When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education ruling 50 years ago, it based its opinion on the premise that the lives of African-Americans were irreparably harmed by the stigma of segregation, leaving their lives bereft of hope and opportunity. Not all African-Americans accepted this idea, however, leading to skepticism about the Brown decision, says an expert in legal and social history and in constitutional law at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Although black ambivalence about Brown may appear to be a phenomenon of recent vintage — one connected to the ‘black pride’ movement of the late ’60s and ’70s or the multicultural movement of the early ’90s — in fact it has deep historical roots,” says Tomiko Brown-Nagin, J.D., Ph.D., an associate professor in Washington University’s School of Law and in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences.
“The historical record should be revised to correct received wisdom: the notion that African-Americans across time and place uniformly supported the campaign to integrate the schools is an historical misconception.”
Brown-Nagin, author of “An Historical Note on the Soundness of the Stigma Rationale for a Civil Rights Landmark” in the recent Saint Louis University Law Journal, says that it is important to understand this skepticism, especially during the decision’s semi-centennial.
As Atlanta goes, so goes the nation
She uses Atlanta’s implementation of Brown as an example of what was happening around the rest of the country.
“Because of its unique place in the history of the South and the nation, Atlanta provides an ideal backdrop for exploring questions about African-American skepticism toward Brown,” notes Brown-Nagin, who also wrote “Race as Identity Caricature” in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
“Although Atlanta’s African-American leadership is fairly characterized as activist on the issue of education during the pre-Brown era, an important segment of it — teachers — reacted with ambivalence to the 1954 ruling,” she says.
“One black teachers’ organization, the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, categorically refused to endorse Brown, despite pressure from the NAACP branch leaders to do so. Thus it was clear early on that the black educators did not necessarily view school desegregation as beneficial, and African-Americans would not necessarily speak in one voice on the matter.”
Even in the years after the ruling, Atlanta’s African-American leadership proceeded toward desegregation in a slow and restrained manner. Brown-Nagin says that there are a number of explanations for this reticence toward Brown.
“African-Americans in Atlanta saw law as a secondary route to equality, preferring to use informal and formal politics to achieve equal rights,” she says. “Other reasons include a prized tradition of separate education and a lack of opposition to the African-American elite’s control of decision-making. All of these reasons run counter to the Brown Court’s assumption that all African-Americans experienced life under segregation as unerringly harmful or viewed themselves as powerless in the face of Jim Crow laws.”
Stigma of segregation felt by others
Not all African-Americans in Atlanta agreed with the approach toward achieving equality that the black leaders preferred, however. A group of black parents from poor and working-class neighborhoods agreed with the Brown Court’s generalization about the stigma of segregation and called for a quick implementation of Brown.
“The poor parents’ voices fell on deaf ears,” Brown-Nagin says.
As in other cities around the nation, the dissonance between the experiences of Atlanta’s African-American decision makers and other members of the African-American community undermined the possibility that structural relief for school segregation would be ordered, according to Brown-Nagin. It upset a key assumption on which the smooth implementation of Brown depended — the premise that African-Americans, as a whole, were unified around the goal of implementing Brown because of their lives under segregation.
“It would be wrong to assume that the history of black ambivalence and conflict over Brown means that it was wrong for civil rights lawyers to wage a battle to end segregation in education,” Brown-Nagin advises. “The implications of this history are much more complex. First and foremost, this history shows that African-Americans were never reducible to a ‘racial’ identity in the way that slave-holders and segregationists claimed.
“The conflict within the black community over civil rights lawyers’ strategies underscores that racism may impact individuals and sub-groups within racialized communities in distinct ways,” she adds. “Distinct harms demand multi-dimensional responses and types of intervention from policy makers and civil rights lawyers. Working-class minorities face unique challenges in resolving their problems: their lack of voice in the corridors of power where policy is made and absence of influence in the law offices where problem-solving strategies are developed.”