where we weren’t wanted, which gave us a sense of security in an unreal world. Looking back, this security gave us the tools to fight larger battles later on.

Dunbar was an unusual institution because it was created by this environment. Dunbar employed many people who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else. Black graduates of Harvard often came down to Washington to teach at Dunbar because segregation prevented them from getting jobs elsewhere. Our teachers weren’t parochial people. They were men and women with a broad knowledge base and a wide understanding of the world. Many of them had lived and traveled abroad and they brought these experiences with them to Dunbar.

I entered Dunbar in 1932 at the age of thirteen. My cousin, Ed Brooks, and I went to Dunbar at the same time. Ed went into politics and became a Senator. He was friends with Frank who was an old boyfriend of mine. Frank and James were brothers who eventually became doctors. When the NAACP fought to desegregate Annapolis, they chose to send James. Now James was a brilliant man and he knew it. We all knew. The first Christmas after he left, he came home wearing his uniform and looked so good. Annapolis being a military school, the officers conducted routine dormitory inspections. Before these inspections, the white boys on James’ floor would blow little pieces of paper though the transom into his room. The officers, who were in cahoots with the white cadets, subsequently gave James low marks. They eventually expelled him from Annapolis on the basis that his English was deficient. Now James had gone to Dunbar and I’d bet my life that his English was better than any of those officers’. James was never quite normal after that. Annapolis had taken a toll on him. He went to the University of Michigan and became a physician but remained reclusive. It was his daughter who danced on Broadway. Howard Just was also in my class. His daddy was Ernest Just, the famous black biologist. He was a very nice boy and brilliant, like his daddy. Howard has a sad story. He enrolled in Amherst in 1936. Howard was the only person in our class to enter Amherst. While he was there, his mama and daddy weren’t getting along. His mama moved to Europe and told his daddy that there wasn’t any more money for Howard to continue at Amherst. I remember Aunt Otelia saying to mama, “Why would they do that? I’d mortgage my house before I’d take that boy out of school!” Howard left Amherst and went to Morehouse but he never did reach his aspirations. I went to school with a boy from the famous Skerlock family. His daddy was the famous black photographer, Joyce Skerlock. Mark and Avery were brothers in my grade who could have gone to the other side but had the courage not to pass. Evelyn was a petite girl in my grade who planned all of our class events. She was a good natured person but I never became too friendly with her. I don’t think she’d have had the time anyhow.

In those days, Dunbar was more like a charter school. Most of the children at Dunbar came from the two main all-black junior high schools in Washington. I’d gone to Garter Patterson and there was also Shaw. These were the better schools located in a nicer area of the city. Children who lived northeast or southwest came from many different places. As far as I know, any child who wanted to attend Dunbar could enroll. Still, many students, including members of my own family, opted for Armstrong, Cardozo, or one of Washington’s vocational schools. Students could get to college from any of these institutions, but their chances of attending the best ones were greater if they came out of Dunbar. We had a classical curriculum which required us to take four years of Latin, Greek, mathematics, foreign languages, science, history, and literature. Each year there were two graduating classes: a February class and another in June. Dunbar had a pool and a library in addition to an honor society, student council, aviation club, typewriting, debate, a Shakespeare club, the Red Cross, social service, girl’s reserves, French club, the Latin society, Negro history club, traffic squad, tennis, track, swimming, football, basketball, orchestra, biology club, chemistry club, and military groups. Each organization had a teacher for a sponsor who brought the students together and worked out a plan that enabled them to meet the club’s goals. Every year there was a military competition between the men from Armstrong, Dunbar, and Cardozo. We all dressed up and went out to watch our classmates put on a show, and oh, did they look good. They each had armbands which they gave to their girlfriends. Usually it was a beautiful day and an important one too.

