THE FIGHTING ARMY BEHIND BROWN Dissertation in History and Humanities Presented to the Faculty of T

WITHOUT A SWORD OR A SHIELD: THE FIGHTING ARMY BEHIND BROWN

Dissertation in History and Humanities

Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

by DEBORAH KEATING

B.A., University of Texas-Dallas, 1980 M.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2000 M.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2015

Kansas City, Missouri 2021

DEBORAH KEATING

WITHOUT A SWORD OR A SHIELD: THE FIGHTING ARMY BEHIND BROWN

Deborah Keating, Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree

University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2021

ABSTRACT

The struggle of Black Americans to obtain access to economic and political opportunities available to Whites in the United States began with the arrival of the first enslaved persons in 1619 and continues today. Men and women of courage led the struggle, many of whom are well-known to history. There are many others, however, whose contributions are lost. In losing those stories, the history of the Black resistance movement also loses much of its human pathos. Looking at Black resistance through the stories of the individuals who participated at the ground-level in the protracted legal battle for educational equality, Brown v. Board of Education provides a unique bottom-up view of the Black resistance experience in America.

While the individual stories of those who initiated and sustained the legal struggle for equal education are essential to capture, often, the success of the struggle is overstated or misrepresented. Brown created a vast sea-change in American racial relations. Some changes were positive and some not, but seventy years after the initial court decision in

1954, the quality of American public education is questionable, and the sacrifices the original families made are at risk of being for naught.

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APPROVAL PAGE

The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, have examined a dissertation titled “Without a Sword or a Shield: The Fighting Army Behind

Brown,” presented by Deborah Keating, candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance.

Supervisory Committee

Diane Mutti Burke, Ph.D., Committee Chair Department of History

Andrew S. Bergerson Department of History

Rebecca Davis, Ph.D. Department of History

John Herron, Ph.D. Department of History

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vi

TABLES ...... viii

MAPS ...... ix

NOTES ON USAGES ...... x

IN MEMORIAM ...... xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... xiii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: JIM CROW AND THE FIGHT FOR EDUCATION ...... 40

CHAPTER 3: LEADERSHIP IN THE BLACK TRADITION: FOUR PREACHERS AND A BARBER ...... 71

CHAPTER 4: WIVES AND MOTHERS, ACTIVISTS AND TEACHERS ...... 133

CHAPTER 5: THE CHILDREN: PROTESTERS AND VICTIMS ...... 185

CHAPTER 6: THE LAWYERS AND THE JUDGES ...... 216

CHAPTER 7: EPILOGUE ...... 270

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 297

VITA ...... 320

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illus. Page

1. Rev. Francis Griffin ...... 72

2. Rev. Joseph De Laine ...... 91

3. Harry Briggs Receiving an Award ...... 97

4. Rev. James Seals ...... 100

5. Mass Meeting at Liberty Hill Church ...... 102

6. Rev. McKinley Burnette ...... 109

7. Rev. Oliver Brown ...... 112

8. Gardner Bishop ...... 117

9. Esther Swirk Brown ...... 139

10 Alvin Todd, Lucinda Todd and Daughter Nancy ...... 142

11. Harry and Eliza Briggs...... 157

12. Jean Fairfax ...... 177

13. Brown Attorneys on Steps of the Supreme Court ...... 216

14. Louis Redding ...... 229

15. Irving Morris ...... 234

16. Elisha Scott, John Scott and Charles Scott ...... 241

17. Charles Bledsoe ...... 243

18. Jack Greenberg...... 245

19. School Segregation Case – Order of Argument ...... 248

20. Harold Boulware, Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood Robinson, III...... 250

21. James Nabrit and George E.C. Hayes ...... 255

Illus. Page

22. Judge Waites Waring ...... 259

23. Judge Collin Seitz...... 264

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TABLES

Table Page

1. Literacy Rates ...... 52

2. Unemployment Rates and Earnings by Educational Attainment ...... 212

3. Number of Black Lawyers in the Confederate States 1880-1940...... 221

4. Public School Racial Mix Projection ...... 281

5. Distribution of Wealth Amongst Racial Categories in U.S ...... 283

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MAPS

Map Page

1. Map of Virginia Showing Regions ...... 84

2. Map of South Carolina Showing Regions ...... 94

3. Map of Greater Washington, D.C. by Census Tract – 1940...... 119

4. Map of Delaware and Counties...... 154

5. Map of Students of Color in U.S. Public Schools...... 277

6. Map of Low-Income Students Enrollment in U.S. Public Schools ...... 287

NOTES ON USAGES

NAACP vs. NAACP LDF

The use of the acronym NAACP or NAACP LDF can be confusing.

In 1940, under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service, the NAACP established the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) with a separate board. The two organizations were virtually interchangeable, sharing the same offices, staff, finances, and board members. After the Brown decision, Southern congressmen brought increasing pressure on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the validity of the LDF’s tax-exempt status. During this time, Marshall had Robert Carter assigned to the NAACP as its in-house attorney, and Marshall resigned as the parent organization’s special counsel. In 1957 the board members were split, making the split between the two entities as factual in reality as on paper. However, each continued to use NAACP as their corporate name. This situation confused its members, the press, legislatures, and even historians, especially when Robert Carter began filing civil rights cases for the NAACP separate from those filed by the Legal Defense Fund. For this dissertation, I used “NAACP” for cases filed before 1940 but heard after that date, and for cases filed after 1940 but not heard until 1957 or later.

Women’s Names

Blacks rightly resented the tendency of White people to call them by their first names. Not allowing Blacks the honorifics of Mr., Mrs., Miss, Dr., etc., was another part of the Jim Crow culture intended to emphasize that Blacks were not social equals. As academic writing tradition is to use last names, I have adhered to that policy whenever possible. However, when discussing individuals with the same last names and where the use of last names only might cause confusion (and the woman’s first name is known), I have chosen to use women’s first and last names versus honorifics to reduce confusion. The intent is to show respect by underscoring that the women were individuals in their own right, not just extensions of their husbands.

Use of Negro, “Colored,” and Capitalization of Black and White

These nouns are only used in direct quotes and in no way intended to be offensive. During this period, Blacks used the term Negro (capitalized) or colored themselves, and the terms appear in documents written by them, including legal briefs.

Recently there has been a move to use capitalized Black instead of African- American when referring to individuals of that ethnicity. The discussion of whether or not to capitalize White is still unresolved. Since APA and MLA both recommend capitalizing both, I have chosen to follow that guidance. The exception is when a direct quote or title of a book or article uses the lower-case “black” or African American.

Other Capitalizations

I have chosen to capitalize Constitution when referring to the United States Constitution. Otherwise, I used lower case.

Similarly, I have chosen to capitalize Court when referring to the Supreme Court of the United States.

“As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.” ― Justin Cronin, The Twelve1

In Memoriam

Uncounted millions contributed to the initial success of the long civil rights movement. Like Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a few are memorialized in books, songs, and art. But the names and sacrifices of most other individuals involved in the long struggle are lost to history. They have become, at best, nameless faces in photographs and newsreels. Others have disappeared totally from common memory. This work hopes to honor these people as a small representation of those who started and sustained this important fight when they had neither a “shield or a sword” to protect them.2

1 Justin Cronin, The Twelve: A Novel, (New York: Ballentine Books, 2012).

2 In “Community as a Liberating Theme in Civil Rights History,” Vincent Harding stated that “The participants [ in community resistance] were not superheroes. Rather they were people who drew upon the emerging experience and vision of community for their strength to continue.” Published in New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan, ed. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 18.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I come to the end of this endeavor, one I never thought I would undertake and often wondered if I would finish, I realize how much the project has changed and evolved since I began. The research journey took me to places I had not imagined, and, in the process, I met and leaned on many people whose help was invaluable. First and foremost, I must thank Dr. Diane Mutti Burke, who has been my champion and my supporter throughout this entire journey. There is no doubt that without her support and patience, I would not have met the challenge I set for myself. Others on my committee have been patient and supportive, and I would like to thank Dr. Rebecca Davis, Dr. John Herron, and

Dr. Drew Bergerson for their honest and direct feedback and support. Their assistance has helped make this work better than I first envisioned.

There are many archivists and librarians to whom I also owe a great debt, especially those at the Library of Congress, the Wilmington Library, the Delaware

Historical Society, the Kansas Historical Society, and the National Archives.

Their interest in my project encouraged me to dig deeper into the primary sources to locate those bits of information that help make any work more interesting. I would also like to thank Naja Griffin Johnson for the time she spent talking with me about her family and her experiences during the Davis case. Her first-hand accounts made the Prince Edward story even more compelling.

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Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends who encouraged me throughout this adventure, which some thought would never end. Yes, it is finally over!

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DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to my parents, Frances and Patrick Keating who blessed me with curiosity and taught me to love learning

and to

Malcolm and Joy – friends, who made the difference.

“The individual in America is protected against slavery and involuntary servitude by ‘both a shield and a sword.’”1 Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, (1944)

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Lake City, South Carolina’s weather was mild and dry the evening of

October 10, 1955. The sun set shortly after 5:30, and without a moon, the countryside was dark. Reverend Joseph De Laine, leader of the African Methodist

Episcopal (AME) church in Lake City, knew that the Citizen’s Council, a KKK clone organization, planned to attack his home that evening.2 After years of harassment and recent threats of violence, De Laine had reached his limit.3 This time he was determined to protect his family and their home from the White supremacists he knew were coming. Shortly after midnight, someone fired shots from a passing

1 Pollock v. Williams 322 U.S. 4. (1944). In his analogy, Jackson saw the shield as the federal Constitution represented by the federal government to which an individual could turn should his rights be abridged by the state.

2 Rev. De Laine received warnings from several Black neighbors who shared rumors about White supremacists’ plans to do him harm. Mattie De Laine received a similar warning from a White neighbor. The family also received written threats. Rev. J.A. De Laine Papers 1915-2000, (Civil Rights Digital Library, University of South Carolina) http://crdl.usg.edu/collections/jad/

3 The spelling of Reverend De Laine’s name is inconsistent in the documents. In some it is spelled DeLaine, in some Delaine and in others De Laine. I have chosen to use De Laine as this spelling is used by the University of South Carolina for its digital file of Reverend De Laine’s papers and by his daughter, Ophelia De Laine Gona.

car outside De Laine’s house. De Laine quickly sent his wife to a neighbor, Webb

Eaddy, for safety.

When the car, which Leroy Moore owned, reached the end of the dead-end street, it turned around and drove slowly back.4 Confident that his wife was out of harm’s way, De Laine waited patiently in the dark yard for the night riders to return.

As the car drew near, shots were again fired, this time at the house. De Laine, prepared and ready, stepped out of the shadows and fired back. At least two bullets pierced the side of the car as it sped away. Fortunately, De Laine was able to get the license plate number of the car. De Laine then jumped into his car and tried to follow the perpetrators into town to no avail. He returned to his home, expecting the police to investigate the gunshots, but no one came. It became clear to De Laine that he could not rely on the police to protect him. De Laine later told the FBI: “I decided to run for my life.”5 Leaving Mattie De Laine with the Eaddys, he turned his car north toward the state line. As he drove past the local Esso station, he saw a car pull out and follow him. De Laine drove as he had never driven before through the moonless night, and somewhere near Coward, South Carolina lost his pursuers. In the early morning, he arrived at the home of friends in Florence, South Carolina, where he took refuge. The next day, with the help of his friends, he planned his escape.

4 “Joseph A. De Laine, Sr., to my family or whom it may concern,” (1973) Rev. J.A. De Laine Papers 1915-2000, (Civil Rights Digital Library, University of South Carolina) http://crdl.usg.edu/collections/jad/.

5 “Government Document, 1955, 15-956 (Washington, D.C.) Rev. Joseph A De Laine, Sr., File # HA9-28873, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Rev. J.A. De Laine Papers 1915-2000, (Civil Rights Digital Library, University of South Carolina) http://crdl.usg.edu/collections/jad/.

Meanwhile, the Lake City sheriff issued a warrant for De Laine’s arrest. Two days later, the Sheriff indicted De Laine for “assault and battery with the intent to kill.” The indictment claimed that De Laine’s random shots during the fracas wounded two men riding in the car.6 The radio carried stories of the events and described De Laine as armed and dangerous. There was no turning back.

De Laine made his way to a cousin’s home in Washington, DC. His cousin drove De Laine to New York City, believing that he would be treated more equitably by the New York courts. Mattie De Laine joined him in New York about a week later. Once in New York, De Laine contacted the FBI and began his long battle against South Carolina extradition. Little did Rev. De Laine know that he would never see South Carolina again.

The White supremacists’ Citizen’s Council targeted Rev. De Laine because of the leadership role he played in the Briggs v. Elliott (1952) desegregation case, part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision.

His is not the only story of personal risk and sacrifice behind the famous lawsuit.

Five separate lawsuits comprised the Brown case.7 For each, the locals’ stories, combined with those of their lawyers and activist judges, reveal the human struggle

6 Sonny DuBose, The Road to Brown: The Leadership of a Soldier of the Cross: Reverend J.A. De Laine (Orangeburg, SC: Williams Publishing, 2002), 25.

7 The Supreme Court decided Bolling v. Sharpe on the same day as Brown v. Board of Education due to the similarity of the issues. Going forward references to Brown include Bolling unless specifically delineated.

behind the legal victory.8 Admittedly, the Brown case was not the only resistance battle waged during this period by Blacks in their ongoing attempt to gain equal rights. However, it is the case that best highlights the complexity and difficulty

Black participants faced in the long history of Black resistance.

Brown v. Board of Education’s legal story has been told and told well by historians such as Patricia Sullivan and journalists Richard Kluger and Juan

Williams.9 Still, the immensity of the case and the decades it took to reach the

United States Supreme Court forces even the best historians to compress events when deciding on the lens through which to tell the story. In doing so, sometimes the personal backstory is lost, and with it, the authentic texture and the real power of the event diminished. In unintentionally giving short shrift to the resistance of ordinary, unknown Blacks who empowered the Brown case, one loses much of the story of the human struggle. We seldom hear of the conflicts within the Black community over the value of integration, the tension between local leaders and the NAACP lawyers, and the resistance of many Black teachers. There are also little-known hopeful stories, such as the Quakers’ help in providing educational opportunities to the

8 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) encompassed Gebhart v. Belton (1952), Briggs v. Elliott (1952); Davis v. Prince Edward County (1951) and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1951) and Bolling v. Sharpe (1952).

9 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vantage Books, 2004); Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (New York: Times Books, 1998); Mark V. Tushnet, ed., Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writing, Arguments, Opinions and Reminiscences (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009).

children of Farmville, the dedication of the White Jewish activist Esther Brown helping with the Topeka case, or Charles Carter’s last fight for justice in the Bolling case. These are not anecdotal events but events that shaped the Brown case’s outcome and gave its history texture and poignancy. Only by understanding this complicated backstory can one really appreciate the magnificence of the long struggle, the sacrifice and bravery of its participants, and the eventual disappointment in the case’s outcome.

For this reason, I chose Brown and the long fight for equal education as the lens through which to examine participants in Black resistance at the grassroots level. Therefore, this dissertation is not a history of a single person or group. It examines the combined story of many people of very different backgrounds and experiences and how they found common cause to set aside regional and cultural differences to achieve a remarkable victory. While the victory was not the end of the fight, it was essential and marked the beginning of the United States’ modern civil rights era. Using the Brown case to examine one critical accomplishment of the

Black pre-King resistance movement, I hope to provide a view that furthers understanding of how difficult, complicated, protracted and dangerous the struggle for equality has been for Black Americans. As racial tensions re-erupt in America, it is essential to place Black Americans in their proper place in our history and listen to the voices of their experiences. Melding those voices and experiences with the broader historical narrative helps illuminate them. Combining the human element with historical facts is the first step to reconciliation.

Methodology

In the words of historian Jill Lepore, “however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual’s life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.”10 This dissertation is such a micro-history. To identify the individuals whose contributions drove the narratives of the individual Brown cases, I scoured the NAACP’s records at the Library of Congress, biographies written by the

Brown lawyers and local activists, records of state historical societies, the clipping files of state and local libraries, and newspaper archives of the five Brown states. My approach was to elevate the local players’ participation by spotlighting their actions, and where possible, use their own words to expand and humanize the story of

Brown. To this end, I used personal memoirs, oral histories, newspaper interviews, court testimonies, and personal papers of the participants. I have tried to balance these sources with secondary literature privileged with a broader view of the legal and cultural landscape. Combining the documented personal experiences with the contemporary historical record helped provide the texture needed for a micro-history of this type to be effective.

As with all histories, context is vital for understanding the cultural imperatives that inspired acts of Black agency. After providing some background on

Blacks’ early quest for education, information about those who aided them, and the

10 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 133.

challenges facing postbellum Blacks living in Jim Crow America, I arranged this work by cohorts of activists. First the local leaders, then those who assisted them, especially the women of the communities, the children impacted by the legal initiatives, and the lawyers and judges who helped them achieve their goals. Unique as this approach may be, its purpose is to help readers appreciate the common sacrifices and risks faced by those sharing similar experiences in their Supreme

Court journeys.

Historiography

To appreciate the significance of the Brown decision and the sacrifices that went into achieving it requires an understanding of the arc of Black resistance in

American history. The historical edges of Blacks’ struggle and the beginnings of the modern civil rights movement are hazy. The lack of a definitive date is due, at least in part, to the difference between “resistance” and “a movement.” Historian E.P.

Thompson wrote: “Most social movements have a life cycle of about six years.” He further suggested that “unless they make a decisive political impact in that time, that

‘window of opportunity,’ they will have little effect on the largest political structures they hope to transform.”11 Historians Vincent Harding and Martha Norman saw “the civil rights movement as a transformative event, one which constantly created and

11 Notes on E.P. Thompson, speech in support of European peace movement, July 8, 1983, Berkeley, California (in Lichtenstein’s possession) quoted in Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History 76, no. 3 (December 1988): 786-611.

recreated itself.”12 They further argued that the “brief and fragile coming together during the Brown decade should be understood as part of a long-term, dynamic, and multifaceted process.”13 Their scholarship mirrors that of historian Jacquelyn Dowd

Hall. In her article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the

Past,” Dowd, while arguing that the civil rights movement has a long history, views the period between World War I and the 1970s as spawning the birth of the

“movement of movements.”14

An analysis of the historiography shows that Black resistance takes three primary forms: individual, localized resistance; local protests and group resistance; and finally, organized movements and overt activism. Each type of resistance cycles periodically through the American cultural landscape.15 At least some form of

12 Vincent Harding and Martha Norman quoted in Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan ed., New Directions in Civil Rights Studies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 7.

13 Vincent Harding and Martha Norman quoted in Robinson and Sullivan ed., New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, 7.

14 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no.4 (Mar. 2005): 1235, quoted in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930- 1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Van Gosse, A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in Companion to Post-1945 America, Jean-Christopher Rosensweig, and Roy Agnew eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 277-302, esp. 282.

15 Rhoda Lois Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 167. Blumberg defines social movements as “a type of behavior in which a large number of participants consciously attempt to change existing institutions and establish a new order of life” and can include “those who agree with them.”

resistance regularly occurred as part of the ongoing narrative of Black America. The

Brown cases represented the second group: local protests and group resistance.

While resistance is not a movement, it is essential to create the platform for a movement to develop.

The lack of reference to Black’s early resistance is partly due to the influence of historian William A. Dunning and the Dunning School members.16 Dunning propagated the theory that post-Civil War Southern Blacks were child-like and unable to care for themselves. The Dunning School historians all but erased Black acts of agency and contributions during Reconstruction from the history of the post-

Civil War era. The Dunning School’s perspective dominated historical thinking until the mid-1930s, and unfortunately, the few dissenters, including W.E.B. Du Bois, were ignored. In 1939, historian Herbert Aptheker’s work Negro Slave Revolts in the

United States, 1526-1860, challenged Dunning’s image of enslaved persons as passively accepting their fates.17 Building on Aptheker’s work, historians like John

Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, and Leon Litwack provided evidence of Black enslaved people’s ability to adapt using various forms of resistance. Their scholarship proved that from the inception of slavery in America,

Blacks found ways to resist total subjugation by forming family units, engaging in

16 William A. Dunning, Reconstruction Political and Economic1865-1877 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907). Members of the Dunning School included U.B. Phillips, Walter L. Fleming, Charles Ramsdell, James W. Garner and Joseph G. De Roulhac Hamilton.

17 Herbert Aptheker, Negro Slave Revolts in the United States,1526-1860 (New York: International Pulbishing,1939).

religious practices, “borrowing” from the owners to meet their needs, negotiating working conditions to the extent possible, and running away. During the antebellum period, this form of individual or small-scale collective resistance was the first and most common form of activism employed by Blacks.18 Although large group revolts were not entirely uncommon before the Civil War, all, except the Haitian revolution, failed to provide the freedom enslaved persons sought.

With the Civil War and the promise of freedom, group resistance by enslaved persons against the Confederate agenda erupted, especially along the battle lines.

Contemporary scholars, such as Steven Hahn, Stephanie McCurry, and Thavolia

Glymph, further expanded the understanding of Black agency as they discussed

18 For a discussion of early resistance in antebellum America in addition to Herbert Aptheker, Negro Slave; also see Aptheker’s “American Negro Slave Revolts,” Science and Society 1, no. 14 (Summer 1937):512-538; John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbottom, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 9th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011); Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press,1995); Deborah Gray White, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton Press, 1985); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

enslaved persons’ efforts to undermine Confederate goals as well as the unique forms of resistance perpetrated by enslaved women.19

During Reconstruction, freed persons had access to legal venues to resolve conflicts with Whites, but it was a short period of promise. Emancipation did not mean that newly freed people suddenly enjoyed all the rights of American citizenship. In Reconstruction:1863-1877, Eric Foner discussed how resistance techniques used during slavery aided freed Blacks in their continued struggle against

Whites’ attempts to encumber their hard-won autonomy after the war.20 Foner credits W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 tome, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, with inspiring and guiding his research.21 Steven Hahn expanded the discussion in his study of “the emergence of political communities and the threads that held them together in the face of tremendous countervailing pressures” during the period between the end of the Civil War and the Great Migration.22 Leon Litwack also explored Black resistance after Reconstruction failed in his work Trouble in Mind:

19 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage; McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003); Frey, Water from the Rock.

20 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution – 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

21 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), First published 1935 by Harcourt, Brace.

22 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet.

Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.23 These works explored the period known as “Redemption,” which began as northern Whites abandoned Reconstruction legislation and federal troops withdrew from the southern states. During

Redemption, White supremacy became codified in Jim Crow laws in the South and

Jim Crow practices in the North.24

In 1938 Paul Keppler, head of the Carnegie Institute, engaged Gunnar

Myrdal, a Swedish social economist, to lead a group of scientists in “a comprehensive study of the Negro in America.”25 Keppler chose Myrdal because of his international reputation and a desire to have the survey’s leader come from a country “with no background or traditions of imperialism” that would undermine

Blacks’ confidence in the report.26 With Richard Sterner’s and Arnold Rose’s help,

Myrdal began the work before World War II broke out, traveling through the South to gather information first hand. The effort was interrupted by the war, but he

23 Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf,1998).

24 Matthew Hild, “Redemption,” New Georgia Encyclopedia (July 20, 2020). https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org. The New Georgia Encyclopedia defines the Redemption period: “In the context of southern politics, the term Redemption refers to the overthrow or defeat of Radical Republicans (White and Black) by White Democrats, marking the end of the Reconstruction era in the South....The term also underscores the widely held belief among White southerners of that era … that Reconstruction had been inefficient and corrupt, and that the ‘Redeemers’ who reestablished White Democratic control of the state also restored effective and honest government,” np.

25 F. P. Keppel, Forward to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), xlviii.

26 Keppel, “Forward,” xlviii.

eventually completed An American Dilemma in 1944 before the end of hostilities. As a social, economic, and anthropological survey, Myrdal’s work had great influence in the United States. The Supreme Court cited Myrdal’s work in its decision in

Brown v Board of Education.27 Dated now, it nonetheless provided a vivid, if sometimes incomplete, image of life for Black Americans in the first half of the 20th century. Following Myrdal’s example, scholars’ attention shifted from the purely political landscape of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age toward socio-historic events that made up the new cultural milieu for Whites and Blacks alike. With the advent of “bottom up” histories, historians and sociologists began looking closely at the cause and effect of political, social, and economic policies on Black Americans as well as Blacks’ reactions to those changes.

No historiography of Brown would be complete without mention of journalist

Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice.28 Published in 1975, Simple Justice was one of the first comprehensive examinations of the five cases as separate entities. A bit unbalanced in focus, the work, nonetheless, established an example of history written for the non-academic that was compelling and informative. Equally compelling and important are the autobiographies of Robert L. Carter, A Matter of

Law; Jack Greenberg’s Crusaders in the Courts; and Oliver Hill Sr.’s The Big

Bang.29 A complement to Hill’s personal memoirs is Margaret Edds’ We Face the

27 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

28 Kluger, Simple Justice.

29 Robert L. Carter, A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal Rights (New York: The New Press, 2005); Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts:

Dawn, a biography of Hill and Spottswood Robinson III.30 In Groundwork, Genna

Rae McNeil’s biography of Charles Hamilton Houston, McNeil documented

Houston’s essential leadership in the creation of Howard Law School and the philosophy of legal activism he instilled in his students like Thurgood Marshall and

Spottswood Robinson, III.31 Mark Tushnet’s work on Thurgood Marshall, which included an interview with the Supreme Court Justice, is another biographical work important to documenting the long journey from Topeka to the Supreme Court, as is

Juan Williams’ Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.32

More case-specific works such as Ophelia De Laine Gona’s in Dawn of

Desegregation and Sonny Du Bose’s The Road to Brown provided a chronology of the Briggs case and Rev. De Laine’s struggle to integrate the Summerton schools.33

Participants in less well-known events also documented their experiences, including

The Milford Eleven, by Orland J. Camp and Ed Kee, which described the attempt to

How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Oliver W Hill., Sr, The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond (Jonesboro, AR: GrantHouse Publishers, 2007).

30 Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson III, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2018).

31 Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

32 Tushnet, Thurgood Marshall, and The NAACP’s Legal Strategy; Williams, Thurgood Marshall.

33 Ophelia De Laine Gona, Dawn of Desegregation: J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011); DuBose, The Road.

integrate the Milford Delaware schools in 1954, and Jeffrey Raffel’s The Politics of

School Desegregation, which explained the struggle to integrate Wilmington,

Delaware schools after the Brown II decision.34

With the advantage of historical distance, Brown v. Board: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution by Robert J. Conttrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B.

Ware provided an overview of Brown’s background and Whites’ commitment to the ideology of Black inferiority.35 In Social Scientists for Justice, John P. Jackson explained the social sciences’ role in the Brown case, especially the famous “doll test.”36 Derrick Bell’s Silent Covenants is a note-worthy look at Brown’s legacy.37

James T. Patterson also looked back on the history of school segregation and the legacy of Brown and argued that America failed to achieve the ideal due mainly to social and cultural challenges outside the courts’ influence.38 Vivian Gunn Morris agreed with Patterson’s analysis. In The Price They Paid, Morris provided a view of

34 Orlando J. Camp, and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven: Integration Fears Robbed Hope from Eleven Black Students. 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Cedar Tree Books, 2013); Jeffrey A. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation: The Metropolitan Remedy in Delaware (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

35 Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Cast, Culture, and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

36 John P. Jackson, Social Scientists for Justice: Making the Case Against Segregation (New York: University Press, 2001).

37 Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown vs. Board of Education and the Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

38 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 2001).

the gains and the losses experienced by one Black community after school integration.39

Much of the afore mentioned Brown historiography takes a deep, vertical dive into one specific individual’s experience or one specific event. This dissertation takes a different approach than previous scholarship in an effort to expose the contributions of the lesser-known participants engaged in the five cases and demonstrate their shared experiences. I look horizontally across all five cases at the determined, spiritually linked activists who fought for a common cause without ever meeting like so many soldiers in a battle sharing a communally intense but plodding march toward the same goal.

While the Brown cases were geographically separate events, still, unintentionally, they had commonality. Shared experiences ignited the cases. Each case bore witness to the determined character of the leaders, the resilience of the plaintiffs and their supporters, and the importance of the help they received from those outside their communities. Resistance from others inside the Black community was also a common element in the cases. Using a horizontal rather than a vertical view creates a matrix to compare this shared struggle for equal education. This new perspective reveals the importance of all the participants rather than a focus on the elite few. By creating a mosaic of the interactions, one sees the similarity and

39 Vivian Gunn Morris, The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community (New York. Teachers College Press, 2002).

differences of the constant striving and slow maneuvering happening in multiple places simultaneously.

The perspective of this work also makes evident the diverse backgrounds of the participants who came from sophisticated urban areas like Wilmington,

Delaware, to a sharecropping community in Southside Virginia; from the capital of

Kansas to the capital of the United States; from the Deep South to the Midwest. The geographical distribution of the cases was one of its unique strengths. By arriving at the Supreme Court more-or-less simultaneously, from so many parts of the country, all with the same complaint and objective, the Supreme Court was forced to see the impact of Plessy and the Jim Crow practices it validated, as a national problem, not just a single community concern.40

Background of the Modern Resistance Movement

The Brown constituents were fighting more than their respective school boards. They were fighting an entire racial culture entrenched in America’s psyche during slavery and intensified after the Civil War when it was codified in the South’s legal system. With Jim Crow, every White person was an extension of the Southern legal system, empowered to personally enforce the segregation laws with little or no risk of government intervention or reprimand. Acts of White violence and

40 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). This was the Supreme Court decision that established the principle of “separate but equal.”

abandonment of Black Americans by the federal government and the legal system made any form of sustained group resistance especially dangerous.41

As Blacks lost more and more of the political ground gained during

Reconstruction, it quickly became evident that freed persons needed an advocate to represent them on the national stage and help guide their energy and aspirations into productive action. By 1890, Booker T. Washington emerged as the dominant spokesman for Southern Blacks. Initially, W.E.B. Du Bois, another outspoken Black leader, supported Washington. The two men could not have been more different.

Washington was an ex-slave and lived all his life in the South. Du Bois was a free- born Northerner, a member of the Black bourgeoisie, and the first Black man to obtain a doctorate from Harvard University. Eventually, Du Bois parted with

Washington and became one of his most outspoken critics.

