The Broken Promise of Brown v. Board of Education

This speech by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond is a powerful narrative of what was accomplished by Brown v. Board of Education and the many betrayals that have followed it through the years. When will we realize that we hurt our children (all children) through segregation and isolation...

Bond's speech is also a great example of integrating personal/family experience with larger social/political/cultural histories to bring a sense of drama, accomplishment and immediacy to the story--very impressive! I also appreciated learning about the roots of Berea College (KY) as an abolitionist college.

Thivai
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"The Broken Promise Of Brown"
by Julian Bond
Tom Paine

Fifty years ago this past April , Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his first sermon as the new pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25 years old.

One month later, on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declared that segregated schools violated the Constitution's promise of equal protection.

Two months later, on July 17, 1954, construction began at Disneyland. Sadly, today Brown's promise is still lost in fantasy land. The Magic Kingdom remains closed to children of color in America.

There can be no mistake—those 50 years since Brown have seen the fortunes of black America advance and retreat, but the decision is always cause for sober celebration, not impotent dismay.

We celebrate the brilliant legal minds who were the architects of Brown v. Board ; we celebrate the brave families who were its plaintiffs; and we celebrate the legal principle that remains its enduring legacy—that, in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."

That the quest for meaningful equality—political and economic equity—remains unfulfilled today is no indictment of past efforts. It is testament to our challenge.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision, it is easy to cast a cynical eye on the status of school desegregation in America today—or the sorry state of race relations—and minimize the significance of Brown. That is a grave mistake, for Brown —by destroying segregation's legality, gave a nonviolent army the power to destroy segregation's morality as well.

Thus it is no coincidence that this year we also celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the most sweeping civil rights legislation before or since, and our democracy's finest hour.

We look back on the years between Brown and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with some pride. In those years, Brown's anniversary became a celebratory signpost, as major events focused on commemorating the date. The year after Brown, Rosa Parks sat down to stand up for her rights, and the Montgomery bus boycott began. Martin Luther King's first national address was at a 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage on the third anniversary of Brown at the Lincoln Memorial. Later that same year the Little Rock Nine successfully integrated Little Rock's Central High School. Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters burst out across the South in 1960, followed by the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the forcible integration of Ole Miss in 1962. In 1963 alone, the year that King—fresh from the battlefields of Birmingham—told the nation of his dream at the March on Washington, there were more than 10,000 anti-racist demonstrations.

King was the most famous and well known of the modern movement's personalities, but it was a people's movement. It produced leaders of its own; but it relied not on the noted but the nameless, not on the famous but the faceless. It didn't wait for commands from afar to begin a campaign against injustice. It saw wrong and acted against it; it saw evil and brought it down. Those were the days when women and men of all races and creeds worked together in the cause of civil rights. Those were the days when good music was popular and popular music was good. Those were the days when the president picked the Supreme Court and not the other way around. Those were the days when we had a war on poverty, not a war on the poor. Those were the days when patriotism was a reason for open-eyed disobedience, not an excuse for blind allegiance. Those were the days when the news media really was "fair and balanced" and not just cheerleaders for the powerful.

But those were not "the good old days."

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