Episode 7.5: Education and the Civil Rights Movement: From Plessy to Brown

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Do curso por University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

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Post-World War II

This module takes up the Cold War and education; the conservative attack on “life adjustment education”; McCarthyism and the New York City schools; federally sponsored New Curricula, late 1950s–1960s; the “radical romanticists”; the post-Brown struggle for racially integrated schools; the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict; and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Episode 7.1: Life Adjustment Education7:42

Episode 7.2: The Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Public Schools6:53

Episode 7.3: Waging the Cold War in Schools: Federal Support for Academic Rigor9:21

Episode 7.4: "Radical Romanticists"4:49

Episode 7.5: Education and the Civil Rights Movement: From Plessy to Brown10:21

Episode 7.6: The Last Hurrah of Jim Crow Schools8:45

Episode 7.7: Busing Goes North: The Limits of Racial Integration8:47

Episode 7.8: Community Control and Teacher Unions7:55

Episode 7.9: Title IX and the "Hidden Injuries of Coeducation"5:49

Conheça os instrutores

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

Recall the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v.,.

Ferguson which gave the courts to the principle of separate but equal.

That principle allowed a state to operate a segregated facility so

long as they were equal.

Separate but equal was to be applied in a series of Supreme Court decisions

bearing on the South's Jim Crow system of segregated public schools and

segregated higher education institutions.

The National Association for

the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, through its legal defense fund,

orchestrated the legal attack on Jim Crow schools.

The legal strategy was created at Howard University,

a historically black university in Washington DC.

The leaders of this crusade were Howard's Law School Dean, Charles Houston, and

Houston's prized student, the future Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

The NAACP strategist decided not to attack the principle of segregation directly.

But, rather, indirectly, to task the principle of Separate But Equal,

ordained by Plessy in 1896 and upheld in southern segregation cases, thereafter.

They devised a strategy for a long march through the institutions.

>> They would first establish a beach head in the southern states graduate and

professional schools.

Here unlike the public schools, there were no state supported facilities for blacks.

No law schools, no medical schools, nada.

The question of equal facilities was moot.

To meet the Plessy criterion of separate but equal, at a minimum, the white south

would have to build separate graduate and professional schools for blacks.

The NAACP strategists calculated that if they could prove a constitutional

violation the white south would either have to expend a great deal of money on

new all black institutions or integrate the existing state supported facilities.

They recognized that proving the false coin of separate but

equal would require a number of test cases and likely take years to win.

They would have the salami slice Plessy out of existence,

starting first with higher education.

Only with the body of Supreme Court precedence in place

would they be able to defrock Plessy as it applied to Jim Crow public schools.

When they might have sufficient judicial armaments to wage the battle

against the principle of segregation itself was anyone's guess.

>> The NAACP strung together landmark victories at the supreme court.

In 1938 in Gaines versus Canada the court ruled that

the University of Missouri which did not have a law school for

blacks, would have to integrate its state law school, build a law school for

blacks or get out of the law school business altogether.

The university changed its policy by integrating its law school at

Colombia, Missouri.

The association now had a clear judicial precedent for

forcing other southern states to follow suit.

The NAACP suspended its education campaign during World War II and

it was back in business by the late 1940's.

Two supreme court cases, both cases originating in the southwest,

both ruled on the same day in 1950.

Charted a path to Brown v.,

Board of Education in 1954.

In the first case, Sweatt v.,

Painter.

Herman Sweatt,

an African American, had applied to the University of Texas Law School at Austin.

He was rejected because he was black.

With an aye to the Supreme Court's 1938 ruling in Gaines v.,

Canada, the federal district court ordered Texas to establish a law school for

blacks, or admit Sweatt to the University's law school.

The state complied minimally by designing three small basement rooms in

an Austin office building as a law school for blacks.

Three part time faculty members were assigned to teach Sweatt and

he was given access to the state's law library in the capitol building.

Texas reckoned that by providing a law facility for blacks, no matter how meager,

it had met the complicity criterion for equality.

