Joe Biden, 'Brown v. Board' Families Remind America That Equality Is Good, Actually

Seventy years after historic decision and how is anyone still arguing about this?

Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education. Video screenshot, Forbes on YouTube.

Today is the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the landmark Supreme Court decision that officially meant the end of school segregation, and the start of another 70 years of fights by white reactionaries to keep it from being fully realized. And here we are again, with public education under renewed attack, because somehow the “massive resistance” to Brown has lasted for decades. It’s a pretty straight line from “segregation academies” to demanding that tax money pay for private schools.

And hell, let’s also not forget that the “religious Right,” which is godforsaken and wrong, originally coalesced around resisting desegregation but realized eventually that skeeved out most people, so it shifted its focus to banning abortion.

To mark the anniversary, and to emphasize that public schools are a national treasure that should be treated like one, President Joe Biden met yesterday at the White House with a group of 25 plaintiffs in the case and their families. That meeting was private, but Biden will be holding a number of public events this week as well, including a speech today at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. We will put up a livestream just before it starts at 11:45 Eastern (Joe will be on time, because you don’t keep a museum crowd waiting. They may archive you). And he will also deliver the commencement address Sunday at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where there may be protests, and that’s about as American as we get.

Biden also issued a proclamation noting that the decision “helped us move closer to realizing the idea that defines who we are as a Nation:  We are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.” The statement also noted that

There is still so much work to do to ensure that every student has equal access to a quality education and that our school systems fully benefit from the diversity and talent of our students — because diversity has always been one of our Nation’s greatest strengths.

After Biden met with the families, several spoke to reporters; just don’t read the YouTube comments, which are depressing. The first to speak was Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father, Oliver Brown, was the plaintiff whose name appeared on the case. The lawsuit against Topeka’s board of education was brought by 13 families with the help of the NAACP, and by the time it reached the Supreme Court, was combined with four other lawsuits against segregated schools.

Ms. Henderson succinctly made clear why it’s just so hard for today’s anniversary to simply be an unalloyed celebration of a transformative moment in our history as a multiracial democracy: That history is itself under attack.

"Right now, democracy is on the line. The White House is one of the symbols of democracy. Democracy gave birth to the rule of law, and the rule of law gave birth to Brown vs. the Board of Education."

Ms. Henderson was joined at the brief presser by NAACP President Derrick Johnson; John Stokes, a plaintiff in one of the related cases, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in Virginia; and Nathaniel Briggs, the son of plaintiff Harry Briggs from South Carolina, whose Briggs v. Elliott case was also combined with Brown.

As USA Today notes in a terrific profile of Henderson and other guests at the White House yesterday (go read it!), she was just three years old when the case was decided. In 1988, she started a foundation in Topeka to help educate about the case and its significance:

"One of the reasons for starting the foundation was to help our state and our city of Topeka embrace this history and recognize that it wasn't a negative, that it was in fact something positive that we had done for the nation," she said.

And in fact, unlike many places across the South and elsewhere, the Topeka schools immediately complied with the Court’s order, and when Henderson started school in 1955, Topeka’s schools had been desegregated without much fuss, although prior to the case, her older sister had been refused when their father tried to enroll her at an all-white school.

By contrast, Briggs said it took another decade for his South Carolina town to finally integrate its schools. He told reporters at the Thursday event that the anniversary of Brown is a reminder that we’re still trying — at least many of us — to get it right.

"It was a struggle in South Carolina. […] It's nice to celebrate and commemorate, but I know the struggle still continues in some of the school districts around this country. I know that unequal access to education still exists in this country."

John Stokes, 92, called for history to be taught accurately, including the parts that might make some people uncomfortable, like the fact that schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, were shuttered from 1959 to 1964 to avoid desegregation — something he suspected most people now aren’t aware of unless it was actually taught. “We lived through it. I saw crosses burn.” He also noted that after the Brown decision, there was a move to reverse it in Congress — another bit of history that shouldn’t be allowed to slip through the cracks or hidden because it might make rightwing white parents sad.

We’ll be back later this morning with Biden’s speech at the museum. As that USA Today story notes, he was 11 when Brown was decided (had you heard? he’s quite old!), and has made his own journey through the ensuing backlash, from his now-embarrassing opposition to busing in the early 1970s, to winning the presidency after winning the 2020 South Carolina primary with the overwhelming support of Black voters. People, and nations, can change, and by god there’s a lot more needed.

[USA Today / White House / New Jersey Monitor]

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