Aside from the military, athletics was important at Dunbar, though it wasn’t as important as scholarship. The students we talked about the most were always the smartest men and women at the school. We didn’t flaunt our intelligence but it was not hidden either. At the end of each report period the school published the names of students who made the honor role. Our teachers and administrators had found the balance between molding us into high achieving and well-rounded individuals. I don’t recall anyone ever dropping out of Dunbar during my time there. If they did, it was done quietly. Occasionally, students smoked when they weren’t supposed to or drank beer. But these instances were rare. When a student got into any trouble they had to sit on a bench outside the principal’s office. Looking back, I don’t recall students getting into trouble very often for Dunbar was an environment of achievement. We were known throughout Washington for our academic tradition and for student achievement. Dunbar was also renowned for its debaters. Mrs. Brown sponsored the debate society. She took pride in preparing us to argue critically and strategically. Every year we attended state-wide competitions and usually won. Our teachers cared the world about us. It was mostly them, and not our parents, who had the responsibility for educating us. Now, Washington being a closed society, there was a social class among Dunbar’s teachers. They often socialized with members of Washington’s black middle class. Our teachers and middle class parents occupied the same social sphere. If we were bad, our parents were bound to find out. Now, there were parents who were separated from the teachers and still supported them. But for the most part, they were a disinterested group of people.

Mrs. Brooks, the Dean of Women, was pretty stern. She didn’t make any trouble and was no-nonsense about practically everything. Ms. Tolliver taught math and was known to be strict. She used to say, “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” My class decided that silence was golden and there, the silence would last. Mrs. Mary Hundley taught English and I adored her. We remained good friends long after I left Dunbar. Mr. McW was an excellent teacher and taught Latin. He said, “The meaning I long since have sought, is that words are given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.” Mr. Douglass was the grandson of Frederick Douglass. He was friends with Mr. Shipman who had graduated from Yale and wasn’t a very good teacher.

At Dunbar we were expected to go to college. Locally there was Howard University and Miner Teachers College. Many of Dunbar’s male graduates attended Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Wesleyan. A few went to Hamilton. Now for women, our options were mainly Smith, Wellesley, and Mt. Holyoke. Though we were spread all over the place, these were the main choices. Dunbar’s teachers and administrators created a rigorous and congenial academic environment that contributed, in large part, to our success afterwards. Most importantly, they inspired us to believe that anything was possible.

When Affirmative Action was White: A Book Review

December 1, 1955 sparked the beginning of the yet another U.S. Civil War when Rosa Parks—a seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama—refused to comply with de jure segregation. However unlike the battle that occurred nearly a century earlier, the outcome of the Second Civil War remains uncertain. America met the demands of a tired and determined people by enacting a series of laws that seemed to lay the groundwork for repairing the grievances that slavery and Jim Crow inflicted upon African Americans. The Civil Rights legislation that emerged from the 1960s conflict appeared to grant America’s blacks equal standing under the law. While the legislation benefitted a small percentage of African Americans, subsequent years would reveal its inefficacy in manifesting America’s promise of equality.

Affirmative action is arguably the most contested byproduct of the Civil Rights era. Opponents of affirmative action call it “reverse discrimination,” “unconstitutional,” “a hand out,” among other things. And yet, after less than one hundred and fifty years since the abolition of slavery and a little over fifty years since the Civil Rights Movement challenged the very fabric of Americanism, critics of affirmative action fail to recognize that since America’s inception, affirmative action has only ever been white.

Ira Katznelson tells one version of this story in his book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. He points to a moment in history when affirmative action was explicitly white in order to strengthen the case for non-white affirmative action today. Katznelson explicates how the New Deal policies which emerged during the 1930s and 1940s served as a form of white affirmative action by excluding and disadvantaging blacks in order to almost exclusively benefit whites. This book attempts to link “the history of affirmative action for blacks since the mid-1960s, with the prior record of affirmative action for whites.” He follows the historical trajectory of New Deal policies in order to tie contemporary solutions to specific historical harm. Katznelson proposes a model of affirmative action that he believes will prove more palatable to those who currently oppose the measure.

The central questions that Katznelson seeks to address ask, “What are the historical instances of white affirmative action?” Additionally, “should affirmative action exist as a remedy for past and present injustice?” He answers the latter with a definitive “yes,” and the former by arguing that the 1935 Social Security Act, discrimination within the military and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), the G.I. Bill, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, among others, fashioned a white American middle class while negating the same upward economic and social mobility for America’s blacks. Said another way, Katznelson argues that black disadvantage found its roots in the generation preceding the end of Jim Crow. In her book, Schools Betrayed: the Roots of Failure in Inner City Education, Kathryn Neckerman accounts for the problems within public education by advancing a similar argument. She maintains that the challenges of urban education possess historical roots and attributes them to the extensive legacy of local decisions that have governed school policy and implementation.