There were multiple reasons for the rift. At its core was a fundamental disagreement over how to educate Blacks and to what purpose. While Washington agreed that “no race can be lifted until its mind is awakened and strengthened,” at

41 For a discussion of Black resistance and protests during Reconstruction and before World War I, see W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, and The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994); Eric Foner, Reconstruction; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet; Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long; Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), and Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

the same time, he advocated education focused on economic uplift -- his version of the “teach a man to fish” idiom.42 “We want more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge must be harnessed to the things of real life,” he wrote.43 Part of his plan included educating Black teachers to help the freed persons and their descendants acquire the skills necessary to compete effectively with Whites in the nation’s economy. Washington firmly believed that economic success would earn Blacks the respect they deserved, but it would take time.44

Du Bois believed in educating freed persons with a top-down approach.

Classically educated himself, he argued for focusing on “The Talented Tenth,” which to him meant the elite of his race who were the best educated and could reach down and help others climb the economic ladder. He wrote: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”45 He believed in spending resources on “developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.”46

42 Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education of the Negro,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: Arno Press, 1969), First published 1903 by James Pott & Co., 16.

43 Washington, “Industrial Education,” 17.

44 Washington, “Industrial Education,” 28-29.

45 W.E.B Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: Arno Press, 1969), First published 1935 by Pott & Co.,33.

46 Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 33.

In many ways, Du Bois’s approach was as much an indoctrination as that advocated by some liberal Whites, whereby the Talented Tenth would tell the less educated Blacks what to think and how to behave. In retrospect, both Washington and Du Bois were guilty of assuming that they knew best what other Black persons needed without actually asking them what they wanted. In this regard, they mirrored the paternalistic attitude of many White Americans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, some younger Blacks, many of whom had never known slavery, became disenchanted with Washington’s accommodation message. The discontented felt Washington was the White man’s tool and too passive. Recent scholarship, however, especially that of historian Robert

Norrell, provided evidence that Washington worked surreptitiously behind the scene to support an integrated society and Black voting rights.47 Eventually, impatient with the slow progress toward equality, some Blacks believed they needed a more militant leader to upset the status quo and force permanent and widespread change.

They turned to Washington’s most vocal critic, W.E.B. Du Bois, an avowed Marxist, who, with newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, formed the Niagara Movement in 1905.48 Theirs was the first postbellum attempt to organize Blacks nationally in a common cause. Unfortunately, the organization succumbed to infighting and financial stress within a couple of years.

47 Robert J. Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

48 Bill V. Mullen, W.E.B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (London: Pluto Press, 2016), EBSCO eBook Public Library Collection, UMKC.

Then, in 1909, appalled by the atrocities perpetrated during the Springfield,

Illinois massacre the previous year, Henry Walling, Mary Ovington, Henry

Moskowitz, and Oswald Garrison Villard formed the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) out of the ashes of the Niagara

Movement, the Afro-American Council, and the Constitution League.49 The newly formed NAACP became embroiled in its first three lawsuits even before the organization was fully incorporated or had a formal legal committee. All three lawsuits, the Pinky Franklin case, the Steve Greene case, and the Thomas Williams case, involved Black-on-White violence triggered by the harsh, southern peonage laws. The NAACP’s involvement was pivotal in obtaining relief, if not pardons, for the three accused. The legal team’s aggressive participation provided much-needed notoriety for the fledgling organization. The three cases also seriously drained the

NAACP’s limited financial resources. Nonetheless, the founders persisted in using the courts as a weapon against racial injustice, without which there was little hope of improving Black Americans’ political and economic plight.50

49 In August, 1908 amidst mob violence, Whites lynched two Black men and forced 2000 other Blacks to flee their homes in Springfield, Illinois. Businesses were shut down for over a week and it took 4000 state militiamen to restore order. Appalled, Henry Walling, Mary Ovington, Henry Moskowitz and Oswald Garrison Villard organized a meeting in late spring 1909 out of which the NAACP was formed.

50 Gloria Garrett Samson, The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy, 1922-1941 (Westport, CT: The Greenwood Press, 1996), 51. After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed in 1920, James Weldon Johnson became the Secretary of the NAACP and its first Black leader. The NAACP handled most of the cases involving people of color. The ACLU handled mostly cases involving Whites.

The NAACP soon found itself involved in most aspects of Black life, as Jim

Crow injustice touched almost every corner of Blacks’ daily existence, especially in the South. Over time, the number of cases filed and the visibility this created helped build the organization into a formidable presence with serious political potential.

However, it also left its resources so thinly spread that it was hard for the organization to develop a clear and consistent legal strategy. A survey of the NAACP

Papers in the Library of Congress demonstrated how scattered and spread out the organization and its resources were. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall told historian Mark Tushnet in 2001 that when he was executive director at the NAACP

Legal Defense Fund (LDF), “We tried our cases one by one. We had no plan because you couldn’t make a plan. You were limited by money, and you were also limited by people who wanted you to file the suits.”51 Marshal further explained that

“You went from step to step. Everybody tries to find a plan. There is none ... we took them as they came.”52 Given the number of cases brought and the diversity of the issues, and with fewer than five lawyers on the national team at any one time, the

New York attorneys participated only sparingly in cases at the local level. There was just not enough lawyer-power to go around.53 To address the shortage, Charles

51 Tushnet, Thurgood, 423.

52 Tushnet, Thurgood, 423.

53 In American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal reported that in 1930 there were fewer than 1,200 Black attorneys in the United States. Of those, two-thirds resided outside of the South. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York, Harper & Row, 1962 edition), (Original edition 1944), 326.

Houston, the first special counsel of the NAACP, and later Thurgood Marshall, his protege and future replacement, slowly shored up the NAACP’s legal strength by building an informal network of Black attorneys across the United States willing to take civil rights cases. The chosen attorneys often worked pro bono or received minimal compensation. They also had to be willing to work in tandem with, and under the guidance of, the NAACP national legal team.

In hindsight, it is clear that the NAACP’s consistent use of legal activism to overturn state and federal laws that supported systemic racism profoundly impacted

American society. Still, legal activism was slow, expensive, and frustrating to those long denied the promise of democracy. Black soldiers returning from World War I and eager for change often found the NAACP’s methodical processes off-putting.54

Their impatience became even more outspoken after World War II when an estimated million Black men who fought for democracy for others returned to an

America that did not recognize their sacrifices. These soldiers believed they had earned the right to full integration into American economic and political life. They wanted access to jobs, decent housing, and the right to vote. Perhaps most urgently, they wanted quality education to equip their children to compete in the new

American economy. On all scores, they were disappointed.

54 Myrdal argued in support of the NAACPs’ focus: “The American Constitution and the entire legal system of the land give the Negro a strategic strength in his fight against caste which it would be senseless not to utilize to the utmost.” Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 834.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, overt acts of individual Black resistance became more frequent, occasionally coupled with local group actions. All too often, when Whites attempted to disrupt Black’s public demonstrations, confrontations turned to violence during which men and women, both Black and White, lost their lives.55 In some instances,

Whites killed hundreds of Blacks, and the confrontations left entire Black communities destroyed, as in the Springfield Race Massacre in 1909 and the Tulsa

Race Massacre in 1921. Black communities learned of protest efforts, especially those involving racial violence in regions other than their own, from the Black newspapers and other Black publications such as The Crisis, a magazine produced by the NAACP. Despite the White terrorism that accompanied some Black protests,

Blacks became more and more confident that their chance of success in opposing

Jim Crow subjugation improved if they stood together to resolve injustice.56 They

55 Previously called “riots” these and other events were in fact massacres of Blacks by Whites. Some that occurred in the period were: the Atlanta Massacre (1906); Springfield Race Massacre (1909); East St. Louis Race Massacre (1917); The Silent March (1917); “Red Summer” (1919); Chicago Massacre (1919); and Tulsa Race Massacre (1921). For more information see Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle before the NAACP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

56 For a discussion of activism between World War I and the formation of the Civil Rights Movement see Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie. Also see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement”; Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Kluger, Simple Justice; William Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D.Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Litwack, Trouble in Mind; Douglas S. Massy, and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of

also increased their efforts to gain specific objectives through the courts. However, even if successful in the legal arena, the court rulings seldom had a positive impact beyond the immediate area where the plaintiffs lived and worked.

The Fight for Equal Education – The Five Cases

Tired of having the benefits of citizenship withheld from them, Blacks stopped pleading for the rights due to them and began demanding them. Education never ceased being of critical importance to Black parents, and the need grew as more and more industrial jobs replaced agricultural ones. Black parents began to come together in acts of collective agency to pressure local school boards for better schools, more advanced classes, transportation, and other amenities denied their children but offered to White children in the same school district. Black civic leaders and local Black preachers mobilized and helped organize the community-level protests. It was this persistence that spawned the five Brown cases. Home-town lawyers provided representation, often at little or no charge, and then brought the

NAACP’s attention to the cases.

During this same period, Marshall’s team began exploring ways to initiate a frontal attack on school segregation. They began looking for a suitable case to drive

the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How American Immigrants Become White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Jean Van Delinder, Struggles Before Brown (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Books, 2008).

a stake into the heart of Jim Crowism and eliminate the legalized segregation established in the Plessy decision. Marshall needed to maneuver the appeal process so a case could make it through the legal gauntlet to the highest court in the land. He required a new legal interpretation to accomplish this – one that would stand the test of multiple court appeals in the same way that Plessy had done since 1896. The legal argument had to be unique and compelling enough that the Supreme Court would overturn its prior decision, something the Court had done fewer than forty times in over 160 years.57 By 1944, Marshall felt the time was right for aggressive action. He was prepared to dedicate a large portion of the national team’s legal resources to the goal and began looking for a case to carry them to the Supreme Court.

Eventually, not one but five cases from five different states emerged, which explicitly challenged the constitutionality of segregation by race and began the slow journey through the legal appeal process.58 A common impression is that the

NAACP carefully selected the five cases from diverse cultural situations and cleverly maneuvered to have the Kansas case the namesake for the effort. Nothing

57 Brandon J. Murrill, “CRS Report for Congress the Supreme Court’s Overruling of Constitutional Precedent: An Overview” (Congressional Research Service: The Library of Congress), September 24, 2018. As of the date of this report, the Supreme Court had overturned 141 of its own decisions, not including those overturned by Constitutional amendment.

58 The original cases at the state level were as follows: Oliver L. Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas U.S. District Court, Topeka, Kansas; Bolling v. Sharpe, U.S. District Court, Washington, D.C.; Briggs et al v. Elliott et al, U.S. District Court, Eastern Division, Charleston, South Carolina; Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward Count, U.S. District Court, Richmond, Virginia; Belton v. Gebhart 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862 (Del. Ch. 1952), aff’d, 91 A.2d 137 (Del. 1952).

could be further from the truth. Even though the NAACP attempted to organize its approach, the five cases that ended up being part of the Brown decision (four cases directly included and one subsumed under the decision) were mainly the result of serendipity. In some instances, the parents challenged the NAACP to join them in their battle rather than vice versa. In fact, Marshall and the New York team initially rejected three cases: Davis v. Prince Edward County, Belton v. Gebhart, and Briggs v. Elliott.

The five cases encompassed in the Brown decision had many similarities, but also some critical differences. Two of the cases were direct attacks on separate-but- equal doctrine (Brown, Briggs), and four started as transportation cases (Brown,

Davis, Briggs, Belton) but changed to fit the NAACP’s new strategy. Attorney

Oliver Hill rejected one case that the NAACP later turned to after losing its preferred case at the federal level.59 Four cases were underway several years before the

NAACP national office became involved. The local leaders also came from different backgrounds with different motivations. Not all were members of the NAACP, but all leaned heavily on the NAACP lawyers’ expertise. One case almost did not make it to the Supreme Court because the local branch did not raise the needed funds to pay the filing fee. In two cases, the students themselves shamed their parents into

59 Mahatma Corbin v. County School Board of Pulaski County (1947). This case was underway when the children of Moton High School contacted Spottswood Robinson asking for help. Out of sympathy, Robinson agreed to stop by Farmville on his way to Christianburg, Virginia for a meeting about the Mahatma case. When the Pulaski County school board refused to build a high school for Black children despite a U.S. Fourth Circuit Court ruling, the NAACP did not pursue an appeal. The Prince Edward case then took on new priority. Vagovernmentmatters.org/activities/586.

fighting for better schools. Black teachers, in general, refused to support all but one of the cases. All five cases directly attacked segregation in public schools; still, four included equalization arguments despite the NAACP’s stated strategy to the contrary. Only one of the cases resulted in immediate integration, and that on a limited basis.

Further complicating the struggle, the initial impetus and goal for each of the cases were different. Each case also had characteristics that made its journey through the legal system unique. First, the case’s namesake, Brown v. the Topeka Board of

Education(1950), was initially envisioned by the local NAACP chapter as a transportation case. It later became the case most carefully orchestrated by the New

York team.60

Unbeknownst to many and despite its reputation as the Free State, John

Brown’s first battleground, and the Exodusters’ promised land, Kansas was a Jim

Crow state. Even though the original Kansas Constitution forbade segregation except in high schools in first-class cities, segregation was prevalent in most Kansas schools.61 In many districts, such as Wichita or Merriam, Kansas, the facility differences were significant. Topeka was somewhat unique, however. The experts hired by the NAACP agreed that Topeka schools had relatively equal facilities and equal teacher qualifications. Only transportation was significantly different, and it

60 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

61 Cities in Kansas with population of 15,000 or more were classified as first class. Cities with population between 2,000 and 15,000 were classified as second class.

was the lack of adequate transportation for Black children that was the original driver of the Topeka case.62 Because the quality of the school facilities and teacher pay was relatively equal, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education offered a unique opportunity to force a discussion about the inherent unconstitutionality of segregation.

Like the Topeka parents, South Carolinian parents originally asked only for bus transportation for their children, although the school facilities for Black children in South Carolina were generally deplorable. The state provided school transportation to less than 10 percent of the Black students in 1944-1945.63 The case began in 1947 as Levi Pearson v. Clarendon County and School District 26. When the NAACP national office took up the case in 1949, it was with the understanding that it would do so only if it could expand the case to one demanding school integration based on the unconstitutionality of segregation itself. The case went through several iterations, even changing names again as the NAACP massaged and sculpted it from a transportation case to an equalization case. Finally, the case’s

62 Seeing threats to segregation looming, many of the southern states began aggressive programs in the 1940s to equalize educational facilities as a way to avoid desegregation. While the gap in average expenditure per student for White and Black students narrowed between 1940 and 1950, in 1952 not a single southern state had equalized educational expenditures. A common shortcoming was a lack of adequate transportation for Black children, most of whom still lived in rural areas and walked significant distances to school. Lack of adequate transportation was the original catalyst for four of the six (later five) cases included in Brown v. Board of Education.

63 Kamina A Pinder and Evan R. Hanson, “360 Degrees of Segregation: A Historical Perspective of Segregation-Era School Equalization Programs in the Southern United States,” Amsterdam Law Forum 2, no. 3 (2010): 61.

name changed again when filed as a direct attack on Plessy and legal segregation. Its new and third name was Briggs v Elliott.64 Chronologically, Briggs was the first case filed. It was also the first to use the argument that separate-can-never-be-equal supported by expert psychiatric witnesses to prove the damage segregation did to

Black children’s self-esteem.65 When the Briggs case returned to the lower courts, the Brown case continued moving forward. Brown claimed the ultimate honor of having the Supreme Court case assume its name. The NAACP did not object because it considered it an advantage to name the case after a western state rather than a Southern Jim Crow state.66

The Delaware cases, Bulah v. Gebhart and Belton v. Gebhart (1951), both started with a simple request for transportation for Black children to and from school.67 In Hockessin, Delaware, about seven miles west of Wilmington, Sara

Bulah’s seven-year-old daughter, Shirley, had to walk the two miles to her elementary school when her mother could not take her. A bright yellow school bus passed right in front of their home every day, but it was only for White children.

Sara Bulah’s simple request was that her daughter be allowed to ride the bus to and

64 Levi Pearson v. Clarendon County and School District 26 (1947).

65 Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952).

66 In much of the more recent literature, this loss of recognition appears to chafe some of the North Carolinians although it is doubtful that it did at the time.

67 The Delaware Chancery Court combined the two cases into one, and they remained combined throughout the appeal. Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart, 33 Del. Ch. 144.

from the Jim Crow school. The school board denied her request citing Delaware’s segregation laws. Sara Bulah filed a lawsuit.

Ethel Louise Belton also needed transportation to school in Wilmington,

Delaware. Each day she walked past the all-White Claymont High School before catching a bus to Wilmington, where she attended the all-Black Howard High

School. Once arriving in Wilmington, she walked five blocks to school. After school, young Ethel walked nine-and-one-half blocks to Carver Vocational School to take her typing class. She took a reverse journey to get home. Ethel Belton thought this unfair to her daughter. She wanted the school board to either allow her daughter to attend Claymont High or provide a bus to Howard High School in Wilmington.

The school board denied her request. At the urging of the local NAACP, Belton and the parents of seven other children tried unsuccessfully to register their children at

Claymont High. The school board explained that the Delaware state constitution required the segregation of Black and White children in schools. Belton, like Bulah, filed a lawsuit.

Davis v. Prince Edward County (1952) was the fourth and perhaps the most tragic case of the five.68 The parents in the Davis case also wanted buses for their children. The children wanted more. They wanted a new high school. The NAACP wanted even more than that. It wanted the elimination of segregation in Farmville,

Virginia schools. After several false starts, the NAACP filed suit demanding integration of the White schools.

68 Davis v. Prince Edward County, Civ. A. No. 1333; 103F. Supp.337 (1952).

In response to the NAACP’s lawsuit, the State of Virginia became complicit in resisting the Brown decision by modifying its state constitution. It eliminated the statutes requiring communities to provide public education in anticipation of an adverse decision by the Court in Brown II. After the initial Brown decision in May

1954, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors and the Prince Edward

County school board used every legal tactic to prevent integration. Eventually, in

1959 the Virginia Supreme Court and the United States District Court struck down the states’ legislative attempts to circumvent Brown. With all legal options exhausted, the Board of Supervisors of Prince Edward County withdrew all but minimal funding from the districts’ public school. The Farmville school board closed all the public schools in Farmville for Whites and Blacks. With the public schools closed, Black parents and parents of poor Whites struggled to provide some form of education for their children, and in the process, an entire generation of children suffered.69

The fifth case was Bolling v. Sharpe (1954. Black parents in Washington

D.C. filed their suit demanding the integration of White schools after overcrowding in the Black Schools resulted in some Black children attending classes only for half- days.70 The District of Columbia did not mandate segregation in public schools, but de facto segregation existed. Furthermore, Carr v. Corning (1950) affirmed the

69 The Farmville Board of Education offered to set up a similar private school arrangement for Blacks. The Black families, at the urging of the NAACP, refused the offer, holding firm to the position that separate was not equal.

70 Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954).

constitutionality of separate schools in the District.71 The Bolling case was unique in that, at the plaintiffs’ request, it was not officially an NAACP or an NAACP-LDF case. Therefore, Bolling was not officially part of Brown, but because of similar constitutional issues, the Supreme Court decided the Bolling case the same day as the other four. Because of attorneys James Nabrit’s and George E.C. Hayes’s close association with the NAACP attorneys and unofficial support from the Howard

University Law School, pride of ownership was evident in the case’s histories written by Nabrit, Jack Greenberg, and others.

The 14th Amendment did not apply to the District of Columbia’s citizens because the District of Columbia was not a state. Overturning Plessy in the District required arguing the case as a violation of the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause.72

In doing so, Nabrit and Hayes took a direct, frontal attack on segregation, and nowhere in the pleadings was there mention of the unequal nature of Black schools in the District as there was in Marshall’s four cases. As author Richard Kluger explained, Nabrit and Hayes based their arguments “entirely upon the fact of segregation itself. The burden of proof...was on the District government to show that

71 Carr v. Corning, Superintendent of Public Schools, et al. Browne Junior High School Parent-Teacher Ass’n et al. v. Magdeburger et al., 182 F.2d 14 (D.C. Cir. 1950).

72 Richard A. Primus, “Bolling Alone,” Columbia Law Review 104, no. 4 (May 2004): 975-1041. https//www.jstor.org/stable/4099366. Also see Oliver W. Hill, Sr., The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond (Jonesboro, AR: GrantHouse Publishers, 2007), 169.

there was any reasonable basis for or public purpose in racial restrictions” in public schools.73 This was a go-for-broke strategy.

Brown’s road to the Supreme Court was not linear nor sequential. Cases were started, floundered, and revived. Plaintiffs dropped out, and new plaintiffs added.

Meanwhile, lawyers traveled back and forth across their states to meet with plaintiffs and witnesses, then rushed home to work on filings, research precedents, and prepare briefs at the same time handling other cases. Simultaneously, everyone went on living their lives with the added strain of threatened violence and economic retribution. A combined timeline of plaintiffs’ and lawyers’ calendars looks like a busy anthill of frantic, unending effort and overlapping activity. From this viewpoint, one can see how unrelenting the work was and how critical grassroots participants were to the beginning of each case and their eventual outcome. When victory was far from assured, to stay the course required significant personal sacrifice and extraordinary determination on the parents’ part and those with them in the trenches. Finding the heart to keep working and sacrificing when the outcome was so uncertain was not a job for the faint-hearted. How the families found the courage to rise again to the occasion after so many previous failed attempts is the heart of this work.

73 Kluger, Simple Justice, 523.

Organization

A new discussion requires a new perspective. To this end, I have organized this dissertation, not by case but by critical cohort. I dedicated a chapter to each of the four main groups of participants. Before launching into that discussion, however,

I reviewed, in Chapter Two, “Fighting the World of Jim Crow,” the prevalent social practices that provided the cultural backdrop against which the five cases played out.

Jim Crow laws protected White supremacy for generations, especially in the South, while suppressing and terrorizing Blacks. This dissertation points to how Blacks’ persistence and acts of agency in the five communities involved in the Brown case helped to circumvent state-sanctioned suppression of Blacks and Black education. In these communities, racial norms were so entrenched in White and Black cultural expectations that only by attacking the root could permanent change occur.

Chapter Three, “Leadership in the Black Tradition: Four Black Preachers and a Barber,” begins the discussion of grass-root participants by looking at local leadership. I analyze the Black church’s role in resisting White dominance, focusing on the Black preachers who instigated four of the five cases. From early antebellum days, Black churches fostered grassroots resistance. The Black community held preachers in high esteem, and a significant portion of Blacks followed church leaders in increasing and sustaining the resistance to White hegemony during the years preceding the Brown case. Some of the activist Black churches eventually helped influence parents to engage in direct legal confrontation to obtain quality education for their children. As the cases that comprised Brown coalesced, the activist Black churches played an important role in rallying the local Black communities and

encouraging them through the long process of achieving Plessy’s overthrow. Where

Black churches were luke-warm in their support, as in Kansas, the struggle was doubly difficult.

The one case that did not originate in the church and did not have a Black preacher as its catalyst was Bolling v Sharp (1954). Gardner Bishop, leader of the resistance movement that became the Bolling case, owned and ran a Black barbershop in the segregated Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C. Bishop’s leadership style developed out of the tradition of the Black barbershop as a place of discussion and debate that mirrored the training in public discourse Black preachers received at the pulpit. Bishop led a group of parents against the D.C. school board’s blatant discrimination in their children’s education. Bishop eventually partnered with

Charles Houston, former head of the NAACP legal team, to end racial segregation in the Washington, D.C. public schools.

Even good leaders need support to be effective. Chapter Four, “Wives and

Mothers; Activists and Teachers,” examines how essential women’s support, especially that of Black women, was in the Brown cases’ success. Women were much more than the local face for the plaintiffs. They were the often overlooked and unsung stalwarts of the exhausting battle.74 Women were essential in raising funds

74 For more about women in the early civil rights movement see Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (June, 1993): 162-182. www.jstor.org/stable/189576; Catherine A. Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice under Law: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998); Patricia Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr: Letters from the Civil Rights Years (New

and rallying the community when enthusiasm faltered. They nurtured their children and supported their husbands, who assumed leadership roles. Women during this period also stepped forward and took risks. By becoming named plaintiffs, they became visible and more vulnerable to direct White retaliation but, in doing so, also laid a foundation for the activist women of the King-era. Women paid heavily for the support they provided, but without it, the cases would have faltered.

Usually, when volunteers stepped in to help the local community, women made the most significant contribution. Of particular note was Quaker women’s involvement in supporting the Prince Edward children and their families during the long lockout of the public schools in Farmville. Local Farmville teachers also volunteered to help, including establishing schools in their homes to help at least some of the displaced Black children continue with their education.

Chapter Five, “The Children: Protesters and Victims,” discusses the Black students’ commitment as an essential contributor to the Brown cases’ success. In some instances, students initiated the local resistance and then turned to their parents to rise to the occasion. Imagine the courage required to walk through picket lines day-in-and-day-out, facing bullying by White parents and children, and often abuse by teachers. Some White children’s lives were also damaged, however, especially in the Prince Edward County school shutdown. In this instance, many of the children of

York: Routledge, 2003); Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994).

poor White families also went without education and had no advocate to assist them, as did the county’s Black children.

Thurgood Marshall received much well-deserved credit for the success of the

NAACP’s legal strategy that finally ended legalized racial segregation. Nevertheless, as he acknowledged, the outcome most likely would have been much different without the local lawyers. Chapter 6, “The Lawyers and the Judges,” explores the evolution of the NAACP’s legal efforts to eliminate school segregation and the contributions of the local and state-level lawyers who did the yeoman’s work on the cases that became Brown. This chapter examines how local and state attorneys collaborated with the local Black leaders to develop each community’s case framework. They were the effort’s legal workhorses, and their joint contribution was the glue that held the strategy together until the cases reached the Supreme Court. In at least two instances, the NAACP attorneys were given significant assists by the activist judges who heard their cases. Today that assistance would be considered inappropriate but was an essential element in the NAACP’s eventual success.

In the final Chapter 7, “Epilogue,” I look at the Brown decision’s legacy and its unfinished business. Brown reestablished Black Americans’ constitutional rights as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment. However, Whites’ loss of protected, legalized dominance, and the threat of Blacks as potential economic and political equals frightened many in the White community, and they fought to avoid or at least dilute the Brown decision. Whites retaliated against the Black plaintiffs and engaged in overt resistance to the Court’s instructions to proceed “with all deliberate speed.”

Sixty-plus years later, public education in America still does not meet expectations. I explore some of the reasons for this in this final chapter.

Recent events in the United States have resurfaced old fears of minority dominance in some sectors, making it clear that America still has a long way to go to overcome its racist roots. The recent publication of The 1619 Project, and the rebuttal, The 1776 Project, highlights the debate as to how to position slavery and

Black resistance in America’s historical continuum.75 Are Blacks victims or victors?

The lawyers, preachers, parents, and children who participated in the ground-level battle for quality education would claim victory in what turned out to be, if not the hoped-for last battle in the struggle for equal education, one of the most important ones. At the same time, disappointment in America’s inability or unwillingness to provide quality public education belies the initial euphoria evident in photographs and interviews published immediately after the Supreme Court decision.

75 “The 1619 Project,” Jake Silverstein, ed., The New York Times, August 18, 2019; “The 1776 Project,” The Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/1776- celebration-america#

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit.” Abel Meeropol, (1937)1

CHAPTER 2: JIM CROW AND THE FIGHT FOR EDUCATION

In November 1946, while handling a case in Tennessee, Thurgood Marshall and three companions were driving from the small town of Columbia to Nashville when a group of White men that included three law officers stopped them. The officers accused Marshall of drunk driving and ordered him into the back seat of their unmarked car, suggesting they were returning him to Columbia to face drunk driving charges. Uncomfortable with leaving Marshall alone with the White officers,

Alexander Looby, Maurice Weaver, and journalist Harry Redmond followed the

White men as they turned back toward Columbia. Their concern increased when the car containing Marshall veered off the highway onto a dirt road that led to the Duck

River. Even more concerned, Looby continued to follow the Whites’ car. Evidently nervous at being followed, the officers turned around and went back to the main road. They continued back to Columbia, still followed by Marshall’s associates, where the judge dismissed the charge against Marshall as unfounded.2

1 Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit (1937), Recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.

2 Ron Cassie, “Justice for All,” Baltimore Magazine, baltimoremagazine.com/section/historypolitics/justice-for-all; Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press,2009), 325; and Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 153.

Harold Boulware, the local attorney in the Briggs case, faced even more frightening abuse. In 1949, while defending a local Greenwood County man named

Willie Tolbert against a rape charge, Boulware suffered multiple assaults.3

According to newspaper editor John H. McCray, first, “an unidentified White male knocked attorney Boulware down the long flight of court house stairs,” supposedly because Boulware was late for the trial.4 Later a group of White men kidnapped

Boulware. They took him into the woods and threatened him with physical harm if

Tolbert was found not guilty. The next day, the men physically assaulted Boulware again on the steps of the courthouse. Some of his assailants then entered the courtroom in a further attempt to intimidate the lawyer. After the trial in which

Tolbert was found guilty, Boulware needed a highway patrolman to escort him safely back to Columbia, South Carolina.5

Marshall and Boulware’s assaults were glaring examples of the Jim Crow intimidation and violence that even well-known Black public figures experienced.

Imagine, then, the pressure Blacks with less recourse than the self-sufficient lawyers suffered at the hands of White supremacists. Historian William Chafe described the

Jim Crow system as both pervasive and multi-layered – a system of concentric

3 State v Willie Tolbert. [The case was heard in Greenwood County, SC; no docket number has been located and the case was not appealed.]

4 John H. McCray, “The Way It Was” Columbia Lighthouse and Informer, May 9, 1987, in John Henry McCray Papers, Box 2, Folder 18, Journalism, Writings, 1986- 1987, University of South Carolina Digital Collection.

5 W. Lewis Burke, All for Civil Rights: African American Lawyers in South Carolina,1868-1968 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 178-179.

circles of social controls. In his analogy, the use of physical force and terror constituted the first circle.6 Economic intimidation, psychological abuse, and socialization of Jim Crow cultural expectations made up the next three. The Black communities involved in the five Brown cases were no strangers to life within these circles.

The plaintiffs in the Brown cases lived their entire lives in a Jim Crow world, however, and understood fully the personal risks they took and to which they exposed their families when deciding to fight for their constitutional rights. Blacks found various methods for dealing with Jim Crow pressures. Some sought safety in passive acceptance of the status quo, some left the South and moved to the North or

West, and others pushed back when they could. Every open battle for equality brought with it the real danger of physical violence, economic retribution, and lost ground. At times, it was difficult to separate the fight for progress from the fight for survival. Historian Sonny Dubose stressed that “it is absolutely essential for history to come to grips with the … Southern environment of White supremacy at the time

[1940s].”7 Dubose reminded his readers that “Whites dominated the jobs, money, schools, records, and nearly everything else.”8 In this environment, any attempt to

6 William H. Chafe, “Presidential Address: ‘The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun,’” The Journal of American History, 86, no. 4 (March, 2000): 1531-1551.

