For whatever reason, lately I seem to keep coming back to matters that concern the Supreme Court. The latest example was my decision to read the 2000 biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, by Juan Williams.
Marshall was certainly one of the giants of the civil rights movement, whose life was a continual effort to bring about an end to racial segregation in the U.S. Working for the NAACP and later the Legal Defense Fund arm of that organization, he had a series of important victories before the Supreme Court that forced an end to "separate but equal." The first cases, beginning in the mid-1930s, involved law schools and medical schools. I don't know if it is still true, but at one time he had argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone else in history, and it was only after a string of victories that he was prepared to argue the famous Brown v. Board of Education case (which was really 5 different cases from around the country consolidated into one and remembered with the name of one of them.)
After the Brown case, Marshall was appointed as a Federal Judge on the Appellate Court in NYC, and in 1962 LBJ named it as the U.S. Solicitor General. (There is an interesting story here that I don't think Juan Williams has necessarily got to the bottom of. Marshall had a lifetime appointment to the Appellate Court and he gave that up to take a political appointment as Solicitor General. Marshall and LBJ always denied there was an agreement that Marshall would get the next appointment to the Supreme Court, and Johnson even told Marshall, on the night before he named him, that he was not going to name him. And there is plenty of testimony by LBJ's inner circle that he was considering others. Still it seems like there is more to that story.)
One of the things I did not know about this time in the civil rights movement is that the goal of integration, while always in Marshall's sights, was not universally shared. Many people thought it was much more practical, and therefore desirable, to use the courts to make the segregated black schools truly equal. The worry was that Marshall's and the NCAAP's quest for the perfect solution would prevent an acceptable improvement of the current reality. While it may seem like an interesting historical abstraction today, these were the real concerns of real people who wanted the best possible education for their children, and for whom the failure to end segregation meant the continuation of some truly horrific schools in many locales. The black community was truly split on this issue, if not 50-50 at least significantly, and with a lot of important leaders on both sides.
Also, it took an amazing amount of personal courage for a black family to allow themselves to be used in an integration case, while a case to bring about truly equal schools could have been filed with less threat to any individual black family. The truly heroic aspect of the ordinary people involved in these cases, people who risked literally everything, reminds me to reread Juan Williams' other book, Eyes on the Prize, which was a companion to the PBS series of the same name...way back when.
Marshall and the NAACP never wavered in their commitment to integration, and one of the reasons the Topeka case was chosen over others is that the black schools in Topeka were very nearly on a par with the white schools. Juan Williams cites evidence that the best black schools may even have been better than the worst white schools in Topeka. The rationale was that they wanted to remove the option from the courts of simply ordering the city to make the schools truly equal, since they virtually were already.
Marshall's story ultimately becomes rather tragic, as the civil rights movement took a different direction from the legal approach he had followed, and he felt less than appreciated by the last decade of his life, especially as the make up of the Supreme Court had changed and he was relegated to the role of perpetual dissenter.
Enough history for today. Next up is an alternative history lesson of what would have it meant to history if Chief Justice Vinson had not died of a heart attack between the time the Brown case was first argued before the court and the time it was finally decided.
1 comment:
This is a very good analysis. Thanks. I am reminded of sections in Condoleezza Rice's book on her parents who were both teachers in Birmingham. They were part of a black middle class that might have been sympathetic to the view you mention to bring black schools to a par with white schools.
As you know, I am really appalled by the school system that I formerly paid taxes to, and I think it has done a terrible disservice to the black population of that city. Wonder what might have been different if, as you say, the alternate route had been taken? Look forward to the next lesson!
Post a Comment