The New Deal legislation was characterized by its exclusion of African Americans. While the Social Security Act offered meager benefits to the few blacks who qualified, it excluded most of them. Katznelson notes that “fully 65 percent fell outside the reach of the new program” which failed to apply to occupations such as agricultural labor and domestic servitude, leaving out the vast majority of black Americans. During this time, Southern members of Congress organized to exclude farmers and maids, “the most widespread black categories of employment,” from the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act. Katznelson notes that “without this fine-tuning, a majority of southern blacks might have had access to protections negotiated by unions that would have shaken the political economy of segregation.” The G.I. Bill of Rights, which represents the broadest set of social benefits offered by the U.S. government through a single program, enabled millions of white veterans to purchase homes, attend college, start businesses, and plan for retirement. This bill almost singlehandedly created a white American middle class and spurned burgeoning suburbs throughout the nation.

The history of New Deal policies reveal that local control remained the key to maintaining the status quo and perpetuating institutionalized racism. Although the legislation lacked explicitly racist provisions, Congress charged administrators on the local level with their enforcement. Within the educational arena, as Neckerman makes plain, similarly race neutral policies contributed to the ultimate demise of urban public education. Local control over education policies precluded federal oversight which opened the door to discriminatory implementations. In a similar vein, Katznelson notes that “guided by the model of decentralization that the South had achieved in earlier New Deal laws,” southern members of Congress drafted a law “that left responsibility for implementation mainly to states and localities, including, of course, those that practiced official racism without compromise.” In 1954, local control would again undermine the promise of equality in an ostensibly landmark ruling. Michael Klarman explicates in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education failed to fundamentally alter the conditions within black America. Similar to the claim advanced by Klarman, Charles Ogletree argues in his 2004 book, All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education, that the critical flaw within Brown lay in the Justices’ decision to cede responsibility for its implementation to the states, allowing them to pursue desegregation with “all deliberate speed.” Southern Democrats indefatigably fought against centralized control over New Deal policies. “By decentralizing authority” Katznelson writes, “and fragmenting decision making, national policies could be administered to suit white southern preferences.” Southern congressional power ensured the preservation of the south’s racial order by strategically maximizing the flow of federal money while preserving local control.

Katznelson’s book possesses numerous strengths, one of which lies in his painstaking attention to the discriminatory development of New Deal policies. He places these measures within a historical context, grounding the argument for non-white affirmative action in historical facts that illustrate instances of specific harm suffered by African Americans. The underlying assumption girding his argument draws upon the age-old maxim, “what you do for one, you must do for all,” suggesting that past white affirmative action justifies non-white affirmative measures today.

There are some who, like Clarence Thomas, presume that affirmative action lowers standards for blacks. In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger Thomas maintains that “a university may not maintain a high admission standard and grant exemptions to favored races,” when in actuality, affirmative action aims to give qualified women and people of color the same opportunities that whites have historically enjoyed despite mediocrity and under qualifications. Thomas naively subscribes to the belief that after four hundred years of racism and sexism, and after only a century and a half since the abolition of slavery, America has now become a meritocracy that is intent upon giving minorities and women equal opportunities. Like many right wing conservatives, Clarence Thomas believes that blacks ought to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, “even if they don’t have any boots.”* As President Lyndon B. Johnson observed in his 1965 address at Howard University:

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

And yet, after nearly forty years of affirmative action, black Americans are still far from equal. Despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act the prevalence of discrimination in home lending persists. Ostensibly, the Fair Housing Act passed by Congress equalized opportunities for African Americans to procure homes. In actuality, it achieved just the opposite by including discriminatory provisions that inhibited the law’s enforcement. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) introduced under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act undermined, rather than reinforced, endeavors to equalize employment opportunities for blacks. The commission instead served white interests by protecting the seniority rights of individuals who had attained positions due to past discrimination against blacks. This in turn insulated the vast majority of white workers from the widespread layoffs that would characterize the decade following the bill’s implementation. Since its founding, affirmative action has done relatively little to narrow the economic and educational gap between black and white Americans. Statistically, affirmative action has advantaged more white females than it has benefitted any other minority group. Despite over forty years of affirmative action and diversity efforts, white men still own sixty-four percent of the nation’s businesses and occupy the majority of the nation’s highest paying jobs even though they comprise only forty-one percent of the nation’s work force. White males are still:

70% of judges
70% of university professors
71% percent of air traffic controllers
73% percent of lawyers
75% percent of police detectives and supervisors
84% of construction supervisors
85% of boards of directors
89% of U.S. Senators
94% of fire company supervisors
95% of senior managers.