7 Sonny DuBose, The Road to Brown,The Leadership of a Soldier of the Cross: Reverend J.A. De Laine (Orangeburg, SC: Williams Publishing, 2002), 50.

8 Dubose, The Road, 50.

change the status quo was dangerous and took immense courage. “Jobs were lost, loans were called, and people died,” Dubose said.9

The most horrific form of violence against Blacks was lynchings.10 In 1947, the same year that Levi Pearson initiated the first lawsuit in the Briggs case, a White cab driver, Thomas Watson Brown, was assaulted outside Greenville, South

Carolina, two and a half hours away from Pearson’s farm. The accused assailant was

Willie Earle, a Black laborer working in Greenville. On February 17, a mob of

White men, mainly White cab drivers, pulled Earle from his jail cell in Pickens

County and drove him to Greenville. There they brutalized him by beating, stabbing, and finally shooting him in the face with a shotgun. None of the thirty indicted perpetrators was convicted.11 A year earlier, Lynwood Shull attacked and blinded

Army Sgt. Isaac Woodward in Batesburg, South Carolina, while Woodward was on his way home to Augusta, Georgia. An all-White South Carolina jury acquitted

9 Dubose, The Road, 50.

10 The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) documented 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950 plus an additional 2,000 during Reconstruction. The EJI defines lynchings as “rituals of collective violence that served as highly effective tools to reinforce the institution and philosophy of White racial superiority.” https://eji.org. In addition to punishing those accused of transgressing social norms, lynchings sent the message that all Black lives were at risk at a White man’s whim. In states associated with the Brown case, EJI documented one lynching in Delaware; nineteen in Kansas;189 in South Carolina, including four in Clarendon County; 84 in Virginia, including one in Prince Edward County; and three in Washington, D.C.

11 William Gravely, “The Civil Right Not to be Lynched,” in Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 93-95.

Shull.12 As Chafe explained, Blacks of all ages heard about such violent acts, and the fear instilled effectively influenced how they interacted with Whites in their community.13

Jim Crow laws were a statement of White supremacy. A challenge to White supremacy was an attack at the roots of White Southern ideology. Still, Black

Americans’ cultural and economic suppression was not exclusively the work of extremists like the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). As Chaplain Alfred Goodman wrote, the

Klan was only “the impassioned tip of the community’s refined prejudice.”14 Again,

White southerners considered themselves empowered to enforce their community’s cultural and racial norms with impunity. During Duke University’s “Behind the

Veil” oral history project, an unidentified Black man stated in an interview that

Whites “had to have a license to kill anything but a n------.”15 “A White man can steal from or maltreat a Negro in almost any way without fear of reprisal,” wrote sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. He went on to explain that “personal vengeance on the part of the offended Negro usually results in organized retaliation in the form of

12 Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isacc Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019),128-129.

13 Chafe, “Presidential Address,” 1553.

14 Chaplain Alfred Goodman quoted in P. Allen Krause, To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2016), 60.

15 Chafe, “Presidential Address,” 1533. The “Behind the Veil” oral history project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies between 1993 to 1995.

bodily injury (including lynching), home burning or banishment.”16 The fear of violence that could occur at any time as much as the actual violence itself was a form of psychological intimidation that created insecurity in those treated unjustly and influenced their daily behavior.17

“Racism separates, but it never liberates. Hatred generates fear, and fear once given a foothold; binds, consumes and imprisons. Nothing is gained from prejudice. No one benefits from racism.”18

Racism and associated racial violence are not unique to the United States.

Where it exists, it is part of a broad “herd mentality” that does not tolerate any dissent from members of the dominant group. As witnessed in all political systems, a society adopts a value system, not because the individuals have “reflected upon and endorse these values, but in order to be accepted and protected by others, we must share and participate in the values they endorse.”19 White Americans north and south

16 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 530.

17 Fear of Jim Crow violence also impacted White’s behavior. Failure to adhere to Jim Crow social norms could have severe ramifications for White citizens alike. According to information provided by the Tuskegee Institute, between 1882 and 1968, there were 1297 lynchings of Whites. In twenty states, more lynchings of Whites occurred than Black.17 Creating this fear in both races was the objective of Jim Crow enforcement. In this way, Jim Crow successfully achieved its goal of maintaining White dominance.

18 Thurgood Marshall, “Acceptance Speech – Liberty Medal,” National Constitution Center, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1992.

19 Andrew Stuart Bergerson, K. Scott Baker, Clancy Martin, Steve Ostovich, The Happy Burden of History: From Sovereign Impunity to Responsible Selfhood (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 101.

of the Mason-Dixon line supported White supremacy and its associated White privilege because they benefited from doing so directly or indirectly. Philosopher

Kwame Appiah argued: “Many of us are unable to give up beliefs that play a part in justifying the special advantages we gain from our positions in the social order.”20

If not active participants, White Americans participated through their silence.

French philosopher, Michel Foucault, stated that “silence itself [is] peopled with words, and that where no word is heard any more one can still hear the deep buried murmur of meaning, that what men do not say is a continuation of their speaking.”21

Political scientist Walter Lippmann argued that the silence of the majority represents public opinion, or at least what most of the public is willing to tolerate to protect its interest.22 Assuming Lippmann is correct, then racial inequality so prevalent in

American society operated at a level that most Americans found acceptable. As a result of this racism, a racial caste system existed, which explained, in part, how philanthropists and activists could support an ideology of equality while remaining racist themselves, a form of “paternalistic racism.”

For most of its history, White America’s silence, with a few laudable exceptions, created a vacuum in the discourse that White supremacy’s dominant

20 Kwane Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.

21 Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 61.

22 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan Press, 1922), 170-190.

ideology filled. “Ethnic resentment and clan consciousness are social forces far more powerful than economic class,” according to essayist and social critic Adam Gopnik.

“It reflects the permanent truth that all people, including poor people, follow their values, however perverted, rather than their interests, however plain,” he wrote.23

Much earlier, Frederick Douglass’ North Star put it more bluntly: “It is a comfort to the lowest and most degraded of the Whites to feel that there is a class of society which they can despise and trample.”24 The article went on to say, “In the States which make the loudest pretensions to Democracy and regard for popular rights, the popular right of insulting and injuring the colored people with impunity is one of the most prized of all.”25

True, some Whites always saw inconsistencies between America’s stated ideology and its reality and spoke up. For most of its history, however, most White

Americans were complicit in racial oppression through inaction and acceptance of the status quo. As a result, Black Americans existed in an ocean of accepting silence

23 Adam Gopnik, “How the South Won the Civil War,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08.

24 “Blue and Black Laws,” The Liberator, reported in Frederick Douglass and M.R. Delaney, ed., The North Star, December 3, 1847, 1. The article was berating Connecticut voters for failing to amend the state’s constitution to give Blacks in the state equal political rights. [capitalization in original].

25 “Blue and Black Laws,” 1.

that perpetuated White privilege and discrimination that they carefully navigated to stay afloat culturally and economically.26 There was little room for uplift.

“There is one sin that slavery committed against me which I will never forgive. It robbed me of my education.”27

Denial of access to education began almost concurrent with the establishment of slavery in North America.28 The permanent effect on the individual proved this to be one of the most harmful techniques used to keep Blacks in subservient roles. One of the first acts of agency of previously enslaved persons after the Civil War was to confront this exclusion and strive to achieve educational self-sufficiency. Blacks did not wait for Whites to provide what they desired but immediately established their own schools. The schools freed persons created were known as Sabbath Schools, and they continued to operate even after Reconstruction ended. For example, in 1885,

The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) reported enrolling over 200,000 children in its Sunday schools, focusing on moral and intellectual development.29

Historian James D. Anderson saw the previously enslaved persons’ determination to acquire an education as a type of movement supported by the

26 For more on this topic see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

27 A formerly enslaved person quoted in James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South,1860-1935 (New York: International Publishing,1939), 9.

28 Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 2.

29 Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 13.

values of self-help and self-determination. He wrote, “Their own action was the primary force that brought schools to the children of freed men and women.”30 A survey of the freed persons’ educational needs conducted by the Freedman’s Bureau in 1866 found that of the schools established for freed persons in the former

Confederacy, Blacks operated and funded 25 to 50 percent of them. Three years later, Freedmen’s Bureau agents identified “1,512 Sabbath schools, with 6,146 teachers and 107,109 pupils.”31 “With the Blacks, all ages share in the thirst for knowledge, and the old men, as well as boys and girls, are found everywhere pouring over the alphabet – a sight most strange and touching. . . and one full of promise for the future,” wrote the Daily National Republican in 1865.32

As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, independent Black churches played an essential role in the freed persons’ educational uplift. First, as mentioned, they provided space for the nascent schools established in the invading army’s wake. Black churches continued to be the nucleus for Black self-help and the source of Black leadership in future decades. During the postbellum period,

Black religious denominations also founded Black colleges that provided primary and secondary education.33 Schools like Morris Brown in Georgia, Paul Quinn in

30 Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 5.

31 Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 13.

32 “Down South,” The New Haven Courier, reported in Washington D.C. Daily National Republican, October 12, 1865, 1.

33 Although called “colleges” many so named actually only provided instruction through eighth grade. This was true of many White and Black colleges at the time.

Texas, and Allen University in South Carolina were built and sustained for and by

Blacks. Historian Marybeth Gasman explained that Black sponsored schools appealed to many because they provided the opportunity for formerly enslaved persons to set the curricula without White interference. At the same time, Black sponsored schools were more vulnerable economically.34

The gradual expansion of Jim Crow laws increased political and economic suppression supported by violence against Southern Blacks. Continued suppression of access to education became a pillar of Jim Crow. Even as Whites found more ways to shore up White supremacy, Blacks did not surrender their fight, especially for education. The very act of building schools and sending one’s children to them constituted a form of resistance. The willingness to accept the risks reflected Blacks continued hunger and passion for education and their conception of its benefit.

According to historian Violet Harris, previously enslaved persons were willing to sacrifice for an education because they saw it as “the great liberator and equalizer,” and that these feelings remained unabated. Harris emphatically stated that

“Education was not bestowed upon Blacks by an enlightened citizenry. Blacks demanded, created, funded, and maintained educational institutions that would ... provide literacy for all.”35

34 Marybeth Gasman, Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), 12.

35 Violet Harris, “African-American Conceptions of Literacy: Historical Perspective,” Theory into Practice 31, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 276-286.

In addition to the progress made through their own initiatives, Blacks received considerable assistance from White religious organizations and industrial philanthropists between the end of the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century. The philanthropic organizations, especially those founded by religious denominations, acknowledged that Blacks, after centuries of oppression and intellectual starvation, needed an education to participate equally in democracy and become economically self-sufficient.36 Nonetheless, as Gasman pointed out, the various denominations’ apparent benevolence was grounded in self-interest and paternalistic racism. Their goal, Gasman claimed, “was to Christianize the freedmen...and rid the country of the ‘menace’ of uneducated African Americans,” more so than helping to restore to Blacks the life stolen from them.37

Regardless of philanthropist’s motives, Black communities certainly benefited from the financial support of religious and industrial activists at a time when help was desperately needed. The need for schools, supplies, and teachers was so great that even at the height of philanthropic support, Black schools continued to be underfunded and over-crowded. This support, combined with Blacks’ own financial contributions and determination to obtain an education, helped move the national illiteracy rate for Black Americans from 80 percent after the Civil War to only 16.4 percent by 1930 (See Table 1).

36 Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 30-31

37 Gasman, Envisioning Black Colleges, 12.

Table 1 – Literacy Rates

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

Year38 Total White Black and Total Native Foreign- other born 1870 20.0 11.5 – – 79.9 1880 17.0 9.4 8.7 12.0 70.0 1890 13.3 7.7 6.2 13.1 56.8 1900 10.7 6.2 4.6 12.9 44.5 1910 7.7 5.0 3.0 12.7 30.5 1920 6.0 4.0 2.0 13.1 23.0 1930 4.3 3.0 1.6 10.8 16.4 1940 2.9 2.0 1.1 9.0 11.5 1947 2.7 1.8 – – 11.0 1950 3.2 – – – – 1952 2.5 1.8 – – 10.2 1959 2.2 1.6 – – 7.5 1969 1.0 0.7 – – 3.6 * 1979 0.6 0.4 – – 1.6 *

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970; and Current Population Reports, Series P-23, Ancestry and Language in the United States: November 1979. (Table prepared in September 1992.)

In the industrial, high-tech economy of the late 19th and early 20th century, the definition of literacy now meant “whether a person’s educational level [was] sufficient to function in a modern society.”39 The expectations to meet this standard increased over time. The education considered adequate at the beginning of the 20th

39 Tom Snyder, ed. 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (National Center for Education Statistics, 1993), 9.

century was deemed inferior by the 1930s and 1940s. Black literacy improved, however, even as the definition of literacy became more stringent. Although the schooling the southern states provided Black children was substandard, at best,

Black parents managed to nurture their children’s academic growth against all odds and continued to do so year over year. This accomplishment deserves more recognition than it has received.

The constant societal pressure for more and better education continued to foster Black parents’ demands for improved educational opportunities for their children. Eventually, once the idea of publicly funded education became generally accepted, southern Whites consistently used their control of the public purse-strings to ensure that Black education was inferior to that provided to Whites. For hardcore segregationists, the use of “White taxes” to pay for Black education was untenable, and they resisted changes to tax laws that would provide the needed funds. While denying Blacks equal access to education and the benefits derived from it, White society created a type of self-fulfilling social architecture out of which Blacks were hard-pressed to escape while being blamed for not doing so.

Whites stubbornly insisted on their belief that not only were Blacks too lazy to learn, but they also were “intellectually inferior and incapable of learning more than the rudiments of basic skills” despite the evidence to the contrary.40 To acknowledge otherwise required a reassessment of Black Americans’ capabilities and their place in the social and economic structure. To follow such reassessment to

40 Harris, “African-American Conceptions of Literacy,” 276-277.

its logical conclusion threatened to erode the very foundation on which White supremacists based their right to dominance.

Social Darwinism, the dominant social theory in the mid-1880s, assumed some individuals’ innate superiority or inferiority. Americans’ use of the theory of natural selection discouraged any intervention or reform least less capable persons rise to positions of prominence. By ascribing a man’s low economic status to his own shortcomings, not to any societal deficiency or neglect, White society absolved itself from complicity in its citizens’ economic problems. If a man failed in his endeavors, it must be because of his own laziness and lack of initiative. Society had no responsibility to assist its members in achieving success.

Whites went beyond adhering to a “sink or swim” social ethos. They established laws that limited Blacks’ access to good education, threatened them with violence should they attempt to “move beyond their station,” and then held them responsible for their failure to succeed. As a result, the downward pressure on

Blacks’ attempt at upward political and economic growth created by Jim Crow discrimination and the theory of natural selection was almost insurmountable in the

Jim Crow South of the early 20th century.

Neglect of educational facilities also contributed to Blacks’ educational deficiencies. By the 1940s, many of the buildings provided through philanthropic organizations’ largesse were exhausted and dilapidated. The disintegration was due, in part, to the states’ failure to provide funds for upkeep. Funding for replacements or new schools to accommodate the population growth required taxing White citizens. As previously stated, such taxes were unpopular and deemed unnecessary

or wasteful by those indoctrinated in the culture of White supremacy. The curriculum in Black schools also reflected Whites’ racist intentions to limit Black progress. Most Black schools offered fewer classes than their counterparts and continued to exclude classes in the classics, foreign language, and upper-level mathematics and sciences.

“I am here in what they call[ed] old Free Kansas, . . . Please tell them of this so call[ed] free Kansas Jim crowism. If What I have written you would get out I guess I would be hang[ed].”41

Each school case that made up Brown was the direct product of the Jim Crow practices in the state in which it originated. Kansas, the namesake case’s location, was in denial about its racial practices. It took pride in being the home of abolitionist

John Brown and the Free State of popular sovereignty. Although aligned with the

Union during the Civil War, Kansas nonetheless followed the Jim Crow practices of its neighbor to the east, Missouri, and codified many into Kansas law. The Kansas state government also participated in enforcing Jim Crow practices. For example,

Black males were not allowed to serve in the state militia until 1887.42 Blacks could not live in the residence halls at the University of Kansas. Kansas hospitals either segregated Black patients or refused to treat them at all. Black nurses could not care

41 Mrs. S.E. McClendon to Gloster Current, March 27, 1948, “Branch Files, Kansas City, KS,1940-1955,” II: A62 Folder 6, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [punctuation and spelling in original].

42 Roger D. Cunningham, The Black Citizen Soldiers of Kansas, 1864-1901 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).

for White patients. As late as 1947, city commissioners in Topeka modified licensing requirements for theatres, allowing them to segregate their audiences.43 In instances where the state law prohibited segregation, it was generally ignored, as in the prohibition against segregated schools, despite their existence throughout the state.

Kansas was also not exempt from Jim Crow violence. In his book This is Not

Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927, historian Brent Campney reports 600 incidents of “systemic and enduring racist violence,” including “thirty-seven … mob killings… and four race riots.”44 The Klu Klux Klan also had a presence in Kansas to such an extent that in the mid-1920s, the organization controlled the state senate and dominated the state legislature. When there were only 29,739 Black males in

Kansas, there were 60,000 White male members of the KKK.45 While the Klan’s primary targets were Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and various immigrant groups, the

Klan also targeted Whites it considered immoral or traitors to their race or gender.46

43 “Jim Crow Gets Boost in Kansas: Topeka Licenses Repealed,” The Kansas City Call, October 10. 1947.

44 Brent M. S. Campney, This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

45 Charles William Sloan, Jr., “Kansas Battles the Invisible Empire: The Legal Ouster of the KKK from Kansas, 1922-1927,” The Kansas Historical Quarterly 40, no.3 (Autumn 1974): 393-409.

46 Staff of the Klanwatch Project, The Klu Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence (Montgomery, AL: The Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011), 20.

“Living in the fifties as an Afro-American was not like a Norman Rockwell painting. There were two Americas, one black and one White.”47

As a border state, Delaware had even deeper roots in Southern traditions than

Kansas. A slave state since its founding, by 1790, 15 percent of Delaware’s population was enslaved. Before the Civil War, the numbers declined to 1.6 percent, making Delaware the state with the lowest actual number of enslaved persons.48 Just as Delaware prided itself on being the first state to ratify the Constitution in 1787, it also claimed to be the first slave state to pledge allegiance to the Union after the firing on Fort Sumter. It was one of the last to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments, however, not doing so until February 12, 1901.49 Despite its small size, Delaware was then, as now, divided culturally and politically between its industrial northern half and its rural southern half. Locals often described it as “a Northern state with a

Southern exposure.”50

47 Orlando J. Camp, and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven: Integration Fears Robbed Hope from Eleven Black Students, 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Cedar Tree Books, 2013), 3.

48 “Statistics on Slavery: Population of the Original Thirteen Colonies, selected years by type.” Economic History Association “Historical Statistics of the U.S. (1970), Franklin (1988),” at https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm. Delaware had 1798 enslaved persons by the beginning of the Civil War.

49 Three states did not ratify the 14th amendment until the 20th century: Maryland and California in 1959, and Kentucky in 1976. The last state to ratify the 13th amendment was Mississippi in 1995. www.history.gov.

50 Eric Ruth, “Brown v. the Board, 40 Years Later,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 16, 1994.

After the Civil War, Black children in Delaware either attended schools with

Whites or, if they could afford it, went to private schools. By 1880, as reported by historian Bradley Skelcher, “the schools had become mysteriously segregated. Now education was denied altogether for [Blacks]...or provided in a separate building.”51

The quality of Delaware schools for all races, especially in rural areas, was substandard. The condition of schools for Black students, however, was deplorable.52

Even after a significant infusion of over $4.3 million cash by the wealthy Du Pont family, who dominated Delaware politically and economically, Delaware schools were below standard.53 Black schools’ quality, especially in the rural areas, was even below that of White schools in the same school districts. Textbooks were hand-me- downs from the White schools. Playgrounds were smaller and poorly equipped. The training of Black teachers was inadequate, and their compensation less than their

White peers.54

51 Without specific direction to do so by the legislature, public schools in Delaware gravitated to segregation. Bradley Skelcher, African-American Education Delaware: A History through Photographs, 1865-1930 (Wilmington, DE: Delaware Heritage Press, 1999), 58.

52 Abraham Flexner and Frank P. Bachman, Public Education in Delaware: A Report to the Public-School Commission of Delaware, with an Appendix Containing the New School Code (New York: General Education Board, 1919).

53 The Du Pont family made its fortune in the chemical industry starting with manufacturing gunpowder. The family no longer owns the company but still holds significant interest in the corporation which is now owned by Dow Chemical.

54 Bradley Skelcher, African-American Education Delaware: A History Through Photographs,1865-1930 (Wilmington, DE: Delaware Heritage Press, 1999), 59-60.

None of this is surprising when one understands that control of the legislature rested in the southern counties where Southern cultural imperatives were strongest.

Jim Crow ideology dominated social practices, especially in the rural southern parts of the state. In addition to the schools, hotels, movie theaters, and restaurants practiced segregation. Blacks could not serve in the National Guard and could not attend the University of Delaware before 1950.55 Because of its Southern cultural orientation, Whites in some Delaware communities reacted with angry protests when the Brown order first came down in 1954, despite the governor’s urging to await the final ruling. White parents boycotted the schools in several communities, the most prominent of which was closing the schools in Milford in protest of admitting Black students. At the same time, the National Association for the Advancement of White

People (NAAWP), a version of the Citizens Council in other southern states, sprang up, leading protests even before the Court issued its implementation order, Brown II, on May 31, 1955.56 Many White Delawareans joined the organization in support of its White supremacy agenda. In 1954, the Milford Courier wrote: “Delaware has been known for years as one of the most prejudiced border states. There is but little difference between Delaware and South Carolina in the treatment of Negroes.”57

55 Eric Ruth, “Brown v. the Board, 40 Years Later,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 16, 1994.

56 The NAAWP originated in Delaware in 1953. After it went defunct, David Duke purloined the name and started a similar group in Louisiana. Delaware schools were finally integrated to the court’s satisfaction in 1967 although, as is true in many states, re-segregation is happening, mainly due to housing demographics.

57 Milford Courier, n.d.

“Can we talk of integration until there is integration of hearts and minds? Unless you have this, you have only a physical presence, and the wall between us are as high as a mountain range.”58

South Carolina was most notorious and blatant in its Jim Crow practices. The state that led the South into the Civil War had not modified its cultural racism to any great extent since then. Only when forced by federal action, which was seldom, did

South Carolina make any serious attempt to educate its Black citizens. In 1950, at the time of the Briggs case, 76 percent of South Carolina residents resided in rural areas. The state’s funding for rural Black students averaged $78.77 per student per year compared to $179.31 per White student. Funding in the metropolitan areas was

$116.75 per Black child versus $170.21 for Whites. Even though journalist Harry

Ashmore claimed that “for many years Southerners have demonstrated their faith [in universal education] by spending a higher proportion of their total personal income for education than has the rest of the nation” (3.3 percent versus 2.7 percent in non-

Southern states), the gap between Black and White school funding was not closed.59

The disparity between rural and metropolitan schools only widened from $20 to $44 across the region in the next decade.60

The situation was even grimmer in Clarendon County, where local parents initiated the Briggs case. In Clarendon, Blacks represented 70 percent of the

58 Chief Dan George (1899-1981), “One Journey, Quotes from Chief Dan George,” https://onejourney.net/chief-dan-george-quotes.

59 Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the School (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 114 -115.

60 Ashmore, The Negro and the School, 111.

county’s population but only 15 percent of the land ownership. Fewer than 300

Black households made more than $2000 annually, while two-thirds earned less than

$1,000 annually.61 School funding in Clarendon County was also discriminatory, with $43 per Black child, significantly below the average spent on rural Black schools in the rest of the state. The county-funded White students at $179 per White child.62 County-funded Black schools in rural areas were small, shabby, and scattered across the county, and school boards rarely provided bus transportation for

Black children. Because the school year for Black children was shorter than for

Whites, Black parents pooled their scant resources to pay to extend the school year beyond that funded by the county. Regardless, children were needed to work in the fields to help support the family, and few children made it past the eighth grade.63

In contrast to South Carolina’s racial environment, Virginia prided itself on having worked out its relations with its Black citizens. In February 1950, editor J.B.

Wall claimed in The Farmville Herald that “for a number of years we have insisted that the South had no racial problem...No place in history do we recall where two races have lived together in harmony as had been done in the South for many years.”64 Wall went on to describe Virginia as a place where individuals had “high

61 Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 192.

62 Lau, Democracy Rising, 192.

63 Lau, Democracy Rising, 193.

64 J.B. Wall, “Racial Problems,” The Farmville Herald and Farmer Leader, February 24, 1959.

regard ...and respect for the opposite race, and in thousands of cases, a deep mutual friendship.”65 In reality, Virginia was as Jim Crow as any other Southern state.

White Virginians were in total control of the political landscape, both locally and at the state level. In History of Prince Edward County, Virginia local historian Herbert

Clarence Bradshaw explained that at Virginia’s constitutional convention in 1901,

White Virginians stole the franchise from Black males and poor White males by including literacy requirements for voting.66

Additionally, the delegates did not submit the new 1901 Virginia constitution to a public vote, but instead, it “was unlawfully rammed down the throats of the

Virginia populace by proclamation.”67 According to an article in the Farmville

Herald, the number of Black voters in the county declined by 90 percent leaving only 44 Blacks of the approximately 450 registered Black voters who qualified under the new constitutional provisions.68 According to Bradshaw, “the possibility of

Negro domination of local government, always a threat under the old suffrage law, was removed; control of State and local governments was assured to White men.”69

65 Wall, “Racial Problems.”

66 Herbert Clarence Bradshaw, History of Prince Edward County, Virginia: From its Earliest Settlements through its Establishment in 1754 to its Bicentennial Year (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 1955), 444-445.

67 Oliver W. Hill, Sr., The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond (Jonesboro, AR: Grant House Publisher, 2007), xxv.

68 Farmville Herald, Sept 5, 1902.

69 Bradshaw, History, 444-445.

The manipulation intended to suppress Black voting was not unique to 1901,

Virginia. Between 1870 and 1880, Virginia political parties were biracial and somewhat democratic. After 1880, however, Virginia’s political foundations reverted to one based on White supremacy ideology. In 1884 Virginia passed the

Anderson-McCormick Law, effectively suppressing Black votes and thereby the number of Blacks elected to state offices. Black participation declined from eight elected state representatives in 1884 to only four in 1889. These were the last Black legislators to serve in the Virginia House of Commons until 1968.70

In 1894 Virginia’s voting laws changed, and the state introduced the pre- published secret ballot. Similar to ballots used today, officials preprinted the candidates’ names on the ballot, so voters only had to mark the candidate for whom they voted. The new process did little to reduce corruption. Furthermore, since a more significant percentage of Virginia’s Black voters were still illiterate in 1894 and could not read the ballot to mark them properly, the new ballots effectively further suppressed Black voting. Thus, Virginia’s long history of voter suppression disenfranchised Black voters and further enculturated White supremacy and the corruption used to support its ideology.

While overt violence toward Blacks was on the decline in Virginia until the time of the Davis case in Farmville, Virginia, neglect of Black citizens’ civil rights was the norm. The presence of separate water fountains, bathrooms, and waiting

70 Brent Tarter, Saga of the New South: Race, Law and Public Debt in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 143.

rooms at train and bus stations were only some examples of institutionalized segregation. Southside Community Hospital allocated only sixteen of the ninety- seven available beds for Blacks, and Black doctors were not allowed to join its staff.

Blacks could not eat at White restaurants or sit in the White section of theatres.

Black shoppers could not try on items before purchasing.71 Elementary schools for

Blacks were dilapidated, unheated, under-provisioned, and underfunded. Virginia was twenty-fifth in the nation in public-school expenditures as a percent of public income (2.8 percent).72

At the time of the Davis case, for every dollar spent on White schools in

Prince Edward County, including “school property, buildings and equipment, and busses,...28 cents [was spent] for the Negro child.”73 NAACP attorney Spottswood

Robinson testified in the Davis case that “it will take into 1972-1973 before we are going to have dollar for dollar spent in proportion… on instructions.”74 The NAACP estimated that even with a vigorous campaign to bring the Black Farmville schools up to the White schools’ standards, it would also take until 1972-1973 to equalize

71 “The AFSC and School Desegregation,” Friends Journal (January 24, 2012): 2. www.friendsjournal.org/node/130.

72 Ashmore, The Negro and the School, 116-120.

73 Spottswood Robinson, “Summation,” Dorothy E. Davis et al, vs. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Civil Action NO 1333. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 985.

74 Robinson, “Summation,” 983.

the buildings. It would take until 1979-1980 for furniture and equipment to be equal.75

When Carol Johns led the student boycott at Moton High School in

Farmville, the demand was that the school board provide the long-promised new high school for Black students. Recognizing the threat of the NAACP’s lawsuit and sensitivity to changing racial attitudes, even in Virginia, the board began constructing the long-promised new Black high school, believing that Plessy’s separate-but-equal criteria would guide the Court’s decision as it had in the past. In

1953, before the Brown decision, Prince Edward County completed building what it claimed to be a state-of-the-art new high school for its Black students.76 The school board was surprised when the Black parents refused to drop their lawsuit after the new school opened. Despite the county’s expenditure, the new state-of-the-art building was still inferior to the White high school. There were few books in the library, minimal audio-visual equipment, not enough textbooks, and lab equipment was non-existent. Additionally, the other fourteen Jim Crow schools in the district received no improvements.77 More importantly, by this time, the Black parents were committed to the principle that separate could never be equal.

75 Robinson, “Summation,” 989.

76 Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists & the Struggle for Justice in Price Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 8.

77 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 8.

The Brown II decision was rendered in 1955, confirming integration as the law of the land. The State of Virginia and many local governments used every possible maneuver to avoid implementation. After years of legalized delays, in 1959, the Virginia Supreme Court and the U.S. District Court in Norfolk declared the state’s resistance legislation unconstitutional and ordered Prince Edward County’s schools integrated that Fall. The school board had planned for this eventuality for some years. It abolished the school property tax and ordered all public schools to close in an attempt to avoid what White citizens deemed a cultural calamity.78 The schools remained closed for five years.

“As the seat of our federal government under the authority of Congress, the failure of the District is a failure of all of the people.”79

The last city involved in the Brown decision was Washington, D.C., one of the most segregated cities in the United States.80 When Congress established the

District’s public schools in 1862, they instigated segregation from day one. There was no law requiring separation of the races, but the District inherited a southern culture. Additionally, a Congress dominated by powerful southerners such as Harry

78 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 31.

