[The Supreme Court decision fueled the civil rights movement and
the call for voting rights that are now under assault across the
country.] [[link removed]]

REMEMBERING THE LEGACY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION  
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Remembering the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education
May 19, 2020
Chicago Sun Times
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_ The Supreme Court decision fueled the civil rights movement and the
call for voting rights that are now under assault across the country.
_

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Sunday, May 17, marked the 66th anniversary of the landmark 1954
Supreme Court decision, _Brown vs. the Board of Education_. The Brown
decision addressed consolidated issues from four different cases —
in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware and Virginia—involving racial
segregation.

The unanimous opinion of the Court was written by Earl Warren,
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s newly appointed chief
justice. The Court declared that forced segregation of children in
public schools violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment
and was, therefore, unconstitutional.

But Brown is about much more than schools. It was a death knell for
legal apartheid in the United States, originally sanctioned in the
_Dred Scott_ decision of 1857, and codified in _Plessy v. Ferguson_ in
1896. The Brown decision established unequivocally that African
Americans had equal rights in America.

While the Supreme Court decides what the law is, it can’t actually
enforce the law. The Court’s decisions often follow public opinion
rather than lead it. But its decisions can empower and legitimatize,
for better or for worse.

In 1896, the Supreme Court took up Plessy v. Ferguson, which involved
a dispute over segregated train transportation in Louisiana. Homer
Plessy, a fair-skinned African American man who could “pass” for
white, purchased a first-class ticket and had taken his seat in a
whites-only train car. When he refused to take a seat in the “dirt
car” reserved for blacks, he was arrested and jailed.

The Supreme Court ruled that separate accommodations on trains and in
other facilities was legal, provided that the accommodations were
substantially equal. Hence, the legal apartheid of race and white
supremacy in America was born. The decision was met with a stirring
dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, who
argued that the “arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of
race is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with ... the equality
before the law established by the Constitution.”

Harlan was a lonely voice at the time. The infamous “Compromise of
1877” had already taken place, withdrawing federal troops from the
South and bringing Reconstruction to an end. The Civil Rights cases of
1883 had effectively nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the
terrorist campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan effectively squelched the
brief era of freedom in the South after the Civil War.

In one context, Plessy was a case about race and public
transportation. In another, more troubling context, the Plessy case
symbolized something more onerous. The Supreme Court had given legal
authority to the Jim Crow laws in the South. Segregated
facilities—that could never, in fact, be equal—became the rule,
rather than the exception.

When Chief Justice Warren issued the unanimous opinion of the Court in
Brown, he wrote that “...in the field of public education the
doctrine of separate but equal has no place,” as segregated schools
are “inherently unequal.” His ruling stripped segregation of its
constitutional authority and immoral sanction. And it applied to much
more than public schools.

The growing civil rights movement, propelled by the decision, pushed
to integrate all public facilities. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to
take a seat in the back of a bus. Eventually, with passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair
Housing Act of 1968, the law revived the intent of the 13th, 14th and
15th Amendments. These amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil
War, declared that all had the right to equal justice under the law,
and that these rights applied to the states, as well.

We now face a renewed resistance to equal justice and equal rights. In
the 2013 Supreme Court decision in _Shelby County v. Holder,_ the
Court, by a 5-4 vote (with five right-wing justices in the majority),
gutted the Voting Rights Act. The scandalous decision by Chief Justice
John Roberts overturned the re-authorization of the Act by Congress,
arguing that the country “has changed” and that racial
discrimination in voting was no longer a problem in the South.

The shortsighted ruling in Shelby has had broad implications. Across
the South, and increasingly in the rest of the country, Republicans
passed new restrictions on voting —limiting early voting, purging
voter rolls, requiring strict voter ID laws, closing polling
places—all disproportionately impacting minority voters.

Partisan gerrymandering soon followed, and today, opposition even to
voting by mail has emerged. The Shelby decision has given renewed
energy to the efforts to roll back advances made during the Civil
Rights era.

In the midst of the current pandemic and the looming depression, the
anniversary of _Brown v. Board of Education_ has passed without much
notice. But we should never forget how historic that decision was and
is — and how deplorable the decision of the “gang of five” in
Shelby remains in undermining the civil rights progress that got
legitimacy from Brown.

The Brown decision reminds us that the Supreme Court can be and ought
to be a force for equality. We should not forget that.

© 2020 Chicago Sun Times

JESSE JACKSON [[link removed]] is
an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was
a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and
1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from
1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form
Rainbow/PUSH.

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