Neither affirmative action nor the legislation that emanated from the Civil Rights era has significantly altered the problems that have historically impeded black Americans. As Martin Luther King observed, “What good is it to be able to eat at a restaurant when you can’t afford a hamburger?” The United States has allowed black Americans entrance into the restaurant of Freedom, Equality, and Justice for All, however it has yet to offer them the necessary means with which to purchase a meal. Rather, the government contents itself upon throwing blacks scraps from the Master’s table—token programs and policies like Upward Bound and affirmative action that target not the roots of America’s institutionalized racial problems, but merely the symptoms of its social ills. To these, select individuals all too eagerly attach the label “progress!” while others scream “foul!”

The Limitations of Desegregation Part 1

Brown v. Board of Education resonates deeply throughout American culture and occupies a prominent place within America’s Progressive Narrative. The 1954 case sought to dismantle state-sponsored segregation within public education, yet over fifty years after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, America’s public schools remain more separate and unequal than ever before. Like America’s Narrative, the Court’s decision in Brown espoused democratic ideals that the Justices embraced only in rhetoric. Their ruling, though later nullified by the Court’s decision in Brown II, reflected future promises that they hoped America would eventually live up to.

While it remains unpopular to suggest that Brown was wrongly decided, the years after the decision have exposed it as little more than a feel-good measure aimed at satiating blacks. Rather than granting black Americans educational equality, the decision offered only the appearance of it. Many of Brown’s critics attribute contemporary challenges within public education to the years after the decision and to Brown II, which undermined its de facto implementation. And yet, the tragic flaw—which would forever preclude Brown’s realization—can be traced back to the ideology of the very people who strategized the case. The NAACP’s decision to dismantle Jim Crow inequality by attacking segregation rather than fighting for the equalization of black institutions would slam the doors of educational opportunity shut for many of America’s blacks.

The original strategy taken up by members of the NAACP in the fight against Jim Crow was equalization for the purpose of integration. Their main objective did not reflect what the majority of America’s blacks wanted for themselves or for their children at the time. In Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, Michael Klarman observes that prior to Brown “most southern blacks were more interested in improving black education, reducing police brutality, and securing access to decent jobs, than in desegregating grade schools.” He explicates what he terms, “inverse hierarchies of preference” between blacks and whites; grade school segregation remained at the top of the white supremacist agenda while blacks had vested interests in voting and civil equality. Contrary to what blacks wanted however, the NAACP viewed desegregation as a cheaper, more feasible pursuit. Yet behind the NAACP’s ostensibly utilitarian view of desegregation lay the belief that desegregation was the surest marker of equal citizenship. This belief was characterized by discomfort with racial separatism and suggests that blacks’ proximity to whites would solve the challenges within the black community.

And yet, the social and political milieu of the 1940s and 50s made equalization a feasible goal. America’s battle against fascism during World War II made Jim Crow inequality difficult to justify alongside democratic ideals. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged the U.S. to “refut[e] at home the very theories which we are fighting abroad.” In the mid-1940s, the Cold War placed America upon an international center stage which profoundly impacted the federal government’s behavior. Klarman notes that during this period, “not only had the national government become more committed to civil rights, but it had also developed a greater capacity to enforce that commitment.” This climate fostered the burgeoning liberalization of white racial opinion throughout the south. Across America, there was a growing consensus towards egalitarianism. The opportune moment had arrived for black Americans to launch a full-scale campaign for equalization.

The NAACP made early attempts to fight for equalization. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), a case that challenged the absence of higher educational institutions for blacks, held that states are constitutionally obligated to provide “equal services to blacks within their boundaries.” The courts allotted time for state officials to establish equalized facilities for blacks rather than requiring white universities to admit black students who were denied admission. For many southern whites and state officials, the equalization of black and white facilities seemed more palatable than desegregation. This suggests that a national attack upon unequal institutions would have been more cordially received by members of the status quo.

Sophia's Tips for Predicting Weather

1) Red sky in morning, sailors take warning; Red sky at night, sailor's delight.

2) If, by a campfire, you see the smoke hug the ground before it blows away, a storm is on its way; If the smoke flies straight up, you can expect warm weather ahead.