79 “To Secure These Rights,” President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, Harry S Truman Library, National Archives, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to- secure-these-rights.

80 Although the Washington D.C. case, Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), was technically not part of Brown, the Supreme Court heard the case at the same time because the constitutional issues were so similar.

F. Byrd, Sr and Strom Thurmond, who strongly opposed integration, administered the District, including its schools.81 In this political environment, housing in the

District became progressively more segregated as the population exploded during the

Roosevelt administration. During World War II, the influx of workers, which was disproportionally Black, put even more pressure on the city’s infrastructure. The quality of the District’s schools deteriorated as Whites left the crowded inner city, and Blacks moved in, creating overcrowded neighborhoods with deteriorating infrastructure in the White House’s shadow.82

President Harry S Truman commissioned a civil rights study in 1947 entitled:

“To Secure These Rights,” President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The study documented the impact of segregation on Washington, D.C, and shone a spotlight on the District’s racial issues. The study stated that “the District of Columbia should symbolize to our own citizens and to the people of all countries our tradition of Civil

Liberty. Instead, it is a graphic illustration of a failure of democracy.”83 According to the President’s commission, “the core of Washington’s segregated society is its dual system of public education.” Schools were segregated, as much by housing patterns as by mandate. Still, adherence to Jim Crow practices ensured racial segregation in

81 “Power of the Southern Bloc in Congress,” History, Art and Archives: United States House of Representatives. https://history.house.gov.

82 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vantage Books, 2004), 510-514.

83 “To Secure These Rights,” President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, Harry S Truman Library, National Archives, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to- secure-these-rights

the schools. Even interracial competition in athletics and forensics was not allowed because it would threaten the racial status quo.84 The Committee summarized the challenges facing Blacks visiting or living within the nation’s capital. All public spaces were segregated, including parks, theatres, and museums. In addition to being segregated, housing available to Blacks was overcrowded and substandard.

As a result of the influx of Blacks into the District and Whites’ migration to the suburbs, Black schools were severely overcrowded, while White schools in the

District were half-filled. As the President’s report documented, the White schools were underutilized with a capacity of 27 percent under the number of students enrolled, while Black schools’ enrollment was 108 percent of capacity. Class sizes were larger in Black schools, and the average number of students per teacher was higher than in the White schools. Because of overcrowding, 15 percent of the Black children received only part-time instruction. “Pupil outlays in 1947 were $160.21 for

Whites and $120.52 for Negro children,” according to Kluger.85 As Whites moved out of the District to the surrounding suburbs, the Black schools’ condition only worsened. According to the commission, “Negro schools [were] inferior to White schools in almost every respect.”86

When Gardner Bishop approached Charles Hamilton Houston in December

1947 asking for help in addressing the disparity in the District’s schools, he

84 “To Secure These Rights,” 73.

85 Kluger, Simple Justice, 513.

86 “To Secure These Rights,” 72.

represented a significant number of working-class Blacks in Washington, D.C.

Initially, Bishop focused on addressing inequities in the Black schools. By 1951, the case took a totally different purpose: convincing the Supreme Court that segregation in the District was unconstitutional.

Summary

The widespread adherence to Jim Crow practices across the United States, especially in southern states, created a perfect Gordian Knot for Black Americans in post-World War II United States. Quality education was an essential prerequisite for upward financial growth, but Blacks encountered barriers at every turn. Even where states outside the South admitted Blacks, the schools, especially the universities, often maintained quotas for minority students, and there were commonly restrictions on housing and participation in extracurricular activities.

The resentment toward White domination that simmered below the surface in the Black community reached the boiling point after World War II. Despite the threats of violence inherent in living in a Jim Crow society, Blacks became more and more outspoken as they fought the status quo for their rights as citizens. Demands for anti-lynching legislation, equal housing, voter protection, job opportunities, and quality education became more energized as advocates for Black civil rights began coalescing around common objectives. The NAACP’s membership grew significantly. For example, in South Carolina, the number of local branches increased to over eighty, drawing most of its growth in branches from rural areas.

Despite the growth, local Blacks did not wait for the NAACP to lead. As historian

Peter F. Lau observed, finally, after three hundred years, “the civil rights insurgency was being waged …led by those on the margins of history and the periphery of power.”87

87 Peter F. Lau, “Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865,” African American Studies (2006): 24. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_african_american_studies/24

“I am many things to many people. But in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.”1 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

CHAPTER 3: LEADERSHIP IN THE BLACK TRADITION: FOUR

PREACHERS AND A BARBER

Young Reverend Francis Griffin returned to Farmville in Prince Edward

County, Virginia, in 1949 to assume the First Baptist Church’s pulpit from his father.

He was looking for action and a mission. Born and raised in the county, he was familiar with the county’s racial politics, which were even more glaringly offensive to him after spending time in the East and the army during World War II. Griffin was particularly resentful of segregation as practiced in the South. He told an interviewer years later, “It was my contention long before the NAACP announced its policy that segregation was a blight to be cut off by surgery.”2 Indoctrinated in the social gospel and religious activism by his uncle, the Reverend Vernon Johns, and the progressive teachers at Shaw University in South Carolina, Griffin joined the

NAACP while still in college. Griffin’s first interest was in increasing the number of

Black voters in Prince Edward County, but soon after relocating, he saw that the

1 Martin Luther King Jr., “The Un-Christian Christian,” Ebony (August 1965), 77.

2 Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County Virginia 1951-1964 (Farmville, VA, Robert Moton Museum, 2008), 20.

issue front of mind in the Black community was education.3 Himself a product of the

Farmville public school system, Griffin understood that there was much to do to improve Black education quality in the county.

Illus. 1: Rev. Francis Griffin Courtesy: Library of Congress

First and foremost, the priorities were transportation and then the Moton

High School’s overcrowding, which meant replacing the tar-paper shacks built to

“temporarily” accommodate student population growth during World War II. Griffin saw an opportunity to use the parents’ concerns to assume a leadership role beyond what just his ministry would provide him. He joined the National Congress of

Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT), the Black equivalent of the Parent Teacher

Association (PTA), and eventually became head of the building committee

3 Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 15.

negotiating with the all-White school board to resolve the overcrowding. His private intention was to use his NCCPT position to build a coalition of Prince Edward’s progressive Blacks. With the old guard displaced, Griffin hoped to begin taking definitive steps to improve his community’s lives. Griffin’s status as a Black preacher gave him a jump start on the success he needed to enhance his influence beyond just his congregation. Exactly how was yet to be determined, but given the issues he saw facing Prince Edward’s Black community, he was confident that opportunities would present themselves.

Rev. Griffin was just one of many resistance leaders to rise out of the Black church even before a national civil rights movement developed. Others, such as Rev.

Joseph De Laine of South Carolina and Rev. McKinley Burnett of Kansas, were also products of the social gospel and impatient with the racial status quo. Where Griffin appeared to have had political aspirations, De Laine and Burnett were more accidental activists accepting the call to help their communities as thrust upon them.

The tradition of Black resistance and the fight for quality education intersected in these men of faith. Perhaps no aspect of the history of Blacks’ progress since slavery was more purely attributable to Black self-actualization than the church’s maturation and the leaders it created. It was no coincidence that most leaders of the 1960s Civil

Rights Movement came from the Black church. Nor is it a coincidence that frequently, the spirit that ignited the five Brown cases rose from that same source.

“The Black Church was the cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a system designed in every way to crush their spirit.”4

Scholarship on the Black church and its importance in the Black resistance movement began early in the 20th century. In 1921, Carter G. Woodson’s The

History of the Negro Church began exploring the churches’ importance in Black lives, beginning with the spread of Christianity among enslaved persons. Woodson also included a brief history of the schisms that established the Black Baptist and

Black Methodist congregations. Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph Nicholson’s The

Negro’s Church, published in 1933, followed Woodson.5 In 1944, Black religion was such an essential element in Black political and social evolution that Gunnar

Myrdal dedicated a portion of his 1944 tome, American Dilemma, to the Black church.6 In 1974 C. Eric Lincoln published The Black Experience in Religion, followed in 1990 by The Black Church in the African American Experience, which he co-authored with Lawrence H. Mamiya. Their work blended sociology and history in a statistics-based study of Black church history, including its role in

4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), xxiii.

5 Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, 1921); Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 edition) [original edition 1933].

6 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York, Harper & Row, 1962 edition), (Original edition 1944).

politics, education, and economic uplift.7 Most recently, historian Henry Louis Gates published The Black Church: This is our Story, This is our Song, accompanied by a

PBS special of the same name.8 As historiography, the scholarship demonstrates an evolving and sometimes conflicting evaluation of the role of the Black churches in the development of Black social, economic, cultural, and political identity. Gates traces the Black church’s role, reaching back before slavery began in America to the importation of the first Black enslaved persons to South America and later to

Spanish Florida.9 Views and opinions of the Black church’s role in Black American life varied as time provided different perspectives; however, the one thing on which these scholars agree is the importance of the Black churches in developing Black leaders.

Black churches provided Black males a place to learn and practice leadership that they leveraged to help their communities. According to historian C. Eric

Lincoln, the Black preacher was an “educator, liberator, political leader, and sometimes...[healer]...as well as...advocate and spiritual leader.”10 Lincoln explained that the Black preacher’s status did not depend on his education but upon his ability to preach and to represent his congregation “before God and before the hostile White

7 C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Experience in Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1974); C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in African American Experience (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

8 Gates, The Black Church, 15-29

9 Gates, The Black Church, 15-29.

10 Lincoln, The Black Experience, 65.

world.”11 In fact, during Reconstruction, few Black preachers had a formal religious education for the obvious reason that educating enslaved persons was against the law before the Civil War. Black preachers rose from among the people and, as such, were known and trusted. Black preachers’ closeness to their followers allowed them to provide the leadership, “which advanced Black survival...at a time when mere survival itself was an accomplishment.”12 Still, conscious of their lack of education, some of the first schools established by the Black denominations were seminaries.13

Initially, the churches represented a community where Blacks could meet in relative safety and vote, hold office, and discuss issues important to their community. Church members learned to work in a bureaucracy as comparative equals without White interference. As such, their experience represented a microcosm of American society at large.14 The training received bore fruit as Blacks became more confident in their ability to lead and their right to an equal share of the

American Dream. Historian Aldon Morris argued that “it was the Black Church which provided an ideological framework through which passive attitudes were

11 Lincoln, The Black Experience, 66. Although there were some female leaders in the Black church, the majority of the clergy were male.

12 Lincoln, The Black Experience, 67. After the Civil War, Baptists took the lead in establishing Black churches and teaching former slaves to read. As a result, Baptists represented the largest denomination in the Black churches.

13 Lawrence A. Jones, “They Sought a City: The Black Church and Churchmen in the Nineteenth Century,” Union Theological Seminary Quarterly Review (Spring 1971): 253-272.

14 “The Black Church a Brief History,” The African American Registry https://aaregistry.org/story/the-Black-church-a-brief-history.

transformed into a collective consciousness supportive of collective action” – what historian Henry Louis Gates described as a “liminal space brimming with subversive features.”15 By World War I, Black churches, especially in the South, were well established. Their function as meeting centers for religious and non-religious purposes provided cover for political activism as it matured in the community. In the early relative safety of the church, Blacks met and developed strategies against racial oppression.16 Such meetings would have been improbable without the permission and involvement of Black preachers.

That early Black organizing efforts were not always well known to the White community is evidenced in Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 American Dilemma. In his evaluation of the Black church’s role, Myrdal did not recognize the church as a

15 Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 79-81, quoted in C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 165; Gates, The Black Church, xix. For more on the role of the Black Church “as a base for building a sense of ethnic identity and a community of interest among its members,” see Hart M. Nelsen, and Anne Kusener Nelsen, Black Church in the Sixties (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971).

16 Examples are the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, the starting point of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the First Baptist Church of Selma which housed the organizing meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Whites targeted Black churches even before the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Later, as Whites understood that the Black churches were organizational instruments for Black resistance, an increasing numbers of Black churches were bombed and burned to weaken the core of support for civil rights activism. The terrorism escalated until 1995-1996 when over 30 Black churches were bombed or burned in 18-months. The federal government deployed its shield with congressional passage of Public Law 104-155: Church Arson Prevention Act in 1996, after the states failed to use their sword to protect the rights of Black citizens.

source of protest and Black agency. He stated emphatically that “the Negro Church in the South did not become an institution that led the opposition to the caste system.”17 He acknowledged the churches’ importance as a center for social work and supporting Black children’s education. Nevertheless, in his opinion, the Black church “remained a conservative institution with its interests directed upon otherworldly matters and has largely ignored the practical problems of the Negroes’ fate in this world.”18 He argued that by diverting congregants’ attention to overcoming oppression and “lifting while climbing,” the churches effectively encouraged submission to the new Jim Crow order.19

Generally, Myrdal’s evaluation was uninformed. Many Black Southern ministers did not fit his description. These men were frequently the early and often forgotten energy behind the local resurgence of Black resistance. Especially after

World War II, the leadership these men provided and the sacrifices they and their families made were essential in fermenting the movement for equal education for their children from passive to aggressive demands.

Thurgood Marshall saw Black churches as essential in the resistance movement. He told attorney Mark Tushnet that “eighty percent of the branches of the NAACP when I went there were run by ministers, in churches. Ninety-eight

17 Myrdal, American Dilemma, 862.

18 Myrdal, American Dilemma, 863.

19 Myrdal, American Dilemma, 863.

percent of the meetings were held in Negro churches.”20 Marshall went on to tell

Tushnet that “the Negro church support was beautiful, from one end of the country to the other. . . I don’t think there would have been an NAACP without the church.”21

While applauding the Black churches, Marshall expressed grave disappointment with the White Christians. He felt that White churches’ role in the civil rights movement was not near what it should have been. “I don’t know of a single [White] church group that did what it should have done,” Marshall stated.22

White churches’ failure went much further back. In the antebellum years, both

Catholic and Protestant leaders supported enslaving Blacks, pointing to the Book of

Genesis to rationalize their perfidy. Certainly, there were some White churches opposed to slavery that supported the abolitionist movement, and several denominations split over the issue, such as the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845.23 In more contemporary times of Marshall’s experience, historian Curtis

Evans argued that White evangelical protestants continued supporting White supremacist ideology. Generally, politically right-wing, the evangelicals argued that

20 Mark V. Tushnet, ed., Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscence (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001), 509.

21 Tushnet, Thurgood Marshall, 509-510.

22 Tushnet, Thurgood Marshall, 509. It is not clear if Marshall was speaking of White churches in the South or nationwide. Given his experience fighting White supremacy everywhere, it is likely that he was painting with a broad brush.

23 “Abolition and the Splintering of the Church,” in This Far by Faith:1776-1865, https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/print/journey2.html.

communal acts of resistance only worsened relations between Blacks and Whites and saw any government intervention as a form of coercion.24

At the same time, Marshall expressed disappointment in some Black clergy.

He confided to Tushnet that “there, of course, were some ministers, Negro ministers, who were against the program and against themselves. Just like there were Negro lawyers, Negro doctors, Negro businessmen. We have our share of skunks, just like anybody else.”25 Modjeska Simkins agreed with Marshall’s assessment of Black ministers who did not support the resistance movement. Simkins, described as the matriarch of the civil rights movement in South Carolina, was not complimentary when asked about the preachers’ contributions.26 She told historian Jacquelyn Hall:

“Around Columbia here, they gave little or no assistance; we never got very much out of them here in early times. We still don’t. Every now and then, one of them would light up kind of like you see a lightning bug light up at night, and that’s it.”27

Simkins felt “they just don’t give a damn.”28

24 Curtis Evans, “White Evangelical Protestant Response to the Civil Rights Movement,” Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 2 (April 2009): 245.

25 Tushnet, Thurgood Marshall, 510

26 “Modjeska Monteith Simkins,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/mmsimkins.htm.

27 “Oral History Interview with Modjeska Simkins,” July 28,1976. Interview G- 0056-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Published by Documenting the American South [October 5, 2020], 67. http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A- 027/menu.html.

28 “Oral History Interview with Modjeska Simkins,” 67.

Historian Yolanda Pierce argued that fear of reprisal motivated some Black preachers more than a reluctance to be part of the civil rights movement: “They worried that their churches would be the next to be bombed. And so, they refused to allow the leaders of the civil rights movement to even have services there.”29

Historian William J. Barber empathized with the Black preachers’ dilemma even if he disagreed. Barber rationalized: “You would get your church blown up. You would get your head shot off.”30 The risk attached to using churches as meeting places for Black activism was real and only increased as the movement took to the street. White supremacists burned or bombed churches, and people died.31 As early as 1822, Whites burned the AME church just outside the city limits of Charleston,

South Carolina, after Denmark Vesey, one of its members, was accused of planning an uprising of enslaved Blacks in the city and was hanged. Almost a hundred years later, in 2015, Dylann Storm Roof walked into the same church, known as Emanuel

African Methodist Episcopal Church or “Mother Emanuel,” and shot ten Black congregants, killing nine. A White supremacist, Roof told officials that he hoped to

29 Yolanda Pierce, Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative, History of African-American Relations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

30 William J. Barber with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), quoted in Gates, The Black Church, 145.

31 Taryn Finley, “The Charleston Shooting Was At Least The 91st Violent Attack on A Black Church Since 1956,” Huff Post: Black Voices, June 23, 2015.

start a race war. Most likely, Roof chose Mother Emanuel because of its history and significance in the Black community.

Ministers who did not support the movement often chose passive resistance as the way to protect their congregations from acts of violence. Sociologist E.

Franklin Frasier argued that these Black preachers saw themselves responsible for

“outwit[ing] the White oppressor.”32 As Frazier explained, the pacifist preacher tried

“to maintain for himself and his followers a posture of pacification and obedience to the dictates of a society which demanded and expected White privilege and Black submission.”33 Such men often became the liaisons between the Black and White communities. As in antebellum days, Whites encouraged Black preachers to enforce the philosophy of accommodation to White supremacy. Without a doubt, some

Black leaders played the peacemaker role, and history has been critical of them for it. However, Frazier maintained that in most instances, the Black preacher provided significant leadership and helped congregants navigate the complicated and dangerous ground of Southern racial politics at a time when just surviving was worth celebrating.34

32 E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1965), 65.

33 Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 65.

34 Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 67.

“The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying not ‘what a lovely sermon,’ but ‘I will do something.’”35

When Rev. Griffin brought his aspirations to his ministry in 1949, he had no possible idea how protracted and painful the journey would be. As eager as Griffin was to effect change in the Black community, he hardly knew he was about to be embroiled in a fifteen-plus-year battle that separated him from his children and damaged his health and that of his wife Adelaide. Nor did Griffin anticipate the sacrifices his followers would make. Given his nature, it is most likely that had he known, he would not have changed course. At the core of his vision was deep-rooted anger and a determination to change his life and the lives of his flock permanently for the better.

Griffin had the advantage of knowing Farmville and Prince Edward County, which were located in the Southside region of Virginia (see Map 1). In the mid-

1900s, Southside was predominately an agricultural community producing dairy products, corn, tobacco, and timber. There were over 40,000 Blacks in the nine- county area surrounding Farmville, which was the largest town in a fifty-mile radius.

In all but three counties in Southside, over 37 percent of Blacks owned land and taxable personal property.36 Of the 14,121 county residents in Prince Edward County

35 Saint Francis de Sales, The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations, compiled by Martin H. Manser (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 297.

36 Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists & the Struggle for Justice in Price Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 23. Many of the Black land owners held their titles since before the Civil War and by the mid-nineteenth century, Prince Edward had the largest population of Free Blacks in Virginia. By 1950 fewer than 20 percent of the

reported in the 1960 census, 42 percent were Black. True to the Southern practices,

Blacks who did not own their own farms sharecropped, and their wives often worked as domestics or occasionally as school teachers in Black schools. Whites also sharecropped, and tenant farmers made up 40 percent of White agricultural laborers37 Even those Blacks who held property, while less vulnerable to White intimidation, were dependent on White merchants’ credit to navigate the financial challenges of seasonal cash flows.38 Blacks depended on this credit and still cowed at stories of night riders and KKK activities. They lived a parallel existence with

Whites, coming together to transact business but seldom in any other

Map 1: Map of Virginia with Regions. Courtesy: virginiaplaces.org

Black farmers in Prince Edward county were tenant farmers. Also see Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 52.

37 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 23.

38 White sharecroppers were also dependent on the credit and support of the Whites in the community. Similar pressure could be brought to bear on them to support the elite Whites’ agenda.

meaningful way. Griffin wanted to break down the barriers to create economic and social advancement opportunities for the Black community.

Griffin’s years outside the South and his wartime exposure to less restrictive cultures contrasted with his early life experiences in Southside Virginia. He returned, convinced that Southern Blacks should not passively accept the Jim Crow world in which they lived. As with so many Black veterans, his disappointment in his treatment when he returned from World War II never left him and helped drive his activism. He told his children that “he came home from the war in my uniform, and they still spit on me.”39 He believed Blacks should take deliberate but legal steps to obtain the rights for which they fought and were entitled.

As previously discussed, Griffin began his activism in Farmville by joining the NCCPT at Moton High School, the county high school for Blacks.40 He used this platform to pressure the all-White school board to provide bus transportation for rural children and keep its long overdue promise to build a new Black high school to deal with overcrowding and inadequate facilities. Griffin’s constant pressure on the school board to address the transportation and overcrowding issues continued for several years to no avail but did help establish him as a leader in the Black

39 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

40 The Black equivalent of the Whites’ PTA, was the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT) which was officially formed in 1926. The organization was frequently referred to as the Black PTA. Moton High school was named after Robert R. Moton, commandant of the male student cadet corps at Hampton Institute and later principal of Tuskegee Institute after the death of Booker T. Washington.

community. The tar-paper buildings remained in use until Barbara Johns, the niece of another Black activist preacher, Vernon Johns, led a strike against the school that preempted Griffin’s more traditional approach.

Griffin did not have advanced knowledge of Barbara Johns’ plan to stage a

Moton High School walk-out. However, when the teenagers asked Griffin for help after the strike, he allowed them to gather in his church’s basement for their meetings. When NAACP attorneys, Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, came to

Farmville at young Johns’ request to meet with the students, Griffin again made the church available. Although it took time, the teenagers’ initiative and Reverend

Griffin’s support eventually convinced the NAACP attorneys that the Farmville case was a possible candidate for pursuing its integration strategy.

Quickly, the responsibility for local leadership of the resistance effort devolved to Griffin. Having found an advocate, students returned to their classes, and, belatedly, the school board went about building a new but separate high school for Black children. For Griffin and the NAACP, their efforts came too late. In 1951, on behalf of Prince Edward County’s children, attorneys Spottswood Robinson and

Oliver Hill filed the Davis vs. County School Board (1952) case demanding equal educational opportunities and integrated schools.41 Dorothy Davis was the fourteen- year-old ninth-grader listed first on the filing; thus, the case took her name. Barbara

Johns was not one of the plaintiffs. Her parents sent her to Montgomery, Alabama,

41 The case became Davis v. Prince Edward County and was eventually combined into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

to live with her uncle, civil rights activist Vernon Johns, to complete her education after she received death threats for initiating the strike.42 Her role in the Prince

Edward saga ended with her departure.

Always opposed to segregation and convinced that separate-can-never-be- equal, Griffin became the stalwart in the Black community to continue the Farmville integration case. As such, he experienced all the economic and social pressure the

Farmville White supremacist could bring to bear, short of lynching. Even his relative financial security as a property owner did not protect him. Local merchants put the family on a “cash only” payment basis, and the bank repossessed his car. The heating oil company refused to allow him the usual line-of-credit, and the family suffered without heat through much of the winter. The traditional gambits of harassing phone calls, and threats of bodily harm, along with an abortive bombing attempt, did not dissuade Griffin from his mission.43 However, at one point, some of his congregants’ dissatisfaction almost succeeded in forcing him to give up the fight.44 Eventually, with the NAACP’s help, Griffin’s financial position began to improve, and he reaffirmed his commitment to the Farmville case. He told Carl

Rowan of the Minneapolis Times: “I wanted to show it wasn’t my intention to lead

42 Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Brown Foundation for Education Equity, Excellence and Research: University of Kansas Libraries), 104.

43 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 49.

44 The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, January 4, 1956 quoted in Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951-1964 (Farmville, VA: Robert Russa Moton Museum, 2003), 139.

folks into trouble and then leave them.”45 Little did Griffin realize that his leadership would require a commitment that lasted beyond the first Brown victory.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregation by race was unconstitutional. After the State of Virginia and Prince Edward County exhausted all legal remedies to prevent the decision’s implementation, the Federal District Court ordered the Virginia schools integrated in 1959. Rather than comply, the Prince

Edward County school officials closed the public schools. The State of Virginia helped support the closures by putting the legal apparatus in place to obtain state funding for private schools, and Prince Edward County Whites took full advantage of it.46 With tuition funded by state vouchers and property tax relief, a private school opened to accommodate the county’s White children. In this way, the Prince Edward

School board blocked 1,700 Black students’ access to public education. The schools did not reopen until 1964, and then only after Griffin filed a second suit. By the time that suit made its way to the Supreme Court, a generation of Prince Edward

County’s Black students either failed to obtain an adequate education or had to relocate in order to be able to graduate.

45Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 139

46 For more information about the Farmville struggle see Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools; Titus, Brown’s Battleground; Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), and Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years Without Public Education in Prince Edward County (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

The ramifications of the school closings were one of the most detrimental of all the NAACP’s desegregation lawsuits. The case was also an example of the

Supreme Court’s ineffectiveness if the public refuses to accept its rulings. If the public is determined to thwart the Court, the Court must depend on Congress and the

Justice Department to enforce its decision. If neither will fulfill its constitutional obligations, the rule of law is thwarted.

Although Prince Edward County’s tragedy was orchestrated and supported by the State of Virginia, the federal government also failed in its duty to Prince

Edward’s Black children. While the Kennedy administration bemoaned the drama taking place in Southside, Virginia, it did little of practical importance to restore the children’s education for over five years. There was one attempt in April 1961 when

Attorney General Robert Kennedy filed a motion to intervene in the Prince Edward case as a plaintiff, but the court denied the Justice Department’s request. Two years later, President Kennedy authorized the attorney general to develop a plan for an interim school. The Justice Department turned to William Vanden Heuvel to develop a plan that did not require congressional approval. Heuvel’s plan “relied on grants from large foundations and donations from sympathetic citizens” to fund the school for one year.47 In September 1963, the Prince Edward Free School Association opened its doors to much fanfare. The irony and sadness were that the Free School was unofficially a segregated school for Blacks.48 A year later, the Court ruled on

47 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 139.

48 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 133-138.

Griffin’s second lawsuit, and the public schools in Prince Edward County finally reopened.49

Rev. Griffin’s resistance to White supremacy achieved a victory of sorts in the final 1964 decision. Griffin, however, expressed disappointment in the government’s failure to implement the spirit of the decision. He told William

Vanden Heuvel in November 1964, “We suffered our children to be destroyed so that the law might speak. The law has spoken. We have yet to see it obeyed.”50 Nor would he. The Prince Edward County public schools reopened in 1964 technically as integrated schools, but even then, the Board of Supervisors continued to resist appropriating only $189,000 of the requested $339,000 deemed necessary to properly operate the public schools for the scholastic year 1964-1965. At the same time, it approved $375,000 to continue to support private schools in the county.51

Thus, although legally integrated by law, as late as 2020, the Prince Edward public schools remained almost exclusively Black, and the private White school still thrived with only one or two Black children attending. Reverend Griffin stayed in Farmville until his death. Interviews in the mid-1970s reflected a weary soldier reconciled to neither victory nor defeat. He told American Heritage journalist John Egerton,

“Unless something drastic...forces further change, I don’t see things being different

49 Griffin v. School District of Prince Edward County 377 U.S. 281 (1964).

50 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 161.

51 Ken Woodley, The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2019), Digital.

in another twenty or twenty-five years than they are now. It is still a battleground,

[sic] the lines of separation still exist.” He ended by saying, “It’s a cold war now, and I look for it to go on.”52

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”53

Illus. 2: Rev. Joseph De Laine Courtesy: National Park Service

Reverend Joseph De Laine, another activist clergyman, led a battle in

Clarendon County, South Carolina, similar to Griffin’s in Prince Edward County

(Illus. 2).54 De Laine’s fight, which began in 1934, fifteen years before Griffin’s,

52 John Egerton, “A Gentleman’s Fight,” American Heritage 30, no. 5 (August/September 1979): 14. www.americanheritrage.com/gentlemens-fight.

53 Toni Morrison quoted by Ellen Brown in “Writing is Third Career for Morrison,” The Cincinnati [Ohio] Enquirer, September 27, 1981, F11.

54 Note: I have used the more common spelling for De Laine’s last name using the spelling his daughter Ophelia Gona used. This spelling also occurs in some of Rev. De Laine’s personal papers.

involved even more violence than the threats and acts of intimidation Blacks experienced in Prince Edward County’s long stalemate. Before it concluded in May

1954, De Laine championed three separate lawsuits that took a strangely circuitous route to the Supreme Court.55 Thurgood Marshall had the first one dismissed and withdrew the second one. The third case made two trips to the Court before being heard. Due mainly to Rev. De Laine’s leadership, the Black citizens of Clarendon

County remained relatively stalwart during this long, painful, and nontraditional legal journey, despite the extreme pressure applied to them by Whites. Fortunately,

Rev. De Laine received a good deal of support from other American Methodist

Episcopal (AME) preachers who also suffered significant intimidation both physically and economically from the White community.56 That said, as in Griffin’s case, some Black ministers did not support De Laine’s vision.

Like Prince Edward County, Clarendon was a rural county in South Carolina with only two towns of any size. (See Map 2). Located in the southern part of the

Pee Dee region, seventy percent of the county’s 32,000 residents were Black making

55 The first was Levi Pearson v. Clarendon County and School District 26 – a transportation case that was dismissed. The second was Briggs v. Board of Trustees for School District Number 22, Clarendon County, an equalization case that was withdrawn; and the third and final was Briggs v. Elliott, which was presented to the Supreme Court, remanded to the District Court, and then returned to the Supreme Court on appeal. It finally became part of Brown v. Board of Education.

56 De Laine specifically mentioned support he received from Rev. J.W. Seals and Rev E.E. Richburg, and Edward Frazier. De Laine also made a list of church affiliation of the plaintiffs in the Briggs suit as coming predominately from De Laine’s Liberty Hill AME with others from Rev. Seals’ St. Mark AME, Taw Caw Baptist, Elizabeth Baptist, and Bethlehem Baptist.

less than $1000 a year, primarily as tenant farmers growing cotton. Reverend De

Laine grew up in Clarendon County, son of Henry De Laine, who, according to De

Laine’s daughter, Ophelia, was from a long line of free Blacks.57 De Laine’s family owned 250 acres of land, an uncommon grace in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s.

