A Girl Stands at the Door

Few Supreme Court rulings in history have approached the importance of the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. In overturning the notorious case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court in Brown unanimously held that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Brown is rightfully celebrated as a great chapter in American history. But do we really know the whole story of how the case arrived at the Supreme Court?

In a new book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools, Rachel Devlin reveals a previously unknown chapter in the history of the school desegregation battle. In the process, she shows how hindsight bias distorts our understanding of history, including the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

When viewed in hindsight, the NAACP’s lawsuits against racially-segregated public schools seem like an inevitable component of the civil rights struggle. After all, it was just as obvious in the mid-20th century as it is today that educational inequality promotes, entrenches, and reinforces racial inequality in society as a whole. 

Yet, despite the pernicious influence and sinister nature of segregated schools, the strategic wisdom of a direct challenge to educational segregation was not immediately apparent, even to the NAACP’s top lawyers. As Professor Devlin points out, “Though the desegregation of America’s public schools may seem a self-evident objective, in the 1940s and early 1950s it remained a radical, divisive idea. There was no consensus about how best to attack educational inequality.” Segregated schools could be found throughout the country, including northern states. Launching a frontal assault on educational inequality thus risked provoking a racist backlash among white northerners as well as white southerners.  

Moreover, contrary to popular understanding, the attorneys for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, including the legendary Thurgood Marshall himself, initially showed little enthusiasm for a direct legal attack on segregated schools. After taking his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, Justice Marshall frankly acknowledged that the legal challenge to primary and secondary schools was not his idea. “[T]here was no plan on any of these cases,” he explained. When the issue first came up in the late 1940s, Marshall recoiled from the idea of suing the public schools because he feared a Supreme Court defeat would set back the cause of civil rights for years to come. Marshall’s “prevailing sense,” one colleague recalled, “was that we just couldn’t afford to lose a big one.”   

Instead, the decision to mount the epic legal battle was made by young African American students (and their supportive parents) who, at great risk to themselves, spontaneously challenged segregation in their local schools. As Professor Devlin argues,

“Brown v. Board was the end result of an onslaught of unsolicited cases, initiated by parents and students, which came as a surprise to the national office and ultimately convinced NAACP lawyers to litigate on the grade school level. The road to Brown was a grassroots movement spearheaded by girls and young women, whose words, actions, and public commitment brought school desegregation to the fore in the postwar era.”   

Devlin’s book highlights a striking feature of the school desegregation cases: the plaintiffs were overwhelmingly female. As she explains: “[A]ll save one of the early school desegregation lawsuits . . . were filed on behalf of girls. Young women and girls, almost exclusively, attempted to register at white schools, testified in court, met with local white administrators and school boards, and talked with reporters from both the black and white press.”

Just as military service in World War II served as a defining experience for African American men, the school desegregation battle had the same effect for African American women. “For many girls and young women,” Devlin asserts, “school desegregation was their call to arms, a mission they felt to be their own. Those who participated uniformly shared a perception that segregated public schools were a political and moral crisis.” For example, Betta Bowman, one of the young women who desegregated Baton Rouge High School in 1963, later recalled the experience in terms identical to military service: “I felt like it was a duty. . . It was my time. It was my chance to help out our own people. . . So when the opportunity presented itself that I could do something, oh yes, I was going to do it.”

The analogy to military service was appropriate in another way. The African American students who desegregated schools across the country put their physical safety and emotional well-being on the line, enduring vicious assaults, merciless harassment, and intense social ostracism. In the words of Shirley Lawrence Alexander, one of the young women who desegregated Albany (Georgia) High School: “I anticipated that I would go through a lot. I wasn’t going to fool myself about that. But . . . I was ready for whatever . . . You can’t turn back. . .  I don’t think any of us thought about running. We thought about enduring it until the end no matter what.”

It is an amazing story and Professor Devlin tells it extremely well.

If you are interested, she discussed her book earlier this summer at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. The video is available here on the CSPAN website and it’s quite good.  It lasts just about one hour.   

Comments

[Bill Turnier]

An interesting podcast on this topic is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Miss Buchanan...” in his Revisionist History podcast series.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/revisionist-history/id1119389968?mt=2&i=1000389334608

[Anthony Gaughan]

Thanks for the link, Bill. I will check out that podcast. Have a good weekend.

[Erik Jensen]

One of the interesting things about Brown is that it did not explicitly overrule Plessy.

[Anthony Gaughan]

That is indeed an interesting point, Erik.

Of course, the reasoning of the Brown decision demolished Plessy in everything but name. In addition, on the issue of the psychological harm caused by segregation, the Brown court expressly declared that "[a]ny language in Plessy contrary to this finding is rejected."

Yet, as you point out, it is interesting that they did not specifically declare Plessy overruled. Moreover, it remains a remarkable fact that as late as December 1952, there were only 4 justices solidly committed to overturning Plessy. But when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died and Earl Warren replaced him, the seas finally parted. Afterwards, Felix Frankfurter famously quipped that Vinson's death was "the first solid piece of evidence I've ever had that there really is a God."

Michael Klarman's book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, includes a fascinating analysis of the justices' conference notes during the Brown deliberations. Professor Klarman points out that the justices' clerks strongly supported overturning Plessy (with the sole exception of William Rehnquist, who was clerking at the time for Justice Robert Jackson). It seems to me that the near unanimity among the clerks likely played an important role in encouraging the justices to reach a 9-0 ruling to reverse Plessy.

Thanks for your comment, Erik, and have a good weekend.