3) If the morning dew is on the grass, rain will never come to pass; When grass is dry at morning light, look for rain before the night.

Resurrecting Napoleon

The phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword”—coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, “Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy”—holds true today; for as history has proven, even the greatest warriors die, while words live forever. Since this nation’s founding, white Americans have wielded the power of representation. Such control has allowed for the construction of a society in which whiteness is perennially affirmed— on television, in art, within curricula, and inside the classroom. Spurned by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, blacks—and subsequently women and other minority groups— began to demand inclusion in an American Master Narrative from which they were heretofore excluded, yet within which they played an integral role. Out of this era emerged the Black is Beautiful Movement, the development of Black Studies within colleges and universities, and a greater emphasis on Afrocentric education, each of which developed in response to their initial exclusion.

In her book, The Language Police, Diane Ravitch argues that a system of quiet censorship governs American education whereby sensitivity guidelines and expurgation choke intellectual freedom (163). Her central question asks: how did the regulation of offensive language evolve into a system whereby textbooks were purged of all material that “might annoy or offend the most agitated imaginations” (18)? She charts the trajectory of bias regulation beginning in 1997 with former President Bill Clinton’s education initiatives, through 2003 in an attempt to illustrate that what began as bias and sensitivity review has developed into unwarranted censorship which now threatens personal freedom, educational quality, and intellectual agency. In her chapter entitled, “Forbidden Topics, Forbidden Words,” Ravitch provides numerous examples of passages which a Bias and Sensitivity Committee deemed inappropriate for elementary school children, in an attempt to show that: 1) personal biases inherently govern which words, topics, and phrases members of the committee deem to be “biased” 2) the inanity behind the exclusion of certain topics does not warrant their exclusion and 3) bowdlerization reduces the quality of language and literature which results in banal material that fails to foster high levels of intellectual engagement among children. She argues that such purging paints a portrait of the past that is historically inaccurate, subscribing to Napoleon Bonaparte’s belief that “history is a set of lies agreed upon.”

Ravitch avoids explicitly condemning Eurocentrism within history textbooks and instead argues that radical academics, extremists, activists, social reformists, and curriculum experts have asserted that “traditional accounts of American history were not only racist and sexist but Eurocentric as well” (135). She unsuccessfully tries to advance the notion of reverse exclusion as it pertains to European history, claiming that “in the American history depicted in today’s texts, the only civilization that seems to be not so very advanced is Europe’s” (154). She also maintains that extreme multiculturalists who advocated for revised curriculums “ignored the dangers of turning history into a tool for group therapy” (136). Her claims, particularly the latter, fail to acknowledge that prior to the 1960s and long afterward, the model of Americanism advanced in schools served as a form of group therapy for white students by instilling into them a false sense of achievement and credit for modernity. Claims for inclusion, however radical, stemmed from the initial exclusion of non-whites from America’s narrative. While inclusion (multiculturalism) and historical accuracy are not mutually exclusive, Ravitch erroneously constructs a dichotomy between the two, writing that “texts try so hard to be positive that they are misleading and inaccurate” (147). She treats nondemocratic societies with an intolerable measure of condescension, claiming that history texts treat other civilizations with adulation while failing to admit “that many nations today are undemocratic societies ruled by dictators and despots, where ordinary people have few rights and freedoms” (148). In light of Howard Fuller’s article “The Continuing Struggle for School Choice,” and Goodwin Liu’s article on school choice—in which they demonstrate the extent to which one’s freedom and choices are circumscribed by race, poverty, and systemic inequality— one has reason to question Ravitch’s naïve view of democracy. Her own biases become explicit when she fails to recognize the peculiarity of the institution of American slavery. She writes that:

Most texts blame Europeans for African slavery, as if this horror were unprecedented before the arrival of the Portuguese on the west coast of Africa…One of the better texts observes that “slavery existed in Africa and other parts of the world for centuries…” (153).

Additionally, she challenges the legitimacy of textbooks which include the cultural achievements of the Anasazi, yet fail to mention the debate over “whether the Anasazi practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism” (154). And yet, she extols Henry Graff’s, America: The Glorious Republic, as “well written and comprehensive," though Graff undoubtedly avoids mentioning that the pilgrims habitually powdered and ate their dead relatives for sustenance before Native Americans—who they would later annihilate—showed them how to plant and harvest crops.