As previously mentioned, property ownership provided some level of protection from Jim Crow economic pressure. De Laine was also one of the less than 1 percent of Blacks who graduated from college.58 Reverend De Laine’s road to becoming a resistance leader was intentional. It began when he returned to Clarendon County with his wife Mattie and baby son in the early 1930s after completing a divinity degree. He was thirty-three years old.59

57 Ophelia De Laine Gona, Dawn of Desegregation: J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 13. In Democracy Rising, Peter Lau states that Henry De Laine was born enslaved but freed at Emancipation, 193.

58 Peter F. Lau, ed. “From the Periphery to the Center” in From the Grass Roots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 193.

59 Gona, Dawn,14.

Map 2: Map of South Carolina Courtesy: of Pinterest.com

Upon his return, Joseph De Laine assumed the Spring Hill AME rural circuit ministry, which included two small churches and no parsonage. He used his own money to build a home in Spring Hill, and he bought a farm nearby. Preaching did not pay well, so he also took a job as principal at the all-Black Bob Johnson

Elementary to support his family. In 1939, De Laine became principal of the Liberty

Hill Elementary school while Mattie De Laine continued to teach at Spring Hill

Elementary. Then, in 1940 De Laine transferred from the Spring Hill circuit to the larger and more geographically distributed Pine Grove/Society Hill Circuit. To reduce the travel time required to manage his circuit, De Laine moved the family to

Summerton, but he continued to teach at Liberty Hill. There he built a second home less than twenty feet outside the town limits, a decision that would have dire consequences in future years. The new house was across the street from the town’s

Black school – Scott’s Branch, one of twenty-six Black schools in the county of various sizes and conditions.60

In his pastoral duties as a circuit preacher, De Laine became well known throughout the county. Increasingly aware of the need for school buses for the Black children, De Laine began lobbying the local school board for bus transportation as early as the mid-1930s. Although over 70 percent of Clarendon County’s students were Black, the school board provided no transportation for them to and from school. At the same time, the remaining 30 percent of students who were White enjoyed the use of thirty buses. The need became even more critical when the completion of Lake Marion in 1941 and the subsequent flooding of the surrounding area cut off the shorter roads to town. At first, the children tried to walk on the partially submerged bridge and then tried rowing over in boats. Eventually, they were required to walk to the schools that were often far from their homes and inaccessible in bad weather. After several years of stonewalling by the school board, the Black parents bought a bus and paid the driver.61 The extra financial burden on these already cash-poor families was significant. 62

The same school board that refused to provide buses for school children refused to provide federally mandated GI benefits to Black veterans. De Laine took

60 Joseph A De Laine, Sr., “Essay, 1973, Joseph A De Laine Sr.,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A Delanie Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library, 2. http://crdl.usg.edu.

61 Gona, Dawn, 21. Gona reports that this happened either in 1943 or 1944.

62 Gona, Dawn, 22.

up their cause as well, and this time his campaign was successful. Due to his efforts, many returning Black veterans furthered their education or learned modern agricultural methods. In June 1947, possibly inspired by his success for the veterans and tired of the school board’s stonewalling, Rev. De Laine decided to escalate his battle with the school officials to obtain adequate bus transportation for Black children.

De Laine approached fellow landowners Hammett and Levi Pearson, whose children walked nine miles each day to school. He asked the Levi brothers if one would be the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the school board (Illus. 3). In exchange,

De Laine promised he would handle contacting the NAACP and would pay all the lawsuit’s expenses.63 Eventually, Dr. A.T. Butler, leader of the Palmetto Education

Association, the state organization representing Black teachers, also committed to helping underwrite the suit.64 After some consideration, Levi Pearson agreed to be the plaintiff, with his more volatile brother, Hammett Pearson, having his back. Levi

Pearson and De Laine hired attorney Harold Boulware, the NAACP attorney in

South Carolina, to represent them.

63 Joseph A. De Laine, “Essays, 1973, Joseph A. De Laine, Sr.,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A Delanie Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library, 2. http://crdl.usg.edu.

64 Sonny Dubose, The Road to Brown: The Leadership of a Soldier of the Cross. Reverend J. A. De Laine (Orangeburg SC: Williams Publishing 2002), 38.

Illus. 3 Photograph of Harry Briggs receiving an Award of Merit from The South Carolina NAACP Executive Committee, June 17, 1951 (Clarendon County, SC), (R-L) E.E. Richburg, Modjeska Simkins, J.W. Seals, Joseph A. De Laine, Sr., Harry Briggs, John McCray, J.S. (Flutie) Boyd, James Hinton, and Eugene Montgomery. Courtesy University of South Carolina; Rev. Joseph A. De Laine Papers.

The parents filed a petition with the school board on July 28, 1947.65 In

December 1947, receiving no response from the board, Boulware filed a complaint in federal court.66 The Pearson case never went to trial. On June 6, 1948, a day before the scheduled hearing began, Thurgood Marshall asked the judge to dismiss the case when the school board claimed that Pearson did not live in the school

65 DuBose, The Road, 38.

66 Levi Pearson v. Clarendon County and School District 26. Filed in 1947, the judge dismissed the case before it went to trial at the request of Thurgood Marshall. Also see “Letter from Levi Pearson to Whom it May Concern, December 16, 1947,” Joseph De Laine Papers, University of South Carolina, Digital Collection.

district that his children attended.67Although Pearson suspected chicanery, nonetheless, he no longer had standing in the court. According to De Laine’s daughter, her father was devastated: “My father claimed his hair turned White that day...To him, it seemed that all of his work had gone for naught.”68

Rev. De Laine refused to give up, however. The NAACP local branch he tried to form in 1942 floundered when De Laine became ill, but now he tried again.

This time he was successful, although for some years the group used the name Negro

Citizens Committee as a cover for work done on behalf of the NAACP.69 Levi

Pearson was the first president, and De Laine was the secretary.70 More than 65

World War II veterans joined as well.71 At an NAACP regional meeting in

Columbia, SC, in 1949, De Laine approached Marshall again about the Pearson bus case. It was then that Marshall explained the shift in the organization’s strategy. The

NAACP would no longer pursue equalization cases, which were “an isolated part of the unfair separate-but-equal system. What was needed,” Marshall explained to the

67 Some weeks earlier, a private detective determined that Levi Pearson’s home straddled two county lines and that he had been paying his taxes to another county. However, if this is why Marshall asked for the dismissal, it is not clear why he waited so long.

68 Gona, Dawn, 37.

69 DuBose, The Road, 82-83.

70 Joseph A. De Laine, “Essay, n.d. (Charleston, SC) Third Test Lawsuit,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A. De Laine Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library. http://crdl.usg.edu/. Eventually, the number of members exceeded 500 and De Laine wrote, “Pressure helps sometimes.”

71 DuBose, The Road, 83.

Clarendon group and others, “was an attack on the entire system.”72 However, when

De Laine agreed to expand the Pearson case’s focus, Marshall still refused, arguing that Pearson was only one person, already being subjected to White economic pressure. Marshall said he wanted a large number of plaintiffs, so if a family quit or became disqualified, it would not derail the entire case. He also argued that the small, financially strapped Black community could never raise the money necessary to fund the lawsuit. Nonetheless, De Laine persisted until Marshall agreed to file the suit under two conditions. First, his colleagues in New York must concur, and second, De Laine must get twenty families to join the lawsuit. Without that, he would not go forward nor risk the money.73

De Laine then called on the friendships and contacts he developed as a circuit preacher, especially with other Black ministers. He needed their help to battle the county’s Jim Crow practices and find the twenty plaintiffs Marshall demanded.

Working closely with his longtime supporter, Rev. James Seals (Illus. 4), the two set out to obtain signatures on a petition to submit to the school board as the basis for the lawsuit and the necessary first step.74 The first hurdle they encountered was finding a place to meet. Many local Black preachers were afraid of White backlash and refused to allow De Laine to hold meetings in their church. “The only thing they

72 Gona, Dawn, 45.

73 Gona, Dawn,45.

74 Reverend Seals was one of the original members of the short-lived NAACP De Laine tried to organize in 1942. He then became the secretary of the second, successfully organization in 1948.

advocated were unceasing prayer, blind obedience, and acceptance of the Black man’s lot of second-class citizenship and subservience as God’s will,” wrote De

Laine’s daughter, Ophelia.75 Fortunately, the ministers of the Mount Zion AME

Church and the Union Cypress AME Church were willing to risk White backlash and made their churches available. Ophelia De Laine (Gona) believed these men understood that “God makes change happen by working through the hands, heads, and hearts of humans,” and therefore, offered their churches for this and subsequent meetings.76

Illus. 4: Rev. James Seals Courtesy University of South Carolina; Rev. Joseph A. De Laine Papers

75 Gona, Dawn, 46.

76 Gona, Dawn, 46.

100

At the first meeting, De Laine obtained a list of signatures of parents supportive of moving forward. In April, Rev. Frazier, another clerical supporter of

De Laine, allowed him to hold a larger meeting at St. Mark AME Church in

Summerton. At the meeting, the NAACP representatives laid out the daunting task ahead of them if they agreed to move forward with the suit. Twenty families willing to publicly associate themselves with the lawsuit were needed. Obtaining those twenty plaintiffs was more difficult than De Laine anticipated.77

The second case De Laine tried to orchestrate, Briggs v. Clarendon County, might never have happened had there not been a dramatic school event in May 1949.

The parents and students believed that the Black principal, S. Isiah Benson, was an incompetent teacher and administrator. Some believed, furthermore, that he stole money from funds paid by the parents or raised by the students for school supplies and activities. The graduating class complained to the school officials, including the county’s superintendent of education, providing a list of specific complaints.78 When their petition went unanswered, the students called a meeting of the parents at St.

Mark’s AME Church. After explaining their complaints, Reverdy Wells, Class of

1949 president and spokesman for the group, turned to the parents and asked them what they would do to help. Astonished, the unprepared parents sat in silence, then slowly began to discuss possible responses. In the end, the gathering elected Rev. De

Laine its leader. He cajoled Rev. E.E. Richburg of the Liberty Hill AME church to

77 DuBose, The Road, 40-53.

78 Gona, Dawn, 53.

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be secretary, and before accepting the leadership role, De Laine demanded that the parents swear to stick with him until the bitter end.79

Illus. 4: Mass Rally at Liberty Hill. Courtesy Separate Is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Behring Center.

The journey was more rancorous and dangerous than anyone anticipated. It began with De Laine losing his teaching job two days after his June 9 meeting with trustee J.D. Carson to discuss the students’ accusations against Principal Benson.80

The board also terminated several teachers who supported the students or De Laine.

79 Gona, Dawn, 58.

80 “Complaints Against the Principal” file, Committee on Action to County Board of Education,” September 2, 1949, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC.

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After this, forty-five parents sent a petition to the superintendent on July 25, demanding that unless a teacher’s termination occurred before June 9, no additional firing take place.81 De Laine wrote that Carson’s response was, “‘More are going’ and they went.”82

Not only did the school board refuse to address the parents’ concerns, but

Whites also began applying economic pressure to the Black community, especially those who had signed the petition. Credit evaporated, and many lost their jobs. Acts of violence became common, including James McKnight’s killing, a killing that De

Laine told the FBI he believed was the result of the fight over the school case.83 De

Laine’s life was also threatened several times by the Klu Klux Klan. His daughter described a plot hatched in the home of one of the town’s elite to have De Laine attacked and killed as he went to the post office to gather his mail. Fortunately, the attack failed.84 A lawsuit for slander filed by Principal Benson did not fail. When De

81 Some accounts say 53 parents signed the petition. Each case required a petition. The first for the Pearson bus case, the second for the equalization case and the third for the integration case.

82 J.A. De Laine, “Clarendon County Schools Must Be Closed Next Term,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A. De Laine Papers, (nd) Civil Rights Digital Library, http://crdl.usg.edu.

83 J. A. De Laine, “Letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation from J. A. De Laine,” April 8, 1950. Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A. De Laine Papers, Digital Civil Rights Library. http://crdl.usg.edu. James McKnight was a supporter of the NAACP lawsuit and a member of one of Rev. De Laine’s churches. McKnight was attacked by two White men and beaten to death. The perpetrator of the murder was exonerated by an all-White jury.

84 Gona, Dawn, 127.

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Laine predictably lost the case, tried before twelve White Clarendon County jurors, the judgment called for him to pay Benson $5,000.85 Anticipating the outcome, and before the trial started, De Laine transferred the title of his property to others in the community, thwarting Benson’s attempt to collect the judgment. However, he could not move the insurance on the property to the new title holder’s name.

De Laine’s health was failing, and he was beginning to lose faith in the

NAACP. Historian Sonny Dubose felt he had due cause, arguing that De Laine and his followers traveled “these troubled, treacherous waters alone.”86 Then on

November 11, 1949, Attorney Boulware finally filed the case that began as Civil

Action 2505, Harry Briggs et al. v. The Board of Trustees for School District

Number 22, Clarendon County, South Carolina. No one knew that this case was the precursor to one that would help change American society.87 Still, there were many miles to travel before the case reached the Supreme Court.

In April 1950, De Laine’s bishop assigned him to a new congregation in

Lake City, South Carolina, about forty miles from Summerton. He told De Laine the reassignment was partly for his safety, a strange claim since Lake City was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. The bishop seemed unaware of the new danger. Several

85 Gona, Dawn, 154.The judgment was later reduced to $2700 on appeal.

86 DuBose, The Road, 50.

87 The Supreme Court originally heard the Briggs case in 1952 but returned it to the district court to determine if the progress claimed by Clarendon County school board was accurate. Marshall argued successfully that separate-was-not-equal and again appealed the case to the Supreme Court in May of 1952. The Court combined it with the other cases into the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.

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days before making his announcement, the Klan killed a Black man in front of the nightclub he owned in Lake City. De Laine felt he was “leaving torment and going to hell.”88 He understood the danger he faced in Lake City but dutifully accepted the transfer, although with much trepidation.

De Laine’s family moved to Lake City in August 1950. News of his departure did not stop the White supremacists’ pressure on his family and neighbors.

The Summerton school board fired De Laine’s wife from her teaching position at the end of the school year. Additionally, his sisters and niece lost their positions, as did the wife of an uncle who taught in another district.89 De Laine traveled between

Lake City and Summerton as he continued to support both communities. Ophelia

Gona recalled, “Daddy still went to Summerton several times a week. . . he had no intention of abandoning the people who had so faithfully followed him into battle.”90

However, the stress and travel further undermined De Laine’s health.91

In December 1950, after a pre-trial meeting with Judge Julius Waring,

Marshall again withdrew the Briggs case. To refile the case as a challenge to South

Carolina’s constitution, Marshall needed a new petition signed by Clarendon County parents. De Laine arranged for a December 18 meeting to gather the signatures, and

88 Gona, Dawn, 127.

89 Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Sara Crichton Books, 2019), 227.

90 Gona, Dawn,133.

91 Gona, Dawn,134.

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Marshall filed the third suit, Briggs v. Elliott, on May 16, 1950. As the case dragged on, De Laine’s daughter quoted her father as saying, “it looked like...Thurgood

Marshall [was] playing with us to see how much trouble they could get us into.”92

The third case made it to the Supreme Court in 1952, but the Court remanded it to the District Court for review. Finally, Briggs v. Elliott made it to the Supreme Court for the second time on appeal from the District Court and became part of the Brown v. Board of Education decision released in May 1954.

The legal maneuverings of the NAACP, including the strategic shift from equalization to directly confronting Plessy, are well documented by numerous historians, including Richard Kluger in Simple Justice.93 What is less well known is what was happening on the ground to Rev. De Laine and his family. Rev. De Laine still owed Benson $2700 for the judgment in the slander case. Because De Laine legally transferred title to his property in Summerton to others, Benson could not attach the property for payment of the debt. On October 10, 1952, the De Laine’s home in Summerton and two outbuildings were set afire. The fire department refused to put out the fire, claiming that the structures were outside the city limits.

While De Laine suspected arson, county officials did not investigate the fire’s cause.

92 Gona, Dawn, 131.

93 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vantage Books, 2004). Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. This was the Supreme Court decision that established the principle of “separate but equal.”

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Benson attached the insurance settlement in payment of the judgment, even though the sum was more significant than De Laine's outstanding amount.

Harassment of the De Laines and eventual terrorism continued even after the

1954 Brown decision or, perhaps, because of it. Many Whites in South Carolina were determined to resist integration. In August 1955, S.E. Rogers formed a White

Citizens Council in Clarendon County, helped by L.B. McCord, the county’s superintendent of education. In a meeting held in Lake City that same month, the group targeted Rev. De Laine as the “backbone of the desegregation movement.”94

That very night, they began terrorizing the De Laine family.95 Four nights later, another attack on the family’s home took place. Next, the terrorists pummeled the house with rocks during a daylight attack. Then for several days, cars full of men drove by De Laine’s home yelling and firing guns. Despite repeated reports to the police, they did nothing to stop the attacks or protect the family. On October 5, while

Rev. De Laine was out of town at a conference of AME churches, arsonists burned

St. James’s church in Lake City to the ground.96 The local sheriff tried to blame the arson on De Laine’s son and his friends.97

As previously described, the events of the week of October 10 forced De Laine to flee for his life and for his wife to seek temporary refuge with a neighbor. Finding

94 Gona, Dawn, 169.

95 Gona, Dawn, 169.

96 Gona, Dawn,175.

97 Gona, Dawn,176.

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his way to New York, De Laine fought South Carolina’s extradition order while living with friends and family, during which time the AME Annual Conference failed to provide De Laine with a congregation. Eventually, the New York court threw the extradition case out “as worthless.”98 Nonetheless, South Carolina did not withdraw its warrant until October 2000, twenty years after De Laine’s death.99 He was safe but never returned to South Carolina. He died in Charlotte, NC, in 1974. In

2003 President George Bush posthumously awarded Reverend De Laine the

Congressional Gold Medal.100

98 Reverend Joseph A De Laine and Miss Mattie Belton, “Essay, n.d., (Brooklyn, NY)” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Joseph A Delanie Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library, 2. http://crdl.usg.edu.

99 Gona, Dawn, 190.

100“Harry Briggs Jr.; a Catalyst for Brown v. Board of Education Dies at 75,” The New York Times, August 18, 2006.

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“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”101

Illus. 6: Rev. McKinley Burnett Courtesy: Kansas State Historical Society

While less violent than either the South Carolina or Virginia cases, the

Kansas case, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, was also championed by a Black clergyman, the Reverend McKinley Burnett (Illus. 6). Unlike the two other cases, the

Topeka case is an example of a Black leader confronting significant resistance from the Black community in addition to White segregationists’ intransigence. While the

Kansas case took a smoother and shorter route to resolution, it required the same type of sacrifices that sustained Black resistance in the South Carolina and Virginia cases. The Kansas case, however, in the end, took a strange turn.

A veteran of World War I, Burnett returned to Kansas after hostilities ended and was very vocal about the discrimination he experienced while serving. His

101 Theodore Roosevelt is often credited s this quote, however, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Center, in his Autobiography Roosevelt credited Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia with the saying. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org

109

activism also drew from his parent’s experiences as formerly enslaved persons.

Burnett was both a minister and a youth leader in the Lane Street Church of God and used his pulpit to rally his congregation to fight against discrimination. He worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and later for the Veterans Administration, which helped him, as a first-generation free person of color, to move quickly into the Black middle class. As a result, his wife Lena and their five children enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in a Black neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas.102

In addition to its being degrading, Burnett found segregation illogical, not to mention illegal under the Kansas Constitution. On a practical level, he found it unconscionable that the school board forced Black children to walk past Whites-only schools, across busy streets, and along dangerous railroad tracks to get to the Black school blocks away. Even before joining the NAACP, Burnett attended every

Topeka school board meeting for over two years.103 He badgered the board relentlessly to either provide buses for Black children or allow them to attend the closest neighborhood school. In a 1992 interview, Charles Baston, an NAACP board member, recalled the school board’s rudeness in forcing Burnett and his supporters to wait until as late as possible to voice their concerns. According to Baston, “It was rather disgusting, because a lot of times, a board member would go through their

102 Burnett’s children were Malcolm, Marquis [Marcus], Maxine, Maurita, and Marcella. United States Census, Topeka Kansas, 1940. The spelling of Marquis Burnett’s name varies in several articles. In the book he co-authored with his father, the spelling is Marquis.

103 “McKinley Langford Burnett (1897-1968),” www.Blackpast.org.

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agenda, and then...laugh or joke about something to try to extend the time.” Baston proudly added, “We never left!”104 Burnett’s appeal met with substantial resistance from the Topeka school board because it meant integrating the schools. Lena Burnett told an interviewer: “Hostility was the only response that Black pressure produced in the White community.”105 One report claimed that a board member even challenged

Burnett to a fight!106

Part of Burnett’s challenge was that he did not have the support of many

Black churches in the city or the Black teachers. Others in the Black community, who were important members of the Black churches, feared losing their jobs. As

Lucinda Todd explained when interviewed by the State Historical Society, “A lot of people had jobs – they worked for the city – and didn’t want to cause trouble.”107 As previously discussed, many Black ministers were uncomfortable with the rising tide of resistance to Jim Crow, fearing a White backlash. Marquis Burnett agreed, explaining that his father’s passion was an unpopular fight.108

104 John Hanna, “McKinley Burnett is Forgotten but Played a Key Role in Brown Case,” United States Congressional Record, Volume 150, Number 85 (Friday, June 18, 2004): E1177-E1178.

105 Kluger, Simple Justice, 396.

106 Hanna, “McKinley Burnett,”E1177-1178.

107 “Lucinda Todd – Oral Interview,” Brown v. Board of Education Oral History, Kansas State Historical Society.

108 Hanna, “McKinley Burnett,” E1177-E1178

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One member of the ministry who reluctantly supported Burnett’s initiative was Oliver Brown. He and his wife, Leola, lived in a segregated neighborhood in

Topeka with their three daughters: Cheryl, Linda, and Terry (Illus. 7). Brown’s

World War II experiences encouraged him to want more for himself and his family than Jim Crow Kansas offered. He wanted his children to receive an equal opportunity in life. Sam Jackson, a law student at the time and a friend of Brown, said that after returning from the war, Oliver Brown “was no longer willing to accept second-class-citizenship...[he] wanted to be a whole man.”109

Illus.7: Rev. Oliver Brown Courtesy National Park Service

109 Kluger, Simple Justice, 396.

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Brown, too, worked for the Santa Fe Railroad as a welder. Additionally, he served as an assistant sexton at the St. John AME church while he studied for the ministry. Brown’s church was conservative, and few congregants, including Brown, were members of the NAACP. How he was eventually convinced to join the lawsuit is not clear. Several have claimed credit for gaining his concurrence. Perhaps it was

Burnett who worked with him at the Santa Fe Railroad or Brown’s friend Charles

Scott, one of the local NAACP attorneys, who provided the most compelling arguments. Esther Brown, a White activist, has also received credit for influencing his decision. Regardless, when the time came to challenge the school board in court,

Oliver Brown agreed to be a plaintiff on behalf of his daughter, Cheryl. He became the only male plaintiff.

Meanwhile, tired of fighting alone, Burnett joined the NAACP and, in 1948, became the president of the local branch. He strongly supported the organization’s goal of integrating the public schools, and in his position as branch president, helped push the organization’s agenda against school segregation, which he saw as an inroad to integrating other public spaces. His focus moved from a request for bus transportation to a demand for children to attend the neighborhood school. He understood that, if allowed, it meant integration of at least some of Topeka’s schools.

Burnett’s demands fell on deaf ears. Growing desperate, Burnett reached out to the national organization, first through the local organization’s secretary, Lucinda Todd, and then with a direct request from branch attorney, Charles Bledsoe.110

110 On September 5, 1950, attorney Charles E. Bledsoe sent a third letter to the “legal department” that eventually reached Charles Carter. It was most likely

113

Burnett’s appeal to the national office was opportune. The New York team initially hoped to file a Wichita case but were thwarted by the Black teachers.

Topeka offered the next best hope. In keeping with its new policy, the national office insisted that its involvement was contingent upon expanding the case to a direct attack on segregation in the Topeka schools. Burnett agreed, and Marshall assigned

Robert Carter of the national NAACP legal team to the case. Carter suggested to local attorney Charles Bledsoe that since all direct appeals to the school board failed,

Bledsoe should have a group of Black parents attempt to register their children in the

White school closest to their homes.111 Bledsoe identified thirteen potential plaintiffs, including Oliver Brown. On the day scheduled for registration, the future plaintiffs took their children to the school closest to their home to register. As they well knew they would, the schools denied their requests to enroll their children. The denials provided the lawyers with a basis for filing a lawsuit against the school board. The national team now stepped in and, on February 28, 1951, filed Brown v.

Topeka Board of Education in the United States District Court for Kansas. Brown became the namesake for the landmark decision.

As the Topeka case’s activity gained momentum, Rev. Oliver Brown remained on the outskirts of the case. Although Brown allowed the use of his and his daughter’s name in the lawsuit, he was not an outspoken advocate for integration. As

Bledsoe’s letter that tipped the scale in favor of national support for the Topeka case. “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 7. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

111 Robert L. Carter to Charles Bledsoe, September 18, 1950, “Kansas Memory,” Kansas Historical Society.

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a result, unlike other plaintiffs in other cases, Brown was not a lightning rod for the

White community’s anger. Because the case bears his name, he and his family received a good deal of attention from journalists and historians over the years, but in fact, his contribution was relatively nominal. In 1953, he moved his family to another segregated neighborhood in Topeka to become the pastor of St. Mark’s

AME Church. In 1959, Rev. Brown relocated to Springfield, Missouri, to assume the

Benton Ave. AME Church’s pulpit. When he died in 1961, his wife, Leola Brown, moved the family back to Topeka. Although he died six years after the Supreme

Court decision in the case, his daughter Cheryl, the plaintiff in the original case, lamented in 1999 that “he didn’t live long enough to see that his name was synonymous with school desegregation and civil rights.”112

When the NAACP filed the Topeka case in Federal Court in 1951, Burnett was bedridden with leukemia he battled most of his life. Still, he continued in his position as Topeka’s NAACP president until 1963, fighting for integration in other

Topeka public spaces such as movie theatres, restaurants, and court houses. Burnett and his wife Lena continued their work with their church and served as foster parents for numerous children. Burnett even found time to write a book with his young son

Marquis’s assistance: The Myth of Abraham Lincoln as Emancipator of the Negro

Slaves – An Historical Expose.113 He died in 1968. In 2001 the Topeka Board of

112 Council Grove Republican, December 24, 1999.

113 McKinley Burnett and Marquis Burnett, The Myth of Abraham Lincoln as Emancipator of the Negro Slaves – An Historical Expose, (Published Independently, ISBN 9781075059926).

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Education named the Topeka Public Schools’ Administrative Center after Burnett. In

2004, then-congressman Dennis Moore read a tribute to Burnett into the

Congressional Record commemorating his 100th birthday.114

Stories like Griffin’s, De Laine’s, and Burnett’s are examples of social activism and leadership that rose from the Black churches. The reverends shared other common attributes. Two were veterans of World War and channeled the skills and experience they acquired in their country’s service into activism to benefit their community. Equally important, they had more than just a high school education, critical to helping their followers, many of whom had not made it past the eighth grade. All three men were confident in the righteousness of their endeavors. They were stout-hearted men with the type of charisma and leadership talent that attracted others to them. Each of the three reverends demonstrated commitment and courage, setting an example for others and making them want to follow their lead. All three possessed the personal determination, patience, and willingness to bear the sacrifice required for sustained resistance efforts. Their combined experiences are poignant examples of the dangers and heartache Black Americans endured while trying to obtain rudimentary public education freely available to Whites.

It might be unfair to call these men heroes because they were not perfect humans. If, however, a hero is defined as a person who takes on personal risks and sacrifices to help others, then the Black preachers of the Brown cases deserve the accolade. They provided the shoulders on which Black activist preachers of today

114 Hanna, “McKinley Burnett” E1177-E1178.

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stand. Modern Black activist ministers like Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Rev. William J. Barber II still lead and influence Black Americans from their activist pulpits. Others like Rev. Raphael Warnock and Rev. Emanuel Cleaver gained political office and used the platform to provide moral leadership and advocate for issues important to people of color. Participation in the Black church is declining, but the Black clergy still has significant influence as moral leaders in the

Black community. Their influence frequently manifests itself in political power that impacts local, state, and national elections.

“To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.”115

Illus. 8: Gardner L. Bishop Courtesy: National Museum of American History

115 Randall Auzier, credits David Caleb Cook, (1875-1927) with the quote, although it is often attributed erroneously to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Randall Auzier, The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, (Carbondale, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2015), xxii.

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Not all leaders in the Brown cases came from the Black church. In particular,

Gardner Bishop, instigator of the Bolling case, was a barber and part of the working- middle class of Black entrepreneurs residing in Washington D.C. It would be hard to imagine an individual more different from Griffin, De Laine, or Burnett than Bishop

(Illus. 8). It would also be hard to imagine a community farther removed from

Farmville, Topeka, and Summerton than the Shaw district of the nation’s capital in the 1940s. Situated in the heart of Washington D.C. and surrounded by mainly White neighborhoods, the forty square blocks of the Shaw district contained the largest concentration of Black professionals in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

(See Map 3).With over “300 Black-owned businesses. . . including movie theatres, a large hotel, three Black-owned banks. . . Black newspapers and pharmacies, a number of successful undertaking businesses, cabarets, [and] billiard halls

118

Map 3: Percentage of Black Residents by Census Tract – 1930 Source: Greater-Greater Washington. ggwash.org

according to one journalist.116

Washington’s Black entrepreneurs’ rise to financial success began as early as the mid-1800s as competition for government jobs as messengers and servants increased. Finding themselves displaced, many chose to move into professions with less direct appeal to Whites. They began establishing themselves as self-employed

116 Tucker Carlson, “Washington’s Lost Black Aristocracy,” City Journal (Autumn, 1996), np.

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barbers, blacksmiths, and shoemakers.117 By the 1890s Black Washingtonians owned assets estimated at $17 million, including an oil and gas development company, two insurance companies, a bank, and eleven employment agencies.118 The Depression took its toll on Black and White Washington; nonetheless, Shaw was a vibrant neighborhood and recovered as the Roosevelt administration and World War II opened more opportunities for Black Washingtonians. As a thriving Black business district, Shaw belied one of E. Franklin Frazier’s claims that Blacks never succeeded on a large scale in business. At the same time, Shaw’s success supported other aspects of Frazier’s evaluation because it thrived, at least in part, because its segregation gave Black merchants a monopoly on Black trade.119

Blacks’ business success created a Black middle-class. It also created a hierarchical social structure divided along economic lines. According to one article, some of the Black elite “owned summer homes in Virginia, employed servants, and held debutante balls for their daughters. Others sent their children to predominantly

White boarding schools and colleges in New England.”120 Among these wealthy

Black families were those considered “the most cultured, most advanced and

117 Carlson, “Washington’s Lost,” np.

118 Carlson, “Washington’s Lost, np.

119 E. Franklin Frazier argued that where Black businesses thrived it was because segregation gave Black businessmen a monopoly on Black trade but beyond these isolated instances, the idea of Black business success was a myth. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press,1965), 153.