On this point, the NAACP's legal defense fund argued vigorously that separating

Sweatt from the University's law school denied him the essentials of a legal

education that were abundantly available in the state's Lily White Law School.

Access to the reputation of the faculty and their social networks,

to alumni, to peers and forums for debate and so forth.

>> The second southwest case, McLaurin versus Oklahoma,

spoke to the heinous treatment accorded George McLaurin.

A black graduate student who had been admitted under a federal district

court order to the University of Oklahoma's School of Education.

Upon enrolling in the University,

McLaurin was immediately segregated within the institution.

He was allowed to listen to lectures, but only from the vantage point of a desk

marked Reserved for Colored stationed in the hallway outside the classroom.

While McLaurin had access to the university's library,

he was not allowed to study in the reading room.

In the cafeteria he was forced to eat alone at a table marked Colored.

Thurgood Marshall denounced his treatment as quote, a badge of slavery.

In Sweatt versus Painter, the Supreme Court ordered Sweatt's

immediate admission to the University of Texas law school.

The court ruled that separate but equal meant real equality of facilities and

instruction, otherwise the separation was unconstitutional.

Tim McLaurin v.,

Oklahoma, the court ruled that McLaurin's segregation within the university

undermined his ability to learn his profession.

The principle of equality demanded that he be accorded the same rights and

privileges as white students.

>> Another four years would pass before the final purging of Plessy in the schools

of the Jim Crow south.

That purging would need a Supreme Court ruling that segregated

public schools were unconstitutional.

Toward this end, Thurgood Marshall and other attorneys at the Legal Defense Fund

mounted Federal District court cases from five states, Kansas,

Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia.

The attorneys found courageous families in the town and interlaced of these states

eager to join the crusade to end Jim Crow in southern schools.

This was a dangerous business.

Blacks, especially in the back wooded hamlets of Clarion county,

South Carolina, were subject to violence.

Threats to their livelihoods, and other forms of coercion.

>> A major breakthrough in the fate of these cases came in 1953 when

President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren,

the former governor of California, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Eisenhower thought he had appointed a conservative on racial

matters to lead the high court.

In any event, the court given the gravity of the situation,

took the cases on appeal directly from the Federal District Courts involved, and

combined them into one case, Brown.

The story of tiny Linda Carol Brown, the daughter of the lead plaintiff,

was about to be emblazoned on the nation's conscience.

Linda's father, Oliver, was a welder for the Santa Fe railroad in Topeka,

Kansas, a border state during the Civil War.

In 1950, eight year old Linda was in the third grade at a segregated black

school about a mile from her home.

Each day she had to walk six blocks between train tracks to catch a bus that

took 30 sometimes 40 minutes to reach her school.

However, importuned the principal of the white school that was

just a six block walk from their home to admit Linda.

No blacks need apply said the principal.

Earl Warren knew that he need unanimity among the other eight justices.

If the courts overturning of Plessy in education was to have forceful

national credibility.

The deal that Warren brokered in exchange for an agreement of unanimity was manifest

in the implementation decree that followed in 1955.

Fully a year after the Brown decision.

Warren issued the court's unanimous nine zero decision on May 17th 1954.

Brown overturned Plessy in education.

Segregation inflicted irreparable harm on black children, the court argued.

The public schools were to be abolished.

The decision was only ten pages long, written in non-technical language.

Brown v Board was a clarion call and moral imperative for school desegregation.

>> Having issued a mandate for

desegregation, it was incumbent on the justices to specify a remedy.

One year later the Supreme Court issued its implementation decree known to history

as Brown II, which charged the federal district courts with responsibility for

overseeing school districts desegregation plans and

for adjudicating complaints of discrimination arising from the plans.

The court intentionally softened the impact of Brown by instructing

school districts to proceed to desegregate with all deliberate speed.

Mm, this was ambiguous, conciliatory language that

allowed Southern school districts to stall desegregation for another 13 years.

In our next episode, we look at the white south's intransigent and

the Supreme Court's delayed response to

compel the racial integration of southern schools.

[MUSIC]

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