120 Carlson, “Washington’s Lost, np.

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intelligent...members of the colored race,” proven by the inclusion of six Black families in the 1888 Social Register.121

This was the social and economic environment that attracted Gardner Bishop and his parents to Washington, D.C., from Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, in

1930. Young Bishop was about twenty-one. At first, Bishop worked as a barber with his father in a shop whose clientele, evidently, was majority if not exclusively White.

Known as color-line barbershops, according to historian Quincy Mills, the color-line barbers made more money if they capitulated to Jim Crow strictures. For example,

White men who frequented color-line barbershops would not accept a haircut or shave with utensils previously used on a Black man, and they expected Black barbers to keep their opinions to themselves unless, of course, they agreed with their customer.122 Since Bishop lost his job after offending a White customer with his unfettered opinions, one can assume he worked in a color-line establishment.

Undeterred, in 1940, Bishop opened his own barbershop at 1211 U Street, the primary artery through Shaw’s business district. According to Mills, “Barbershops have historically been one of the most accessible paths to business ownership and economic independence for Black Americans,” and by the 1930s, more Black barbers began servicing only Black customers.123 This new generation of barbers

121 Carlson, “Washington’s Lost, np.

122 Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2013) 61.

123 Mills, Cutting, 5.

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focused on marketing their services by creating separate Black business spaces and marketing to Black customers. Conversely, White barbers did not generally serve

Black customers. Therefore, Black barbers had the Black market to themselves. It was a lucrative trade for one willing to work hard.124

A Black barbershop provided more than a haircut and a shave for its Black customers. According to Mills, it provided a free public place to gather “without the usual surveillance that accompanied other public spaces like parks, groceries, and street corners.” A 1927 study by William James described Black barbershops as

“commercial institutions that satisfy ‘the cravings for leisure-time activity.’”125 The study concluded that “as a social and recreational institution, it [the barbershop] plays a greater role in the Negro community than it does as a pure commercial agency.”126 Black men discussed everything from the racing form to politics in the barbershop, and the barbershop owner was “key facilitators of the social interactions in the shop.” As such, he could set the tone and control the subject discussed.127

The Black barbershops provided a safe space in which to engage in political discussions and participate in the American political process. Here Black customers met and debated everything from the latest public issues, labor disputes, candidates

124 Mills, Cutting, 149.

125 William Jones, “Recreation and Amusement Among Negroes in Washington, D.C.: A Sociological Analysis of the Negro in a Urban Environment” (1927: reprint Westport, CT: Negro University Press,1970), 88-91 quoted in Mills, 165.

126 Jones, “Recreation,” 88-91.

127 Jones, “Recreation,” 88-91

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for office and pending legislation. In his own shop, Bishop’s unguarded opinions and outspoken resentment of segregation attracted a particular type of clientele. He soon became known as “The Barber of U Street,” where like-minded Black men went for a haircut, shave, and a dose of gruff political debate and where Bishop developed his rhetorical skills.

Although Bishop located his business in the Black community where he lived, he still chafed at the constraints on Blacks in the segregated nation’s capital.

Still, he did not consider himself an activist. That is, until 1947, when the

Washington school district assigned Bishop’s daughter, Judine, to the district’s overcrowded and under-funded Browne Junior High. Browne had a capacity of 783 students but an enrollment of 1,638.128 When Bishop tried to enroll Judine in the nearby Eliot Junior High that had space, the school officials denied her entrance because Eliot was a Whites-only school. As a final alternative, Bishop tried to enroll her in the Black Banneker School, already 300 students over its designed capacity, but the Black school officials rejected his daughter’s application.129 Although a public school, the Black school board explained that in addition to the overcrowding,

128 Daniel Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber and the End of Public School Segregation,” Washington Spark, August 20, 2015, n.p.; Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2017), reported that the actual enrollment was 1,727, p. 305.

129 George D. Strayer, “The Report of a Survey of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949), 343.

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Banneker was for the Black elite, not for barbers’ children.130 This rejection inflamed Bishop in a way that a similar rejection by Whites might not have done. In later years, Bishop told an interviewer: “Segregation was not only White against

Black, but it was also upper-class Blacks against the lower class. We were on the bottom shelf. I’m Black and I’m poor, so I’m segregated twice.”131 Bishop called this “the double Jim Crow.”132

Meanwhile, because of the overcrowding at the Browne school to which

Judine Bishop was assigned, Garnet Wilkinson, the Black assistant superintendent in charge of Black schools, established a temporary half-day schedule until he could reactivate two closed elementary schools previously used for White students. The solution was unacceptable to Bishop and many of the other parents for several reasons. First, the board stripped the schools of most of their equipment when they closed them, and the desks, chairs and equipment that remained was elementary school size, much too small for junior high school students. Most importantly, not only would the Black students’ initial classroom time be cut in half, but they would also be required to travel between different buildings, walking in all kinds of

130 Washington D.C. schools had a school board comprised of six White members and three Black members who were responsible for all schools in the district. In addition, there was a Black school board that that handled the administration of the Black schools and reported to the White board. Bishop needed the Black school boards permission to enroll his daughter in a school to which she was not assigned.

131 Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber,” n.p.

132 Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber,” n.p.

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weather. Still worse, the shuttle system could only accommodate 1,100 students.

Classes for the other 600 would continue to be half-day.

Perceiving the formal Parent Teacher Association (PTA) at Browne as Black elitists who looked down their noses at working-class parents, Bishop called a meeting of parents who “worked two jobs and went to church on Sundays” at the

Jones Memorial Church.133 In 1947, Bishop and this group of parents formed The

Browne Parent Group for Equality of Educational Opportunities. The organization operated in parallel with the formal PTA. Bishop was the vocal spokesman for the group consisting of over 160 parents, half of whom were women. He relied heavily on his co-chairs, both of whom had political activism experience: Nellie Greene and

Joy P. Davis. The Browne Parent Group planned to protest the school board’s half- day arrangement by boycotting the school. The day before the new schedule went into effect, Bishop shepherded forty Browne students into the Board of Education

Meeting, where he announced their intention. On December 3, 1947, all the children stayed out of school. Instead, they picketed the school building and the Board of

Education’s Franklin Street offices.

As in the other Brown cases, Black support for Bishop’s action was not universal. After a few weeks, there was considerable community pressure to end the strike. Eventually, Bishop pulled back on the demonstration, only continuing the boycott of the two satellite schools. As with other school boycotts, the need for supplemental education to support the students during the protest became pressing.

133 Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber,”n.p

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Bishop sought support from the Jones Memorial Methodist Church to provide space for the temporary school. As the strike dragged on, the parents pushed Bishop to file a lawsuit. Like other parents in his organization, Bishop did not trust the Black elite establishment or its methods, including the NAACP. As the strike continued without resolution into late December 1947, however, the parents voted to have Bishop contact Charles Houston, the former head of the NAACP legal department who lived in D.C., and, despite his reluctance, Bishop agreed.

Given his distrust of Black elites, it was hard for Bishop to approach Houston and ask for help. Bishop saw Houston as one of the Black bourgeoisies, who looked down on working-class Blacks with no interest in helping the “little people.”134

However, the strike Bishop initiated against his daughter’s school was fading, and

Bishop was willing to try anything before seeing it fail. By this time, Houston was in private practice and was running for office in the District. In December 1947, Bishop approached Houston at one of his political rallies, and Houston agreed to meet with

Bishop and the parents’ group at his home. At the end of the meeting, according to

Bishop, Houston said, “You’ve got yourselves a lawyer.”135 Thus began the strange alliance between Houston, a Harvard Law graduate, and Gardner Bishop, the outspoken “Barber of U Street” that eventually led to the integration of the public schools in the District of Columbia. The students involved in Bishop’s strike

134 Daniel Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber and the End of Public School Segregation.” Washington Spark, August 20, 2015, np.

135 Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber,” np.

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returned to their classrooms on February 3, 1948. Simultaneously, the Board of

Education began using all five available buildings eliminating the need for students to shuttle between buildings. All students also were able to attend classes for a full day.136 The schools, however, were still overcrowded and underfunded.

Even before the boycott and picketing organized by Bishop began, other parents outside of Bishop’s committee and the Browne PTA mounted parallel attacks. First, in October 1947, James Carr filed a suit on behalf of his daughter,

Marguerite, challenging the half-day school schedule and the legality of segregation in public schools. Browne Junior High School PTA also did not accept superintendent Wilkinson’s solution. The PTA filed a separate suit in the same

District Court, protesting the shuttle arrangement and challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in the District. Both cases claimed that

Browne’s overcrowding forced Black students to attend school for only half-day thereby violating the school board’s requirement that students receive instruction for six hours per day. The plaintiffs asked that the students attend Eliot Junior High

School, an all-White school in the same neighborhood, to alleviate the overcrowding and the half-day schedule.

On December 22, 1947, the District Court sided with the school board, which claimed that the overcrowding was temporary. When Carr and the PTA appealed the decisions, the Appellate Court combined the two cases into Carr v. Corning. Two years later, on February 14, 1950, the Appellate Court upheld the District Court’s

136 Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber,” np.

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ruling.137 The Court declared segregated schools in the District to be constitutional.

138 Additionally, the school board argued that when the new John Philip Sousa

School for Whites opened in 1950, overcrowding was relieved, making the complaint moot. The old school building previously used for the White children was converted for the Black students to relieve the Black junior high schools’ overcrowding.

Long before the appellate court rendered its Carr decision and anticipating its outcome, Houston, Bishop, and the Consolidated Parent Group were on the attack. Houston filed several suits in District Court, including Bishop v. Doyle,

Gregg v. Sharpe et al., and Haley v. Sharpe et al.139 The cases went beyond just school equalization. They also waged a fight against segregated recreational areas, another of Bishop’s personal battles. In addition, they fought for a reduction in teachers’ workloads and the inclusion of Black children in kindergarten. Historian

Genna McNeil suggests that in selecting a strategy for the desegregation case he was preparing with Bishop, Houston chose an equalization approach versus the NAACP strategy of a direct attack on segregation because he wanted a “favorable ruling as quickly as possible for the parents.”140 In addition, Houston knew he was sick, and it

137 Carr v. Corning, 86 U.S. Court of Appeals, 173 (Washington, D.C., 1950).

138 Minnie Finch, The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1951),165.

139 Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 189.

140 McNeil, Groundwork, 188-190.

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is most likely that he wanted to ensure that Bishop and his followers experienced some relief before he had to withdraw from the field permanently.

According to Bishop, Houston was relentless. He told an interviewer that

Houston “never let up…never backed down…never ceased working,” all qualities that a scrappy fighter like Bishop appreciated.141 Initially, Houston worked alone but eventually hired Harry Merican to help.142 According to Bishop, not only did

Houston obtain assistance from Merican and attorneys at his firm, but he also sought help from Howard University professors. Little did Bishop understand this was modus operandi for Houston and his lawyer friends at the NAACP and Howard Law

School. In addition, Houston paid the filing fees for the cases out of his own funds and refused to accept the parents’ money when offered to cover expenses. Houston’s generosity surprised and impressed Bishop, especially given his low opinion of the educated Black elite.

Meanwhile, in February 1949, the D.C. school board finally released a long- awaited Report of a Survey of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia, which confirmed the inequities that Bishop and Houston had been pointing out publicly.

Unfortunately, it offered no immediate solution to the problems identified. Nothing of significance changed in the three years since President Harry S Truman’s Civil

141 McNeil, Groundwork, 190.

142 McNeil, Groundwork., 189-190.

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Rights report spotlighted the rampant discrimination in the nation’s capital and the poor quality of its Black schools.143

Shortly before his death, knowing that he was terminally ill, Houston and

Bishop met at Houston’s home. Houston advised Bishop to contact attorney George

E.C. Hayes and James Nabrit and tell them to take over the case. Houston instructed

Bishop to “tell Hayes and Jim Nabrit [that] they owe me and take your case.”144

Nabrit told Bishop he would only take the case if they changed the approach from an equalization case to a direct attack on segregation. Nabrit wanted to challenge the constitutionality of segregation in the District head-on. Bishop agreed, but only if

Nabrit agreed not to involve the NAACP. As discussed in Chapter 6, Nabrit and

Hayes leaned on the expertise of the Howard Law School to research and structure the Bolling case. Although the attorneys most certainly coordinated with Marshall, the NAACP attorneys were not involved in Bolling.

When the new John Philip Sousa Junior High School for White children opened in September 1950, Bishop, under Nabrit’s guidance, arranged for the parents of eleven Black children to try to register at Sousa Junior High. The school board denied them admittance because of their race. Spottswood Bolling, Jr., whose mother worked for the federal government, was one of the students. The school board assigned Bolling to Shaw Junior High, which was over-crowded and under-

143 “To Secure These Rights,” President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, Harry S Truman Presidential Library, National Archives.

144 McNeil, Groundwork, 210.

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resourced. Eventually, Bolling became the lead plaintiff in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), initially filed in Federal District Court in 1951.145 When the Supreme Court released its final decision in May 1954 that included Bolling, seven years after he began his fight, Bishop took pride in his case being the only desegregation case won without

NAACP assistance, at least in his view. Somehow, Bishop honestly remained unaware of the close linkage between Nabrit, Hayes, Houston, and the NAACP or chose to ignore it. He had accomplished his objective, and the rest was just a postscript.

Summary

Griffin, De Laine, Burnett, Brown, and Bishop varied in age, experience, and religious conviction. They shared, however, a common anger and resentment for the treatment they and their families received from White supremacists. Griffin, Brown, and Burnett had military experience, which helped develop their leadership skills and exposed them to a life without Jim Crow suppression. The chance to see life in a world not dominated by Jim Crow, an experience they shared with De Laine, who spent significant time in the North and West, stoked their determination to acquire for themselves and their families the civil rights long denied them. As products of the Black church, De Laine, Griffin, Burnett, and Brown honed their skills as leaders and persuaders. Each man developed the much-needed talents of persuasion and

145 Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954).

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encouragement through their time at the pulpit or, in the case of Gardner Bishop, behind the barber’s chair.

The leadership qualities the Brown cases’ activists acquired were essential in convincing their constituents that it was possible to confront White supremacy and win. The clear understanding each had that segregation was demeaning and contrary to America’s stated principles provided the motivation to confront their home states' deeply embedded cultural norms. A personal conviction about what was morally right helped them articulate their vision and convince others to fight with them.

Equally essential was a willingness to share the same risks and abuse as their followers, a choice critical in helping the community stay the course in the face of

White’s intimidation and retribution.

When looking at these Black leaders as a group, it is clear they were products of the rising Black anger prevalent after World War II. As men of action, they were unwilling to wait for an organized political group like the NAACP or the Baptist or

AME churches’ governing bodies to take the lead against social injustice. Nor did they look to mentors from those organizations. The origin of the resistance that became Brown v Board of Education came from these men’s hearts and souls. Their passion ignited others, who inspired still others, who inspired even more - like an explosion blowing outward. Those simultaneous explosions across the five Brown states propelled the lawsuits upward to the Supreme Court.

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“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”1

CHAPTER 4: WIVES AND MOTHERS, ACTIVISTS AND TEACHERS

On August 28, 1963, 250,000 Black men and women from all over the United

States journeyed to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. walked down Constitution Avenue behind A.

Phillip Randolph and other civil rights leaders on their way to the event site at the

Lincoln Memorial. Their wives and other female leaders walked separately and unnoticed down Independence Avenue to meet up with them. Even the five women scheduled to be honored at the event did not walk with the men. At the event itself, the only women to speak were Josephine Baker, who flew in from France for the event and spoke for twenty minutes, and Daisy Bates.2 Activist and publisher Daisy Bates read words written for her by John Morsell that included a pledge of Black women’s support for the men of the movement – Randolph, King, Roy Wilkins “and all of you fighting for civil liberties.”3

Later, the meeting with President Kennedy and ten top civil rights leaders did not include any women. The failure to include more women in the event’s pivotal moments did not occur from lack of trying on the part of women. None other than Dorothy Height,

1 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

2 Jessica Goldstein, “March on Washington had One Female Speaker: Josephine Baker,” Washington Post, August 23, 2011.

3 Jeanne Theoharis, “How Women’s Voices were Excluded from the March,” MSNBC, September 4, 2013, 2.

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president of the National Council of Negro Women, and activist lawyer Pauli Murray campaigned for more equitable inclusion of women, but to no avail, Height told MSNBC journalist Jeanne Theoharis years later. Pauli Murray went further and complained to

Randolph: “I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions…”4

Height and Murray simply shone a spotlight on a historical fact. Black women were essential to Black male leaders’ success in the long resistance movement but received little recognition. In addition, they seldom served in any official role setting strategy or making policy decisions. Even as Black women fought for equality in a country dominated by White men, they fought a parallel battle for equality in the Black community. As Murray wrote Randolph, “‘tokenism’ is as offensive when applied to women as when applied to Negroes.”5 As the feminist movement grew and Black women

4 Quoted in Jeanne Theoharis, “How Women’s Voices were Excluded from the March,” MSNBC, September 4, 2013, 2.

5 Theoharis, “How Women’s Voices,” 2. For more first person accounts by women in the Civil Rights movement see Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003); Daisy Bates and Clayborne Carson, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (New York: David McKay Co.,1962); Septima Clark and LeGette Blyth, Echo in my Soul (New York: Dutton, 1962); Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Bantam Books,1968); Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate (New York: Pocket Books, 1994); Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Pauli Murray, Song of a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

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identified with its goals, feminism intersected with the fight for civil rights. There were apparent synergies, but tensions also began to appear that would erupt to the surface in the late 1960s and 1970s.6

The importance of women in the grass-roots battles, especially in the pre-King era, has been underestimated if not overlooked by historians studying the Brown cases.

While there is some scholarship about the women activists of the post-War period, such as Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie, Septima Clark’s Echo in My Soul, or Daisy Bates’

The Long Shadow of Little Rock, the focus is not specific to the local women involved in the Brown case.7 An abundance of scholarly attention celebrates women on the ground in the King era. Many of those histories are autobiographies written by women like Pauli

Murray, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Anne Moody, Dorothy Height, and Allison Berg, or the biographies written about such individuals as Claudette Colvin, Fannie Lou Hammer, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo.8

6 For more on Black feminism see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004); bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981).

7 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); Septima Poinsette Clark and LeGette Blyth, Echo in My Soul (New York: Dutton, 1962); Daisy Bates and Clayborne Carson, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (New York: David McKay Co., 1962).

8 Pauli Murray, Song of a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row,1987); Jo Ann Robinson, The Montgomery Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Bantam Books, 1968); Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003); Allison Berg, “‘Trauma and Testimony in Black Women’s Civil Rights Memoirs,’ The Montgomery Bus Boycott and

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One exception is a group of articles published after the 1988 conference, Women in the Civil Rights Movement, Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, touch on the little-known laborers in the pre-Brown period. According to the editors of the collection, the conference “was unique in bringing together for the first time, activists as well as scholars of the [pre-King] movement.”9 The oral histories compiled by the University of

North Carolina in its Southern History Collection offer an opportunity to enhance that scholarship. There are over 5,000 histories of civil rights activists in the collection, many of which are those of women. The UNC collection and others across the country, including the Kansas Historical Society, represent a treasure trove of information for scholars’ use expanding the history of the civil rights struggle and more fully include women’s contributions.

Fortunately, a great deal of focus on Black women activists in the period after

Brown exists and is growing but at the same time feels like history without a firm foundation. The majority of it starts in 1955 or later without a backstory. Historians Davis

W. Houck and David E. Dixon acknowledge women’s absence.10 Historian Bernice

the Women Who Started It, Warriors Don’t Cry and From the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 3 (Fall 2009):84-107; Philip Hoose, Twice Toward Justice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); Megan Parker Brooks, A Voice that Could Raise an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

9 Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1990), xix.

10 Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, ed., Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), xxi, fn12.

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McNair Barnet attributes women’s lack of visibility in the pre-King resistance story to sexism, racism, and classism.11 While true, it is also true that traditionally, a historical analysis of events generally starts with the most visible contributors to the “Ah-Ha” moments, which historically until recently have been mainly men.

It is important to understand that the Black preachers and male leaders were not the only forces pushing up from below to effect change, however. Many Black women supporting the lengthy effort were also associated with the local Black churches, where women constituted the majority of the membership. In fact, the women’s conventions of the Black churches represented “the largest organized groups of Black women in the

United States.”12 Evidence shows that the Black churches owed much of their survival to female member’s active support. Black women were primarily responsible for the success of their congregation’s political and economic programs. These Black women were as essential to each case’s success as they were to the broader activist movement. At the same time, as this discussion will show, not all women in the pre-King civil rights struggle were from the Black church, and not all were Black. While the fight for equal education arose from the Black church’s ideology, it was not a religious struggle but a political one supported by religious, moral principles.

11 Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race and Class,” Gender & Society 7, no.2 (June 1993): 162-182.

12 C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 275.

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Nonetheless, men at the local level dominated the official leadership roles as preachers and deacons. When church leaders assumed the activist role in the Brown story, they looked to their wives and the wives and mothers in their congregation for critically needed support. Other Black women and women-centric organizations, not necessarily part of a local Black congregation, also made significant contributions to the effort providing leadership, raising money, garnering community support, and working together, often across racial and religious lines. Women’s organizing abilities were an example of unacknowledged leadership skills essential to the Brown cases’ success.

“Make a friend that doesn’t look like you, and you might change the world.” 13

As acknowledged by historian Darlene Clark Hine, Black women “led much of the interracial movement to improve race relations,” another example of their role in the continuum of the three-hundred-year civil rights struggle.14 An example of this was the alliance two activist women formed during the Topeka case: Esther Brown, a White

Jewish woman, and Lucinda Todd, a retired protestant Black teacher. These two women worked together to unite the Black and Jewish communities of Topeka and Kansas City to overthrow the segregated Jim Crow schools in the Kansas. By combining their networks of activists and their organizational expertise, Brown and Todd helped lay the

13 Motto on T-Shirt designed and marketed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbbar, 2021.

14 Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Women in the Civil Rights, xix. In 1988, a conference sponsored by Georgia State University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, focused on Black women as activists and scholars who heretofore were largely unheralded. The papers of the conference demonstrated the variety of roles and experiences women in the “long civil rights movement” shared.

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case’s foundation. Additionally, they assisted with gathering expert witnesses, raised money, and led grassroots campaigns to convert reluctant Blacks to the cause. Each woman brought much-needed and unique qualities to the partnership. Separately each was formidable. Together they were a powerhouse.

Esther Brown brought her experience initiating and winning education cases in

Kansas to the partnership (Illus. 9). A few years earlier, Brown and Topeka attorney

Elisha Scott led the struggle to integrate the elementary school in South Park, Kansas, in

Webb v. School District 90 (1948).15 Under her guidance, South Park’s parents staged a successful one-year boycott of the Jim Crow school that integrated the South Park elementary school and the Shawnee Mission High School in Merriam.16

Illus. 9: Esther Swirk Brown Courtesy: Kansas Historical Society

15 In the process of the Webb case, Brown also became acquainted with Scott’s sons Charles and John Scott, who later served as local NAACP lawyers during the Brown case.

16 South Park was later annexed by Merriam, KS.

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Brown’s decision to support the Black families of South Park and Topeka in their demands for equal education resulted in Brown and her family sharing the same risks as the Black activists with whom she worked. During the three-year Webb effort, the

Browns received harassing phone calls, and someone burned a cross in their yard. One caller reminded Esther Brown that the Klu Klux Klan was still active in Kansas and threatened to burn down her home.17 An unidentified neighbor turned her name over to the FBI as a potential Communist sympathizer, and Kansas City, Missouri local police followed her and kept records of her activities.18 The FBI also investigated her husband, and as a result, he barely managed to retain his reserve commission in the United States

Air Force.19

A woman of incredible energy and undeterred by the threats, Brown organized campaigns publicizing the Webb children’s plight, working in another inter-racial partnership with Lucille Bluford of The Kansas City Call, a Black newspaper with a five- state distribution area. Brown also garnered the support of Sidney Lawrence, president of the Jewish Federation and Council of Greater Kansas City, overcoming his initial disapproval of her involvement with the Black community. She worked closely with Carl

Johnson, President of the Kansas City, Missouri NAACP, leaning heavily on his legal

17 Paul Brown, “A Memorandum,” June 10, 1994, 2.

18 “Mrs. Esther Brown, Twentieth Century Joan of Arc – Woman of the Week,” The Kansas City Call, April 22, 1949.

19 FBI Report: KC File 100-1372. Mrs. Esther Elizabeth Brown. February 21, 1949, Kansas City. South Park File: Johnson County Museum Archives, Olathe, KS. FBI Report: KC-File 1372 (Reopened). Mrs. Esther Elizabeth Brown, February 8, 1951. Kansas City. South Park File: Johnson County Museum Archives, Olathe, KS.

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expertise during the Webb case. Sometime in 1948-1949, Johnson’s Kansas City

Missouri NAACP branch elected Brown Vice President.20 On the national level, Brown worked with Franklin Williams and Thurgood Marshall on the Webb case. Later, NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg sought her assistance preparing the plaintiffs and identifying key witnesses for the Topeka case. In June 1952, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the

Topeka and Clarendon County appeals. Robert Carter wrote Esther Brown advising her of the triumph, a clear indication that he recognized the importance of her contribution.21

Brown was also one of the speakers on the platform at the victory celebration in Topeka after the Court announced its decision.22

Brown’s partner in the Topeka case was Lucinda Todd (Illus. 10). At the time of the Brown case, Todd was secretary of the Topeka NAACP. Todd was also a former teacher in the Black Topeka schools, and she was known and liked in the Black community. As a plaintiff in the Brown case on behalf of her daughter, Nancy, she spoke from a position of strength when asking other Blacks in the community to risk joining the fight. As previously mentioned, Todd wrote the initial letter to Walter White, asking for legal support from the national organization for the Topeka case. “Our situation has

20 The letterhead for the Kansas City, Missouri NAACP lists Esther Brown as Vice- President.

21 Robert. L. Carter to Esther Brown, June 11, 1952, “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 5, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

22 “Topekans Celebrate Supreme Court Victory,” The Kansas City Call, May 28, 1954.

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Illus. 10: Alvin Todd, Lucinda Todd, and Daughter Nancy Courtesy: National Park Service

become so unbearable,” she wrote, “that the local branch has decided to test the permissible law which we have here in Kansas.”23

A champion for Black civil rights, Todd was also the president of the Citizens

Committee on Civil Rights and used her organizational and public speaking skills to motivate Topeka’s Black community to support Rev. Burnett’s crusade.24 The inter-racial organization included Esther Brown and influential Topeka female leaders like Fayette

Sawyer, Vera Forbes, and Dora Brown.25 Most likely, Isabel Lurie was also a member.

23 Lucinda Todd to Walter White, August 29, 1950, “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 5, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Burnett followed Todd’s letter with an August 1 letter to Walter White. On September 5 attorney Charles E. Bledsoe sent a third letter to the “legal department” that eventually reached Charles Carter. It was most likely Bledsoe’s letter that tipped the scale in favor of national support for the Topeka case. “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 5, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

24 Lucinda Todd’s husband, Alvin Todd was the personal assistant to Karl Menniger who served as an expert witness in the Topeka case. “Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Oral History Collection,” Kansas Historical Society.

25 Isabel Lurie traveled to New York in 1948 to talk directly with the national office about using Topeka for a test case. “The Segregation of Topeka’s Public Schools,1879-

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Burnett described her as “the most active woman in the local branch [who] is working very hard to end jim crow [sic] in the schools here.”26 The group organized mass meetings and petition drives to garner support for the fight against the local school board.

One hand-typed leaflet circulated by the group read: “Democratic minded Topekans have had enough! They are determined to restore fair play and democratic freedom in Topeka

Schools, regardless of cost.”27

The financial cost of this fight was no small thing. The national office expected the local chapters to fund the cases they initiated, but Topeka fell woefully short of that goal. Many in the Black community, and especially the Black teachers, did not support

Burnett nor the NAACP’s school integration goals. Given that women were the Black community’s primary fundraisers raising money for the cause was even more challenging than usual. When the New York office sent out an urgent plea for funds needed to file the

Topeka case with the Supreme Court, Lucinda Todd and Esther Brown, along with Carl

Johnson of the Kansas City, Missouri NAACP, established a fundraising event under the guise of “The Special Committee on Equality in Education” (a previously non-existent group). Their effort raised a significant portion of the needed funds.28 Johnson later

1951,” Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, (U.S. National Park Service).

26 M.L. Burnett to Franklin Williams, September 3, 1948, “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 5, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

27 “The People Fight Back,” Kansas Historical Society (1948). https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/213389/page/1.

28 Carl Johnson to Robert L. Carter, November 13, 1951, “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 6, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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explained to Charles Carter that middle-class Black constituents would not have attended if they called the meeting under the NAACP’s auspices.29 Johnson’s explanation demonstrates that the Black community’s resistance was strong enough to be detrimental to the Brown case if not overcome. The teachers’ intervention pitted Black women against Black women in an initiative where both held the same objective – the best education possible for Black children – but disagreed as to how to achieve it. Undoing the teachers’ campaign’s damage was one of the focuses of Todd’s and Brown’s local lobbying efforts.

At the root of Black teachers’ resistance was the NAACP’s decision to expand the

Topeka case’s focus from a request for transportation to a demand for full integration of the schools. The previously supportive Topeka teachers came out openly against Burnett and organized a counter-resistance in response. They interpreted the NAACP’s insistence that Black children suffered when attending segregated schools as an indirect criticism of their teaching ability. Most importantly, Topeka’s Black teachers were concerned with losing their jobs if integration became the law of the land. Their fears were not unfounded. Their resistance included pressuring the Kansas branch of the National

Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT) to challenge segregation by influencing the member parents.30 The Kansas NCCPT went so far as to send a letter to

29 Johnson explained that the ploy was necessary because so many of Black Topekans were opposed to the lawsuit. They would not attend had the NAACP and Burnett sponsored the fundraiser.

30 The Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers was a separate national organization for Black parents until it merged with the White National Congress of Parents and Teacher’s Association (PTA) in 1970. The NCCPT was frequently referred to as the Black PTA.

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the school board expressing its support of the board’s position against integration. As pointed out by sociologist Jean Van Delinder, “this resulted in Blacks acting in support of a White supremacist segregationist policy in order to preserve community and economic stability.”31 The letter was also another example of the tension within the Black community over the issue of school integration.

Despite the teachers’ attempts to undermine the lawsuit, local NAACP president

Burnett continued trying to win the teachers over but to no avail. He told Dr. Hugh Speer, an expert witness in the case, that when a lawyer from the national office was invited to

Topeka to speak to a meeting, “we invited the teachers to come. They didn’t come, not one.”32 Lucinda Todd told Lucille Black, Membership Secretary for the national office, that the local churches supported the teachers, making it even harder to rally community support for the case.33

31 Jean Van Delinder, “Early Civil Rights Activism in Topeka, Kansas, Prior to the 1954 Brown Case” Great Plains Quarterly 21, no. 1(Winter 2001):45-61. This was not the first time the teachers banded together to prevent integration of Topeka elementary schools in order to save their jobs. In 1941 Elisha Scott represented the teachers in Graham v. Board of Education 153 Kan. (1944) over the disparity in assignment of Black children to seventh, eighth and ninth grades to elementary schools where White children in the same grades went to a junior high school. On behalf of the teachers who were afraid of losing their jobs, Scott argued that Black children did better with teachers of their own race and when associating with other Black children and urged the court not to order the junior high schools integrated. “The Segregation of Topeka’s Public Schools,1879-1951,” Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, (U.S. National Park Service).

32 Hugh Speer, and Esther Brown. The Case of the Century: A Historical and Social Perspective on Brown v. Board of Education. (Kansas City, MO. (self-published) 1968), 27.

33 Letter from Lucinda Todd to Lucille Black, August 14, 1953 quoted in “The Segregation of Topeka’s Public Schools,1879-1951,” Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, (U.S. National Park Service).

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The teachers had other supporters as well. Topeka attorney Earl Reynolds also protested the Topeka case’s filing because of its potential impact on Black teachers. In a lengthy letter to Robert Carter, he reminded Carter that the Black teachers “were cut adrift even though they were qualified teachers holding Masters degree [sic]” when

Pittsburg, Kansas, and Fort Scott, Kansas integrated their schools.34 He told Carter in strong terms that the “people at large in [the] City of Topeka are not in favor of the said case.”35 Carter responded, saying that while “the winning of the right of Negro children to attend integrated schools may present a problem for Negro teachers, the answer...is not to oppose the breaking up of segregated schools.”36 Carter suggested that should the teachers lose their jobs, the local branch and the national NAACP should “pool our resources in a legal fight to win back the teachers’ jobs.”37 Carter claimed the intention was to demand the integration of the teaching staff at the schools. In the course of the case, the lawyers lost sight of the teachers’ concerns.38 Reynolds was right in his concern

34 Letter to Robert L. Carter from Earl Thomas Reynolds. October 1, 1951. “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 7. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

35 Letter to Robert L. Carter from Earl Thomas Reynolds, “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 7. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

36 Robert L. Carter to Earl Thomas Reynolds. October 1, 1951. “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 7. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

37 Robert L. Carter to Earl Thomas Reynolds. “Brown v. Board of Education,” II: Box 134, Folder 7. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

38 For more about the impact of the Brown case on Black teachers see Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” The Journal of American

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for Black teachers. John Eckert, Professor of Educational Leadership at Wheaton

College, reported that of the 82,000 Black teachers employed in public schools before the

Brown decision, over half were displaced as schools were closed to accommodate integration.39 Historian Adam Fairclough points out that the national office “knew full well that integration would jeopardize the livelihoods of Black teachers,” but its

“sympathy for...[them] was limited.”40 In an even colder analysis, Fairclough believed that Carter’s position was “individual and collective sacrifices must be paid” to obtain the greater good.41 In fact, Fairclough thought Carter’s lack of sympathy stemmed in part from a belief that restructuring might have a silver lining if it helped weed out incompetent teachers.42

It is unlikely that Carter would have taken the same position had a more significant percentage of teachers been males. Teaching was the purview of Black women, and as late as 2016, the Department of Education reported that males made up

History 91 no. 1 (2006): 6. http://www/historycooperative.org.silk.library.umass.edu:2048/cgi-bin.

39 Jon Eckert, “Wheaton College Experts on the Impact of Brown v. Board of Education,” April 3, 2018. https://www.wheaton.edu/news/recent-news/2018/april/the-impact-of- brown-v-board-of-education.

40 Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2006), 6.

41 Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown, 6.

42 Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown, 6.

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less than 2 percent of Black teachers.43 The national NAACP was elitist and true to the attitudes of the day, also misogynistic. Still, Carter’s attitude was inexplicable, given the importance of Black female teachers’ income to their families’ economic health. Many of the wives and supporters of the local Black leaders associated with the Brown case were teachers, and their stable salaries important in sustaining their families.

Todd’s and Brown’s partnership eventually overcame the Topeka teachers’ counter-assault and demonstrated how the fight for equality benefited from strong, purpose-driven inter-racial liaisons. It is important to note here that Esther Brown was a secular Jew, and religious ideology did not drive her involvement in the Topeka case. It is more accurate to trace her activism to her upbringing in the early socialist movement in

Kansas City.44 Nonetheless, Brown’s contact with the Kansas and Missouri Jewish communities expanded the Topeka NAACP’s network of supporters.

While the partnership was beneficial in the Topeka case, the history of Black-

Jewish cooperation in the pre-King and post-King era was bumpy, often fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. Historian Marc Dollinger challenges what he argues are the myths about Jewish support for Black civil rights and the self-serving historical memory that has created a mythical alliance that, at many levels, did not exist.45 Rabbi P.

43 “The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Work Force,” Department of Education, (2016). http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity- workforce.pdf.

44 Milton S. Katz, and Susan B. Tucker, “A Pioneer in Civil Rights,” Kansas History 19, (Winter 1995): 236.

45 Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018).

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Allen Krause’s study of twelve southern rabbis in the 1960s supports Dollinger’s thesis.

Krause documented various levels of interest in civil rights by the rabbis but with little direct activism, which Krause attributes to fear of reprisal.46 Dollinger and Krause provide strong evidence for reexamining previous conceptions of the relationship, especially in the pre-King era.

There are examples of successful inter-faith and inter-racial alliances, however.

The NAACP itself is an example of inter-racial collaboration, as was the pre-Civil War

Women’s Suffrage movement. Why more such partnerships are not successful is, in part, a function of the “hyphenation and specialization” of American activism. One of the most glaring and disappointing examples is the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which failed to unite White women and Black women’s concerns in any productive way, resulting in a split that left both dissatisfied. However, the Brown-Todd cooperation showed that White and Black women of different faiths did interact on personal levels and with positive results at the ground level in the pre-King struggle.

46 P. Allen Krause, To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement, Mark K. Baum and Stephen Krause, eds. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016). The fear was not unfounded. In October,1958 a White supremacists group calling themselves the “Confederate Underground” set off a bomb at the north entrance of Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in Atlanta causing over $100,000 in damage. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured. The bombing was in retaliation for the rabbi’s support of integration and racial equality. www.the-temple-org.

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Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.”47.

When Black mothers accepted the role of plaintiff on behalf of their minor children in the Brown cases, they understood this was not an act of passive resistance.

The mothers knowingly assumed the risk inherent in openly fighting White supremacy.

As historian Charles M. Payne observed, the risk, however, was not just a personal one. It was a family risk.48 Not only were they likely to lose any job they had outside the home, but their husbands and extended family members could likely suffer White retaliation, even violence, as a result of their decision. The benefits they saw in the fight for their families, especially their children, were worth the risk. Should the battle for integration succeed, their children’s admission to the White schools with better facilities, equipment, and possibly, better teachers promised the uplift needed. By taking advantage of the benefits for which, their parents risked everything, the children had the opportunity to improve their economic position and move into the middle class.

When two Delaware mothers, one from Hockessin and one from Claymont, both small towns outside of Wilmington, took the critical first steps to improve their children’s access to a quality education, they understood there might be backlash from Whites. They also understood that even some Blacks might not support them out of fear that White reprisal would extend to the entire Black community. There was also a risk that Blacks

47 Madam C. J. Walker, to National Negro Business League, (date unknown), quoted by Jill Robinson, “Walker, Madame C.J.,” Learning to Give. www.learningtogive.org.

48 Charles M. Payne, “Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” in Black Women in United States History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1990), 4.

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opposed to integration could try to undermine their fight. Once the attorney filed the suits, however, the die was cast. Sara Bulah, Ethel Belton, and the other six mothers who joined them as plaintiffs became named activists in the fight for equal education. They were no longer quiet resisters in the long struggle for equality but instead public activists in an open battle for equal education.

Map 3: Map of Delaware Counties Source: Ontheworldmap.com

Bulah’s and Belton’s requests were simple and straightforward. They wanted their children to be allowed to attend the school closest to their home or, at least, have transportation provided to the Jim Crow school the children attended. Taking note of the

Bulahs’ situation, Judge Collin Seitz, the judge in their cases, stated, “the State Board of

Education refused to authorize the transportation of this then seven year old [sic] plaintiff

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to the Negro school, even though the bus for White children went right past her home.”49

Judge Seitz also pointed out how irrational the decision was “even though the two schools are no more than a mile apart...[and] there is no public transportation available from or near plaintiff’s home to or near the Negro school.”50 When Belton testified about her daughter’s twenty-mile round trip journey on public transportation to downtown

Wilmington and Delaware’s only Black high school, she stated: “I live in the community of Claymont. I work in Claymont. I shop there, and I help to support the community in general.”51 She went on to say, “ I can see no reasons why my child should leave

Claymont and travel all the way to Wilmington to attend [Howard] high school when there is a public high school right in Claymont.”52 Harvey Stahl, the Claymont school superintendent, agreed with Belton. Once NAACP attorney Louis Redding filed the

Belton and Bulah cases, Stahl’s Claymont school board joined the Hockessin Special

School District board and began quietly making plans to admit Black students, anticipating that the Chancery Court would rule in the mothers’ favor.53

49 Belton e al. v. Gebhart et al. Bulah et al v. Gebhart et al. Civ. A. Nos. 258, 265 (1952).

50 “Testimony of Ethel Belton” in “Belton v. Gebhart,” II, Box 139, Folder 6, 36-38. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

51 Belton, Belton v. Gebhart, 36-38.

52 Belton, Belton v. Gebhart, 36-38.

53 At Redding’s direction, eight families attempted to register at the Claymont High School and were denied. Redding filed suit. The nine children from these families were: Ethel Louise Belton, Bernice Byrd, Elbert Crumpler, John Davis, Spencer Robinson, Robert Sanford, Styron Sanford, Almena Short and Mrytha Trotter. The three children from Arden were Carol Anderson, Joan Anderson, and Merele Anderson. Shirley Bulah was the plaintiff in the Bulah case. “Delaware: Belton v. Gebhart,” Recovering Untold

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Belton had much to say on behalf of herself and the other mothers, making it clear that the stakes were high. “To my understanding and my knowledge, we are all born

Americans, and when the State sets up separate schools for certain people of a separate color, then I and others are made to feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she told the court.54

She concluded, “Such separations humiliate us and makes us feel that we are not as good

American as other Americans. I don’t want my child growing up, feeling that she is not as good an American as any other American.”55

The citizens of the neighboring Arden School also agreed with Belton. In their district was a new community, Ardencroft, explicitly designed to create a diverse, integrated community.56 Dr. Leon V. Anderson, head of the Wilmington NAACP’s legal defense section that helped fund the Belton case, moved with his wife and three children to Ardencroft. He approached the Arden School to admit his children.57 Anderson told the board that if it refused to admit them, he would sue the school district. Journalist

Harry Themal reported that the residents “made it clear through town meetings and petitions that they wanted all residents to be taught at the school” and that Anderson’s

Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Topeka: University of Kansas Libraries, 2018), 2.

54 Belton, Belton v. Gebhart, 36-38.

55 Belton, Belton v. Gebhart, 36-38.

56 Connie Wright McKinney, “What the Arden Schools Can Teach Us: Hard Lessons in Community Building” (MA thesis, University of Delaware, 2004), 58-59.

57 “Ádmit 8 Children Next Month, White Schools Ordered,” Wilmington Journal Every Evening, August 28,1952, 1.

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threats were unnecessary.58 Though the Arden School was not part of either of the original cases, the school district rode the legal struggle’s coat-tails to the benefit of

Black residents in the community.

When the Chancery Court announced its decision in the Belton case, Judge Collin

Seitz ordered immediate integration of Claymont’s high school and Hockessin’s elementary school. Arden joined in immediately admitting Black children. The next day the state announced that it would appeal Seitz’s ruling and ordered superintendent Stahl to send the Black students at Claymont home. He refused, and the children stayed enrolled. Claymont, Hockessin, and Arden became the first integrated public schools in

Delaware, two years before the Brown Supreme Court decision.59

On the surface, in the communities where the Beltons, Bulahs, and Andersons lived, school integration went smoothly. Years later, journalist Harry Themal observed,

“What years earlier might have caused disruptions happened peacefully and with broad support of the communities.”60 Integrated schools in Claymont, Hockessin, and Arden were accepted and considered routine by the time the first integrated class graduated from

58 Harry Themal, “The Missing Part of the Nation’s Desegregation Story,” Delaware Online, June 2, 2014. The Arden School only went through eighth grade. The Anderson children attended Howard High School for the Spring semester and then transferred to Claymont High School in September after Judge Seitz ruled in the Belton and Bulah cases. “Delaware: Belton v. Gebhart,” in Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Topeka: University of Kansas Libraries, 2018).

59 James Merriweather, “Brave Few Spurred Claymont Integration,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 17, 2004.

60 Harry Themal, “The Missing Part of the Nation’s Desegregation Story,” Delaware Online, June 2, 2014.

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Claymont High in June 1954, one month after the Brown decision.61 Unfortunately, Kent and Sussex County in southern Delaware did not replicate the calm approach enjoyed in

Claymont. There White supremacists inflamed massive resistance threatening violence against anyone, Black or White, who registered their children in an integrated school.62

Judge Seitz summarized the cause-and-effect of the cases some years later after

Delaware became the center of a school busing controversy, saying that “the board of education’s refusal to grant Mrs. Bulah’s modest request triggered a more pervasive demand which resulted in the complete legal desegregation of the White school.”63 Seitz went on to observe that “indifference or callousness to small problems often generates massive ones.”64 Seitz argued that had the local school boards accommodated Belton’s and Bulah’s reasonable and relatively inexpensive requests to allow their children to attend the White school or, at least, provide transportation, Delaware’s school integration history might look much different. That is not to say that segregation would prevail. On the contrary, the winds of change were in play, and integration was inevitable. However,

61 Louise Belton graduated from all-Black Howard High School that May. She never changed schools as she wanted to stay with her friends.

62 James Merriweather and Beth Miller. “Brown: Desegregation Reactions Varied in State,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 17,2 004. Also see, Orlando J. Camp, and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven: Integration Fears Robbed Hope from Eleven Black Students. 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Cedar Tree Books, 2013).

63 Annette Woollard-Provine, “Introduction to: ‘What is Past is Prologue,’” in Proud Moment for Delaware: Louis Redding Esq. and the Hon. Collin J. Seitz and Their Contribution to the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Delaware Heritage Commission, 2004), 31.

64 Woollard-Provine, “Introduction,” 31.

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for a brief time, Delaware had the opportunity to influence the mechanism for achieving school integration through its example of peaceful transition. The gradualist approach

Delaware used initially to integrate its schools eventually proved to be unsatisfactory.

Housing patterns stymied attempts to balance student populations based on demographics while maintaining the neighborhood school concept. The demands for racially balanced schools lead to extensive court involvement, the implementation of inter-district busing, and more White resistance.

Belton, Bulah, and the other parents likely held concerns that integration might not go smoothly. Regardless, the mothers went forward in the best interest of their children. After the civil disruption at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Martin

Luther King, Jr. stated that “it is an immoral act to compel a man to accept injustice until another man’s heart is straight.”65 His pronouncement in many ways mirrored the comments Shirley Belton made to the Chancery Court on behalf of her daughter several years earlier.

65 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Address at the Thirty-fourth Annual Convention of the National Bar Association,” August 20, 1957, Stamford University Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.

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Illus. 11: Harry and Eliza Briggs Courtesy American History Museum

Another mother, Eliza Briggs, took on even more personal risk than Belton and

Bulah as she assumed an advocacy role in the South Carolina Briggs case (Illus. 11.) The legal procedure required that the parents submit a petition to the school board outlining their complaints before filing a lawsuit. Marshall wanted twenty signatories; a demand based on his understanding of the effect White retaliation had on plaintiffs in similar cases. He knew some parents would drop out of the case but hoped that at least some plaintiffs could survive until the end. Rev. De Laine, the Black leader in Summerton, organized a meeting to confirm the potential plaintiffs’ commitment and rally support for the dangerous undertaking. Following the NAACP’s advice, De Laine arranged for the families to sign the petition in a different location than the mass meeting. Eliza Briggs and her husband, fully understanding the risk they took, allowed the use of their home for the petition signing and were the first to attach their name to the petition. The Briggs children of school age and a brother-in-law were next to sign. Parents and school-age

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children from twenty-four families totaling 107 individuals went in ones and twos to the

Briggs’s home and signed the petition.66 As the first to sign, the complaint took the

Briggs’s name, making the Briggs family an especial target for White reprisal.

With Christmas approaching, the White community began its retribution, even against Blacks who had not signed the petition but supported De Laine’s initiative. The

Summerton Motel fired Eliza Briggs after she refused to remove her name from the petition. “I told him no, I didn’t want to do that because we [would] be hurting the children, and I’d rather give my job up and keep my name on there,” Briggs explained.67.

The local Windsor Motel fired Annie Gibson and Mazie Solomon. Solomon’s landlord then gave her two weeks’ notice to vacate her rented home.68 The owner of Carrigan’s

Sinclair station, where Harry Briggs worked, fired him on Christmas Eve after giving him a carton of cigarettes as a Christmas bonus.69 James Brown quit his job at the Esso station when his White friend and boss of nineteen years underwent pressure to fire him.

Brown’s son Thomas lost his after-school job at the drugstore.70Bo Stukes lost his job at

Juicy Davis’s garage. Near the first of January, Rev. James Seals lost his teaching job.

66 Gergel, Richard. Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), 218.

67 “Interview with Eliza and Harry Briggs,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Civil Rights Digital Library, crdl.usg.edu.

68 Gona, Dawn, 108.

69 Gona, Dawn, 108.

70 Gona, Dawn, 106-107.

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After Harry Briggs lost his job at the gasoline station, he tried unsuccessfully to find work in Clarendon County. Briggs then attempted to support his family with farming but without credit from Whites, was doomed to fail. Eventually, he went to Florida to work, leaving Eliza and the five children in South Carolina. His oldest son, Harry Briggs,

Jr., also tried to find work in Clarendon County, but no one would hire him. After some time, he went to New York, where his uncle lived. After Harry Jr. left Summerton, Eliza

Briggs and the other children joined Harry Briggs in Florida. After a year, Eliza Briggs and the children returned to Clarendon County for their daughter to finish school. Harry

Briggs remained in Florida for another year to support the family.

Once their daughter finished high school, the Briggs family moved to New York.

Eliza Briggs recalled: “We learned a lot during this time and leaned on our neighbors since we all lost our jobs. We knew people were scared, but we had to reassure them that their children was [sic] worth it.”71 Eliza Briggs was proud that she did this for her children and equally proud of her husband for standing up to the White supremacists, even though it eventually cost both their jobs. When asked about signing the petition,

Eliza Briggs responded: “Being one of the first to sign the petition was very important to my family and myself. I felt as if we spoke...about giving our children a better life, but we had to do more than just speak. There had to be action done.”72 The Briggs’s sacrifice

71 “Unsung Women Change Agents,” November 1, 2016. https://yppaction frame.fas.harvard.edu.

72 “Unsung Women Change Agents,” November 1, 2016. https://yppaction frame.fas.harvard.edu.

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was finally acknowledged when Eliza and Harry were posthumously awarded

Congressional Gold Medals in 2003 by President George Bush.73

Historians have not previously discussed the emergence of Black mothers as public participants in the fight for education. By the simple act of signing their names to public documents, Black mothers like Bulah, Belton, and Briggs assumed an advocacy role not just for their families but also for their communities. As mothers-become- activists, they became the public voice of their community’s collective grievances and lost whatever shielding the veil of motherhood provided them from White retaliation. As plaintiffs, some testified openly in court. In doing so, they faced the White men they accused of violating their children’s civil rights. These were the same White men who, weeks before, denied credit to their husbands or fired them from their jobs. Black mothers’ willingness to step forward and stand as equals beside the men of the family and community rather than remain in the background reflects a determination to risk all to gain the benefits to which they and their families were entitled. Later, female activist leaders like Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Septima Poinsette Clark, and Viola

Gregg Liuzzo emulated the mothers’ acts of agency as women stepped even further out of the shadows bringing their own form of leadership and experience to the Civil Rights

Movement of the 1960s. The courage of the Brown mothers provided the precedent for their outspoken activism.

73 “Harry Briggs Jr.; a Catalyst for Brown v. Board of Education Dies at 75,” New York Times, August 8, 2018.

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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”74

When Black men took up the civil rights torch, their wives usually found

themselves sharing not only in the risks but also shouldering more and more of the

responsibility for child-rearing, family stability, and financial security. As leaders like

Griffin and De Laine spent more and more time engaged in the fight for others, their

wives became their surrogates at home and in the community. Many of the wives,

especially those of the ministers, were often skilled organizers, experienced at balancing

multiple priorities, but the challenges and risks inherent in the struggles in which their

spouses engaged brought mental and emotional stress beyond the norm. The

historiography of the wives is extremely limited and what exists predominately looks at

the wives of famous male King-era activists such as Coretta Scott King, the wife of

Martin Luther King Jr., Betty Shabazz, the wife of Malcolm X, or Myrlie Evers-

Williams, wife of Medgar Evers. Identifying and documenting the contribution of the

wives of the less well-known Black leaders in the Brown cases provides an insight as to

the dedicated work, sacrifice, and struggle of these almost invisible participants in the

grass-roots effort.

One of the less well-known wives was Adelaide Griffin, wife of Reverend L.F.

Griffin, whom she married in 1946. When Rev. Griffin took up the cause for integration

in Prince Edward County in the Southside region of Virginia, Adelaide Griffin was

supportive. She understood and agreed with her husband’s commitment to racial justice.

What neither Adelaide Griffin nor Rev. Griffin anticipated was how the stress of his

74 Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Random House, 2015).

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endeavors would impact her. Even before Rev. Griffin challenged the local school board in federal court, Adelaide Griffin, who grew up in New Jersey, found the cultural changes she experienced as a new bride in Virginia hard to accept. She never fully acclimated to her adopted home’s Jim Crow practices.

The Griffins had six children, whom Adelaide Griffin attempted to protect as best she could from White ugliness. As an adult, her daughter, Naja Griffin Johnson, belatedly realized that her mother was not being mean when she said Naja could not take ballet lessons or go to a dance. Instead, Johnson explained, she was “protecting us from experiencing the rejection of the Whites. She let us be angry with her rather than have hatred in our hearts for others.”75 Protecting her children took on new dimensions as threats to her family increased in proportion to her husband’s challenges to Southside

Virginia’s Jim Crow practices.

As was true of many Black wives, in addition to maintaining a household, Griffin taught school. She saw first-hand the problems that motivated her husband’s crusade.

However, the necessity of the battle saddened her because she saw the toll it took on him physically and emotionally, in addition to the strain it put on the family’s finances.

Nonetheless, Adelaide Griffin stood by her husband despite the impact of his activism on her children and her own health.76 “I think when she looked at the bigger picture, she realized it was worth it,” said her daughter Naja Griffin Johnson. “When we complained

75 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

76 Adelaide Griffin’s children’s names were: Cocheyse (Cookie) J. Griffin, Mignon D. Griffin, Naja D. Griffin, and L. Francis Griffin, Jr., Charles Griffin, and Eric Griffin. Eric was not of school-age when the Griffins filed the final lawsuit.

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about Daddy being gone so much, she explained to us that this was our father’s role and we all had to sacrifice.”77

And sacrifice she did. Journalist Carl Rowan from the Minneapolis Morning

Tribune described Adelaide Griffin when he first met her as charming and attractive.

Upon being reintroduced in 1955, he expressed concern in finding her “deeply detached” and “plung[ing] toward a complete breakdown.”78 The journalist learned that some in the

Black community shunned the Griffins, resenting the hardships brought on the entire community by Griffin’s campaign. Others distanced themselves out of fear of White backlash if they continued to associate with the Griffins. Over time, membership in

Griffin’s church declined by half. Rev. Griffin told Rowan that the privations and isolation caused by the White and Black backlash were, in part, to blame for his wife’s condition. “She was excluded from her primary social outlets: the school and the church,” explained her daughter, Naja.79 “My mother would receive calls, not threatening her directly, but telling her of the harm that might come to her husband and her children if

Daddy persisted. These calls weighed heavily on her.”80 The stress resulted in Adelaide

Griffin’s hospitalization for what historians Brian E. Lee and Brian J. Daugherity referred

77 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

78 Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951-1964 (Farmville, VA: Robert Russa Moton Museum, 2008),137-138.

79 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

80 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

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to as nervous breakdowns.81 While Adelaide Griffin recovered, the children lived with their grandparents for a short time.

Probably the sacrifice that took the most significant toll on Griffin was the decision to send her three oldest children away to be educated. Her children’s loss to temporary White foster families was heart-wrenching for Griffin. According to her daughter, the children stayed with their host families from September through June, not even coming home for Christmas. “In an age without social media and where telephone calls were expensive, we relied on letter writing to stay in touch,” Naja remembered. Not until years later did her mother tell her how hard being separated from her three older children was on her. “She told me she cried every night. It hurt her heart to be separated from us. The people who voted to close the schools were in reality voting to rip children out of parents’ arms,” Naja Griffin Johnson shared.82

The Prince Edward case was the lengthiest of all the Brown cases. The Black parents’ fight began in early 1940 before the Griffins 1949 return to Farmville. It continued until the schools reopened in 1963 after Farmville Blacks took to the streets in protest marches and boycotted White-owned businesses. Adelaide Griffin saw her oldest son, “Skip,” participate in the protest marches, although he was not one of the eleven

Black activists arrested by police. The protests resulted in the opening of the “Free

Schools” in 1963 and the reinstatement of publicly funded education in 1964. Through all

81 Brian E. Lee and Brian J. Daugherity, “Program of Action: The Rev. L. Francis Griffin and the Struggle for Racial Equality in Farmville, 1963,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (2013). http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/hist_pubs/3.

82 Author’s interview with Naja Griffin Johnson, July 22, 2019.

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this, Adelaide Griffin continued supporting her husband and caring for her family. She finally returned to teaching in 1964 when the public schools reopened. When Rev. Griffin died, Adelaide Griffin moved to Richmond, where she lived until she died in 2016.

History also lost sight of the wife of Rev. Joseph De Laine, leader of the South

Carolina Briggs case. As a dynamic young woman, Mattie De Laine met her future husband while attending Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.83 She and her husband moved to Clarendon County when Rev. De Laine accepted a position at the

AME Spring Hill Church. Rev. De Laine was a native of neighboring Clarendon county, so this was a homecoming for him. Mattie De Laine began teaching at the Spring Hill

Community School and soon acclimated herself to her new home. Her life focused on her children, her teaching, and her role as a preacher’s wife. She made friends and developed a social life centered on the school and the church.

Life changed for Mattie De Laine in 1948 when her husband, a strong proponent of the social gospel, engaged in a legal battle for school transportation fronted by his neighbor, Levi Pearson. The suit led to the eventual confrontation with the school board over the integration of the public schools. The school board and the White community immediately retaliated against De Laine and his family for his school case leadership.

Mattie and the family experienced all the economic and social pressure the Farmville

White supremacists could bring to bear, short of lynching. Even her husband’s relative financial security as a property owner did not protect the family from financial hardship.

Local merchants put the family on a “cash only” credit basis, and the bank repossessed

83 “History: The Rev. Joseph A. De Laine,” Statehouse Report, July 31, 2015, www.statehousereport.com.

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his car. The heating oil company refused to allow him the usual line-of-credit, and the family suffered without heat through much of the winter. After enduring every sort of harassment, Rev. De Laine finally fled to New York only after White terrorists attacked his home.

Mattie De Laine referred to the time of her husband’s escape as the “TERROR by night.”84 She documented her memories in a short essay now in the archives of the

University of South Carolina.85 The experiences that traumatized her included “being dropped from her teaching position along with all of the kin.”86 Her list also included her husband’s trial for defamation in Federal Court and subsequent $2,700 judgment against him, the 1955 attack on her home, and the terrorist’s shots on October 10, 1955, from which she and her husband fled. Most painful was the seven days of silence after Rev.

De Laine left for New York, waiting to hear whether he was “linched [sic].”87 There are conflicting stories about exactly when Mattie De Laine joined her husband in New York.

The Southern School News stated that after her husband fled, Mattie De Laine moved in briefly with her brother in Columbia, South Carolina. When the News published the story,

Mattie De Laine was preparing to return to her teaching position in Lake City.88

84 “Reverend Joseph A. De Laine and Miss Mattie Belton – Essay (undated),” Rev. J.A. De Laine Papers 1915-2000, (Civil Rights Digital Library, University of South Carolina) http://crdl.usg.edu/collections/jad/. Punctuation in original.

85 De Laine, “Essay,” np.

86 De Laine, “Essay,” np

87 De Laine, “Essay,” np

88 “Clarendon Case Figure Quits S.C. Over Shooting Incident,” Southern School News, November, 1955, 11.

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Eventually, once Rev. De Laine settled in New York, Mattie De Laine joined him.

Then, as she described, she suffered through three sessions in the New York court as the

Governor of South Carolina, George Bell Timmerman, Jr. tried to have Rev. De Laine extradited to South Carolina on a warrant for assault and battery with a deadly weapon.89

The De Laines then endured eight months in New York feeling homeless while awaiting a posting by the Annual Conference of Bishops. When it came to her disappointment, it was an “‘Open Appointment’ with no members, no church, [and] no home but with a family and friends.”90 Mattie De Laine eventually returned to teaching in New York and continued to teach until retiring with her husband to North Carolina.

Wives of the Brown initiative’s Black leaders led lives of selflessness and bravery, especially when their husbands were preachers in the Black church. To piece together even the above short stories required significant ferreting in archives, memoirs, newspapers, and oral histories. The effort uncovered the exceptional contributions made by Adelaide Griffin and Mattie De Laine to their husband’s successes in the Brown cases.

Doubtless, there are many more stories yet to uncover. The emotional stress alone that the local leader’s wives endured, coupled with the financial retaliation that penalized their families, should have earned them the community’s undying support. Unfortunately, their

89 “Reverend Joseph A. De Laine and Miss Mattie Belton – Essay (undated),” Rev. J.A. De Laine Papers 1915-2000, (Civil Rights Digital Library, University of South Carolina) http://crdl.usg.edu/collections/jad/. Punctuation in original. Note: George Bell Timmerman, Jr., was the son of Judge Timmerman who ruled against Briggs at the appellate level.

90 De Laine, “Essay,” np.

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loyalty often resulted in loneliness and isolation as congregants attempted to distance themselves from the leaders’ militancy.91 Even those supportive of their ministers’ activism expected their wives to remain quietly in the background. Adelaide Griffin,

Mattie De Laine, and others like them did not have the option available to Eliza Briggs,

Lucinda Todd, Sara Bulah, and Shirley Belton to engage in the local initiatives as active players. The roles society thrust on them caused their contributions to be under- appreciated if not ignored when others documented the Brown cases’ history.

“Teaching is more than imparting knowledge; it is inspiring change.”92

It is possible to understand why Black mothers and wives put themselves in harm’s way to secure a quality education for their children. What is particularly noteworthy is the assistance provided by non-family members who, in reaching out, also shared the risks. Without exception, women constituted the majority of those who stepped forward and offered aid of all types to the families and communities involved in the Brown struggle. As previously mentioned, assistance was often inter-racial and inter- generational, especially in times of severe need. Help often came from sources far outside the local communities. By looking at non-familial volunteerism, one gains a sense of the

Black community’s connectivity and the emergence of changing racial attitudes in the

91 De Laine, “Essay,” np.

92 William Arthur Ward, (1921-1994).

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United States, yet another example of how the contribution to the Brown cases plowed new ground for the emerging civil rights movement.

There are many examples of supportive volunteerism in the Brown saga. Titus claimed that when Rev. Griffin sent out a call for help “developing a comprehensive educational program for the 1700 children who had no school to attend, some twenty organizations” responded.93 These organizations, she explained, were ones concerned with racial politics in the South, and their membership was predominantly female. In no case was women’s support more essential than in Prince Edward County, where the penalty levied on Prince Edward County’s families resulted in permanent damage to many, even those Blacks not directly involved as plaintiffs. Support came from many quarters and manifested itself in many ways.

Locally, women opened their homes and set up temporary schools to fill the gap, not realizing that the need would be there for over five years. The Virginia Teachers

Association (VTA) sent teachers to the county during the summer months to offer remedial tutoring.94 Women staffed the community centers established by Rev. Griffin’s

Prince Edward County Christian Association (PECCA) organization to provide ongoing training, especially for elementary school children. Foster families, Black and White, across the nation took Prince Edward’s children into their homes so the children could continue their education. Women of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

93 Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists & the Struggle for Justice in Price Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 50.

94 The VTA was the Black equivalent of the Parent Teachers Association.

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spent five years in Prince Edward County providing community outreach and working to heal the breach that caused so many children to go without formal education for years.

When it became clear that the public schools in Farmville would not reopen,

Prince Edward County’s Black women found themselves caught between White racism and Black determinism. Nonetheless, desperate that a generation of children did not lose access to education, a group of Farmville’s Black women set out to provide at least some temporary education for those displaced by school closings. They established Operation

1700 (named for the 1700 children whose education was in jeopardy) in 1959.

Essentially, they offered summer school programs to help students with basic skills. The majority of the schools established by Operation 1700 closed after about two years, but they contributed what they could to shore up Farmville’s Blacks’ education during that time.95 Despite the women’s efforts, researcher Robert L. Green found that only 6 percent of the eligible students attended all three summer programs.96 Still, years later, some of the Farmville students attributed their success in overcoming the school’s closing effects to these women’s work.

Other Farmville women did what they could as individuals and ran schools out of their homes. By definition, the schools were small and usually accommodated only ten to fifty children annually. Unfortunately, the home schools were far from the quality of education the children needed or deserved. Those teaching were generally working-class

95 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 40-53.

96 Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years Without Public Education in Prince Edward County (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012),120.

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women who wanted to help and did their best. Some were teachers, but many were individuals valued by the community because of their church affiliations.97 The women were not all equally educated, but each did her best. None of these women received any compensation for their work. Most paid the expenses of their schools out of their own pockets.

Most of the names of the women who created the schools are lost, but a few survive. Beatrice Davenport, who taught for forty-four years in the Prince Edward

County Public School system, partnered with Elizabeth Watkinson to establish a school in the St. James AME church’s basement. When Watkins left to take a teaching position in Bedford County, Davenport arranged for Libby Jordan to assist her. Another volunteer,

Flossie S. White Hudson, ran a school out of her basement from 1959 to 1963 and served fifty children on average.98 Former teacher, Alberta Sims, ran a school with the help of her neighbor, Culla Berryman, in the back of Odel Wommack’s grocery store.99 Leola

Womack Hill operated her school out of the former School #22 without the school board’s permission. Apparently, the board did not know of this infraction or chose to ignore it. The actual number of students who attended the schools is unknown; however, despite their efforts, the need was greater than these makeshift schools could alleviate.

97 Amy Tillerson-Brown, “‘Grassroots Schools’ and Training Centers in the Prospect District of Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1959-1964,” The Educational Lockout of African Americans in Prince Edward County, Virginia (1959-1964): Personal Accounts and Reflections (New York: University Press of America, 2010), 11.

98 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 120.

99 Tillerson-Brown, Grassroot Schools, 8-9.

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The home schools tried to provide as close to the traditional academic curriculum as they could manage.100 They refused “to water down their teaching methods to comply with the objectives articulated by the Black middle-class, male-dominated leadership in

Farmville.”101 In doing so, they created some tension with the NAACP, which did not want anything to weaken the appearance that Black education was in a crisis in

Farmville. Despite understanding the toll the school closings took on the children and their families, the NAACP’s focus was on its ultimate goal of eliminating segregation permanently. Had it realized how long the closings would last, the leaders may have taken a different position, but it is unlikely. These were not their children, and every evidence is that Marshall and the NAACP staff believed any sacrifice worth the price.

Achieving the long-term benefit of eliminating segregation across the entire nation, the sacrifice of a generation of Farmville’s sharecropper children was worth the price to them.

In addition to home schools offering a classroom curriculum mirroring what they experienced in the public schools, Rev. Griffin formed the Prince Edward County

Christian Association (PECCA) and established ten training centers for the displaced students, staffed initially by local Black female volunteers. Eventually, Griffin tried to hire displaced teachers. The training centers’ purpose was to provide an environment that fostered Black pride, good citizenship and educated the children in current events.102 The

100 Tillerson-Brown, Grassroot Schools, 11.

101 Tillerson-Brown, Grassroot Schools, 10-11.

102 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 50-51.

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centers’ other purpose, according to Griffin, was to keep “students and parents [together] and to inspire and support them in their efforts to obtain first-class schooling.” Griffin went on to clarify that the centers were “in no sense a substitute for formal schooling, but recreational in value, [providing] training in good citizenship…racial pride, good health habits, and general current events.”103 The NAACP attorneys most likely helped craft this mission statement as they wanted it clear that these were not schools in the traditional sense. While determined to help where it could, Griffin was realistic about PECCA’S limitations unless it received strong support from outside sources. Unfortunately, conditions in the centers were often worse than the conditions in the Jim Crow schools.

Additionally, the PECCA centers curriculum focused on the younger students and had little or no appeal to older ones.104 During their operation, the enrollment was less than half of the eligible elementary school children.

Fundraising for civil rights efforts was difficult in the pre-King era. Much of the

PECCA centers’ money came from the National Council of Negro Women, the NAACP, and volunteer fundraising.105 Due to the instability of the fundraising efforts, salaries promised the PECCA teachers often failed to materialize.106 Since a teaching job frequently provided a sharecropping family with its only stable income, the prolonged school closures and inability to pay salaries on a dependable schedule forced most

103 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 119.

104 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 54.

105 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 40-53.

106 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 40-53.

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displaced teachers to find other work. By early 1960, the Virginia Teachers Association

(VTA) helped fifty of the county’s sixty-seven Black teachers find other positions “most outside the county and many outside the state.”107 One of the biggest drains on the community’s efforts to provide alternative schooling was the loss of qualified teachers.

While funding was the Achilles Heel of PECCA, the lack of transportation also prevented many children from taking advantage of its offerings. As a result of these combined deficiencies, the centers established by PECCA closed after two years.

In other efforts, the VTA sponsored summer schools starting in 1961, staffed mainly with volunteers. In the first year, the summer school reached 425 students. The following summer, the VTA taught 401 children. The Student Christian Federation of

New England joined the effort in 1962 and taught an additional 162 students. In the summer of 1963, a group of volunteers from Queens College and the New York Public

Schools provided a seven-week summer program. It is difficult to determine with accuracy the total number of children served by these volunteer efforts, but the best estimate, based on a variety of sources, is that less than 50-percent of public school-aged

Black children participated in any one of the local offerings. Generally, their participation was only for one or two years. Some never participated at all.

As admirable as the local attempts to provide educational opportunities for the children of the Jim Crow schools were, they were at best remedial, unstable, and often short-lived endeavors. Assistance from organizations like the VTA and the National

Council of Negro Women was frequently seasonal as the type of help needed was not

107 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 53.

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their primary function. The one organization that was structured to provide long-term, dedicated, consistent assistance throughout the stand-off was the American Friends

Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization. The AFSC arrived in Farmville in

1960 fresh from reconciliation work in Little Rock, so staff members were not surprised at the racial tensions existing in the small community.108 Their mission focused on three goals: serving the students’ educational needs, lobbying the federal government to intervene, and building interracial understanding by opening communications between

Whites and Blacks.109

The Quakers founded the AFSC in 1917 to “give young conscientious objectors ways to serve without joining the military or taking lives.”110 For its work helping war victims, the AFSC received the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize.111 In 1957, the AFSC launched its Southern Civil Rights Program to aid communities in the transition from segregated to integrated schools. The Quakers found themselves called to Prince Edward County. As historian Jill Ogline Titus explained, “The decision to go into Prince Edward County played a significant role in charting AFSC’s course for the next two decades.”112

108 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 41.

109 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 41.

110 “AFSC History,” American Friends Service Committee website, Afsc.org/afsc- history, np

111 “AFSC History,” This was not the first time Quakers offered assistance in Prince Edward County. When shortly after Lee’s surrender, the African Americans of Prince Edward County asked the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Lands to provide a teacher for their children’s school, the Quakers responded. The school grew to over 300 students.

112 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 42.

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The director of the AFSC was Jean Fairfax, a paid career activist (Illus. 12).

Fairfax could relate to Prince Edward’s Black community as she was the granddaughter of previously enslaved persons. Both her mother and father were the first in their families born free. Both her parents graduated from college and taught Fairfax the importance of education. Fairfax graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan.113 As a member of the AFSC, Fairfax worked in post-war Europe for several years and served as dean of women at both Kentucky State College (a historically Black college) and

Tuskegee Institute. Originally intending to stay only one or two semesters in Prince

Edward County, the organization stayed until 1965, a year after the public schools reopened.114 The AFSC tried to play intermediary roles without putting the NAACP’s agenda at risk or alienating the White establishment. Simultaneously, it pressed the federal government for intervention while building an interracial coalition to lobby for the stalemate’s constructive resolution.115

113 Katharine Q. Seelye, “Jean Fairfax, Unsung but Undeterred in Integrating Schools, Dies at 98,” New York Times, March 1, 2019.

114 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 116.

115 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 41.

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Illus. 12: Jean Fairfax Courtesy: Thurgood Marshall Institute

After Fairfax established the AFSC’s presence in Farmville in 1959, it soon became the hub for coordinating the county’s efforts to assist the Black students. That same year a meeting of organizations that Fairfax attended discussed how best they could serve the displaced pupils. The consensus was that any support: (1) should not jeopardize the legal initiative; (2) should not in any way relieve the school board of its responsibility for public education of all children; (3) should make good education sense; and (4) should contribute toward successful integration as the conflict resolved.116 These goals’ politically charged nature and the planning needed to implement them required the type of deftness and sensitivity for which Jean Fairfax was known.

116 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 117.

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The AFSC focused on finding opportunities for students to continue their education outside Prince Edward County. They called the effort the Emergency

Placement Project, and Fairfax and her team worked tirelessly with the families to identify candidates and facilitate their transition to the new schools and temporary families. The organization wanted to develop future leaders and believed expanding the students’ horizons with experiences outside the county would help. Fairfax reached out to five AFSC regional offices. She asked for help placing about fifty Moton High School juniors and seniors in host families. She needed the centers to assist students and host families with expenses and identify counselors to help students navigate the transition.117

A local woman, Mrs. Daniel Brown, worked with Fairfax spreading the word and identifying potential candidates. Convincing parents was not an easy task for many reasons. As Fairfax explained: “We were a predominately White organization that nobody had ever heard of before, that had no roots in the county, that proposed receiving children who were willing to go away to a distant place, maybe having to live with White families and go to predominantly White schools.”118 Fairfax acknowledged that allowing ones’ children to be taken away in these circumstances took a lot of convincing and much courage on the parent’s part. Participants were not just the best students, but a mix of children from rural Virginia “who may or may not meet national standards.”119 A group

117 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 121. Host families received thirty dollars per month plus an additional five dollars for spending money for the student. Also see Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 84.

118 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 121.

119 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 121.

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of local women volunteers helped the AFSC place twenty-two children between 1961-

1962. During the next school year (1962-1963), the AFSC placed sixty-seven students with families in Kentucky, New Jersey, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania,

Massachusetts, and California.120

Rev. Griffin also agreed to seek out “educational maintenance” opportunities through the Prince Edward County Christian Association (PECCA). PECCA arranged for sixty-one Moton High School students to attend classes at Kittrell College in North

Carolina, which also had a high school. By 1960, an estimated two hundred students attended school outside the county through this program. The Virginia Teacher’s

Association also found homes and schools for over one hundred students and offered to support even more. It was still hard to find parents willing to be separated from their children for such long periods. Some parents made their own arrangements, sending their children to families and friends to continue their education with people they knew. Even with these arrangements, some children could not tolerate the separation and returned home. Eight children did not return to the host families the second year.121

The needs of the Prince Edward families were extensive, and, of course, Fairfax did not work alone. Helen Baker worked as resident program director in Prince Edward

County. Baker, a devout Quaker, was an upbeat and extraordinary individual of personal courage, totally committed to education and civil rights. Before joining the AFSC in

120 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 122. Note: The number of children placed by the various efforts varies from author to author but the ranges are representative.

121 “The AFSC and School Desegregation,” Friends Journal, January 24, 2012, 2. www.friendsjournal.org/node/130.

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1960, she worked for the Southern School for Workers as a literacy program director.

Baker’s role was to engage the community’s various sectors, especially the Black community, and develop local leaders who would be “informed advocates for the public schools.”122 Her responsibility included identifying Whites to work with who supported the concept of quality, integrated public schools, a daunting task in the highly charged atmosphere of Farmville, Virginia. She saw her job as “taking the first awkward steps” toward breaking down hostility between the races.123 She did this through “carload conferences,” which were small encounters between two or three White women and the same number of Black women from outside the county.124 They took a driving tour of the area, visited the training centers, closed schools, and other facilities, and ended their meeting with a discussion over lunch. She also formed a Leadership Institute for the women who ran the training centers.125 She became a touchstone for many local women and teenagers in the area, especially when they just needed someone to talk with about their struggles without judgment.

One family that benefited from the AFSC’s placement program was the Griffins.

Their experience illustrates the emotional conflict experienced in deciding to allow one’s children to leave Prince Edward County for schooling and the ramifications on the family. At first, Adelaide Griffin attempted to home-school her children when the schools

122 “The AFSC and School Desegregation,” 56-57

123 Titus, Brown’s Battleground, 58.

124 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 127.

125 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 127.

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closed. With five – soon-to-be six – children out of school and her health declining, it became increasingly difficult. In order to help his wife, Griffin sent Adelaide and the children to a family in New Jersey, where the children attended public school, but they returned to Farmville after a year. More permanent relief came when the AFSC program found out-of-town placements for the three older children. Naja, Leslie, Jr., and Mignon lived with strangers in California and Massachusetts to continue their education. Over sixty years after the Prince Edward lockout, Naja Griffin Johnson shared that she and her siblings understood that they benefited from an education they would never have received in Prince Edward County. Despite being separated from their family: “We were the lucky ones. For others, the impact was lifelong. Some never went back to school.”126

The work of the many volunteers and the AFSC did much to hold the coalition of

Black families together throughout the long Prince Edward County struggle. The solutions offered and supported by many from outside the county validated for the Black community that their sacrifice was worth it. By the time the public schools reopened in

1964, many of the children from the original classes were young adults and some, like

Skip Griffin, joined in the last stages of the struggle, especially as it became more militant and began to intersect with King’s national protests.

Summary

Everywhere one turns, evidence exists of the importance of local women, teachers, and volunteers in the Brown cases. The list is long, and their contributions

126 Bonastia, Southern Stalemate, 127.

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varied, as did their tenure as activists, but the energy they brought while they were involved helped fuel the outcome. Some, like Esther Brown and Jean Fairfax, met sociologist Jean Van Delinder’s definition of a career activist. Such dedicated individuals were “persistent, committed individuals [who] make decisive contributions to collective action.”127 These women and others like them were, as Van Delinder suggested, “self- starting, self-directing, and self-sustaining in their activism,” and their careers extended beyond any one campaign or objective. For example, Brown’s interest in racial equality began with her Webb case involvement and continued until her death. In the interim, while staying closely aligned with the NAACP’s objectives, she also moved into other initiatives such as the fight to formalize Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices

Commission.128 After the Brown decision, she eventually channeled her activism through the “Panel of American Women,” an inter-faith organization that worked to improve inter-racial understanding. Brown served as its national coordinator until her death.

Historian Frank Adler suggested that Brown’s involvement was less motivated by religiosity and more by her search for a venue for continuing her fight against racial injustice.129

127 Jean Van Delinder, Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 90.

128 Franklin D. Roosevelt established The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) 1941 to enforce Executive Order 8802. The order required companies doing business with the Federal Government to establish hiring practices that prevented discrimination based on race or religion.

129 Frank J. Adler, Roots in a Moving Stream (Kansas City: Spangler Press,1972), 253.

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Jean Fairfax joined the Legal Defense Fund in 1965. In her position as director of the LDFs division of legal information and community service, she helped Black families wrestle with whether and how to enroll in White schools, where they would face uncertain hostility. She held the position from 1965 to 1984.130 While not an attorney,

Fairfax performed numerous services, including documenting White resistance to integration, helping in the War on Poverty by directing federal funds to families in need, and helping with cases involving discrimination against Black workers. Jack Greenberg wrote: “She became the most influential single staff member in determining the direction we took on such issues as the integration of Black colleges and which industries we should target in employment cases.”131 Fairfax retired from the LDF in 1984.

However, as demonstrated, most of the women critical to the five Brown cases’ success were not career activists. When viewed as a group, the immensely consequential impact of their contributions and their commonality of purpose becomes apparent. Each was motivated more by her personal troubles and less by the external factors and high ideals that energized the NAACP attorneys. Most did not think of themselves as activists at all. They were mothers, sisters, and neighbors who understood that White society would never willingly provide the benefits of democracy to their children without a fight and the protection of the law. For these women, White supremacy had their neighbors’ faces and names, making the fight more frightening and personal. For the sake of their

130 Katharine Q. Seelye, “Jean Fairfax, Unsung but Undeterred in Integrating Schools, Dies at 98,” New York Times, March 1, 2019.

131 Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 383.

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children and their community, Adelaide Griffin, Mattie De Laine, Lucinda Todd, Sara

Bulah, Eliza Briggs, and others challenged a color line drawn by their neighbors. Where their advocacy would eventually take them was still in the future. Clearly, the women fully appreciated the importance of their efforts on their immediate families and communities. Over time, as the Brown decision’s importance became obvious, most were immensely proud of their impact on the broader American racial landscape. So, while the

NAACP’s professional activists provided the tools to elevate the fight in such a way as to obtain lasting results, it was the mothers, wives, sisters, and the army of women volunteers that provided the gumption.

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“Segregation hits a child at a very important stage in life and when the state identified itself with segregation, it identified itself with its most bigoted citizens.”1

CHAPTER 5: THE CHILDREN: PROTESTERS AND VICTIMS

On Tuesday, November 20, 1952, Adkins High School senior class president John

Dudley addressed the student body over the school’s public-address system. His message,

“Carolyn Coefield has lost her red pocketbook. If anyone has found it, please return it to the office,” was not a public service announcement but a prearranged signal to the school’s 720 students to begin their planned boycott. As agreed, every student left school and headed for the recreation center on East Bright Street, carrying signs reading

“Freedom,” “Equal Rights,” and “Education,” in protest of the school board’s failure to keep its promises to build a new vocational school for Black students.2

The Adkins protest was not unique. As early as 1939, hundreds of Norfolk students marched to support a Black teacher terminated after bringing suit for salary discrimination. Black students across the South increasingly took matters into their own hands as they grew tired of waiting for their parents to solve the problem of their inadequate and unequal education.3 In another instance, in October 1947, most of the 300

1 “Testimony of Dr. Frederick Wertham,” Transcript of Testimony in Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, Gebhart v. Belton (Bulah), 87a.

2 Michael E. Ruane, “To Protest Segregation They Walked Out of Their Classrooms and Into History,” Washington Post, September 22, 2016.

3 August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “The Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action in Afro- American Protest: A Note on Historical Discontinuities,” in Along the Color Line:

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Black students in Hearne, Texas, boycotted their school for ten days. The school board ignored their parents’ protest against the overcrowded and inadequate use of army barracks and other temporary classrooms installed after the school burned in 1945.4 In

September 1948, 450 Black students in Gloucester and King County, Virginia, refused to register for classes when inspectors determined that their technical training school’s long- promised improvements remained incomplete.5 In Lumberton, North Carolina, approximately 300 Black children met and staged a parade through the town’s central business district, protesting the two Black schools’ poor conditions. A week later, 400 students launched a boycott demanding that the county board of commissioners initiate a school improvement program. The strike lasted nine days.6

Student strikes for better educational opportunities became quite common after

1954 and dominated the fight for equality during the King era. One just has to “Google”

“Student strikes,” and one finds many scholarly works about strikes, boycotts, and sit-ins, usually starting with the Montgomery Bus Strike and moving forward in time from there.

There were incidents of student activism occurring earlier than 1954, but the Brown

Explorations in the Black Experience, ed. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

4 “Pupils End High School Boycott,” The Kansas City Call, October 3, 1947.

5 “Refuse to Enroll at ‘Inadequate School,’” The Kansas Call, September 17, 1948.

6 “The Negro School,” The Burlington/Almanac Daily Times, October 14, 1946. Historian Margaret Edds states that “sociologist Christopher Bonastia identified fourteen school-related student boycotts between 1943 and 1951, including two in North Carolina,” Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson III, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2018), 204.

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decision gave legal foundations to protests, and the King movement encouraged these non-violent vehicles as a way to elevate a broad array of Black issues in the public’s consciousness. Scholarship on these early student protests is sparse, with much of the history found in old newspapers. One student strike that has received a good deal of academic attention was the student strike at Farmville High School in Prince Edward

County. As a result, a good deal of information is available detailing the strike and the ramifications.

“When they closed the schools, they might as well have taken those kids out and shot them. Their lives were ruined.”7

The Farmville strike is of interest to academics because it helped trigger real change, albeit at a significant cost to the participants. A cluster of well-researched books appeared between 2008 and 2012 attempted to document not only what happened in

Farmville but how it could happen and last so long. In 1996 journalist Bob Smith, author of They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951-1964, published first.8 He followed the county’s journey from segregation to forced integration and the creation of the Whites-only private school. Unfortunately, Smith’s comments in his

“Prelude” to the 2008 reprinted edition marred his analysis. In it, Smith celebrated that

“the Prince Edward County Public Schools had been fully desegregated for two decades

7 Burrell Robinson quoted by Barry Barkan, The Afro-American, March 22, 1969. Robinson was a popular White teacher at R.R. Moton High School. He was fired in 1969.

8 Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951-1964 (Farmville, VA: Robert Russa Moton Museum, 2008, originally published, 1996), Prelude, ix.

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and that this happened without incident and with some academic success.”9 He further stated that “the school system is considered by some to be a model for racial integration for the country.”10 Smith can be forgiven for his overstatement of the Farmville success as he admittedly did not live in the county and visited only after the 1996 publication. As will be seen, even when Smith wrote this, the Farmville public schools were still predominately Black.

Jill Ogline Titus provided a very different view of Blacks’ fight in Farmville in

Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists & the Struggle for Justice in Prince

Edward County, Virginia.11 Titus provided a poignant picture of the massive resistance

Blacks faced and the sacrifice they and their supporters made trying to obtain justice for

Farmville’s Black children. In 2012 sociologist Christopher Bonastia focused on unraveling White’s justification for closing the Prince Edward schools and the legal maneuvers employed to countermand their efforts in Southern Stalemate: Five Years

Without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia.12 Finally, in 2015, journalist Kristen Green explored her White family’s role in the Farmville closings, drawing also from her personal experience as a White child attending the Prince Edward

9 Smith, They Closed Their Schools,ix.

10 Smith, They Closed Their Schools, ix.

11 Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists and the Struggle for Justice in Price Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

12 Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years Without Public Education in Prince Edward County (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Academy after the public schools reopened.13 Although several of these works are not by academics, they are an essential part of Brown’s historiography because of the writers’ proximity to the events. Their different perspectives provided a solid, although sometimes conflicting, picture of Farmville, Virginia and the battle between its White and

Black citizens before and after the Brown decision.

High school students Carol Johns and fellow students Carrie and John Stokes initiated the strike in Farmville that drew such attention. Their sole purpose was to obtain a better building for the Black high school. Johns and her friends did not strike for integration, but when attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson made it a requirement before agreeing to take the case, they willingly went along. The student boycott led to the Davis v. Prince Edward County (1951) case and eventually to Brown v.

Board of Education (1954). In the process, Prince Edward County deprived its Black children of their education, and Barbara Johns fled the state after receiving death threats.

Barbara Johns was the daughter of Robert and Violet Johns and the niece of

Vernon Johns, an activist Baptist preacher mentioned previously (Chap.3). Robert’s and

Violet’s story was similar to many other Black families; migration north in search of work and then home to the South to be with family and finally to Washington D.C. during the war years. When the Army drafted Robert Johns, Violet Johns took her children home to Prince Edward County to live with her mother. She returned to her clerical job at the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., commuting the 168 miles from

Washington D.C. to Farmville to see her children when she could. After the war, Robert

13 Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, A Virginia Town, A Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

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built his family a new home and barn in Darlington Heights, about fifteen miles outside

Farmington, where Vernon Johns also owned a farm and a small store. During construction of the new home, the family lived in the back of Vernon John’s store and supplemented their income by selling gasoline, running the corn mill, and managing the store.14

The Robert R. Moton High School that Carol Johns and her sister Joan attended was an all-Black school about fifteen miles from their home. The small brick building is now home to Robert Russa Moton Museum, but the school was the only high school for

Black students in the county during the Davis case. The school was so crowded that the school board built temporary classrooms to accommodate the student overflow during

World War II.15 Supplies for building a permanent addition were unavailable during the war, so the school board built “temporary [structures] made of wood covered with heavy paper coated with tar...When it rained, the roofs leaked...[and they] were heated by potbellied [sic]wood stoves,” which expelled smoke and put out uneven heat.16

Barbara Johns knew that the school board told the Moton High School principal and the local Virginia Teacher’s Association (VTA) multiple times of its plans to build a new high school for the Black children, but nothing materialized. Author and lawyer

Terri Kanefield described how Johns became frustrated with the Whites’ false promises and the adults’ seeming acceptance of the delay. She took her complaints to her favorite

14 Teri Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Abrams Books, 2014), 13-18.

15 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School, 5-6.

16 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School, 5-6.

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teacher, Inez Davenport. Rather than give her a solution, Davenport asked Johns: “Why don’t you do something about it?”17 Disappointed in her teacher’s challenge, Johns, nonetheless, spent time thinking out solutions. Kainefield quoted Johns as saying: “I lay in my bed…and prayed for help. Whether in a dream or whether I was awake...a plan began to formulate in my mind, a plan I felt was divinely inspired.”18 The next day she put her plan in motion to convince student leaders to join her in a strike and demand the school board take action. Johns believed the strike’s publicity would leave the school board no option but to deliver on its long-delayed promise of a new high school.

After gathering all the students in the school auditorium, she reportedly gave a rousing speech to the 450 Moton students, convincing them that they must do something themselves if they wanted change. When she finished speaking, she walked out of the auditorium and out of the school, followed by her classmates. The students then called

Reverend Griffin and asked him to come to the school. Griffin arrived to find the students picketing the building. They solicited Griffin’s advice as to whether or not to involve their parents. Then Johns contacted the NAACP in Richmond, asking for legal help.

When Oliver Hill, NAACP attorney for Virginia, got her call, he advised her to go back to school and refused to come to Farmville. Johns then wrote a letter to the NAACP again asking for help, and Hill agreed to stop by on his way to another meeting. The strike was in its third day when Hill and Spottswood Robinson, III, arrived in Farmville.

17 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School, 6-8.

18 From Barbara Johns Papers quoted in Teri Kanefield, The Girl From the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Abrams Books, 2014), 12.

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They again told the students to go back to school. As Kanefield explained: “Quite simply,

Mr. Hill and Mr. Robinson believed that a rural backwater like Prince Edward County was not the place to wage a legal battle over school facilities.”19 Later, Hill acknowledged their reluctance. As Kanefield reported, Hill and Robinson both felt that

“such a battle would have a better chance in the cities, where the White community was less resistant to change.”20

When the students refused to surrender their strike, the NAACP lawyers explained that the organization no longer championed “separate-but-equal” cases.

Instead, they only supported cases focused on ending school segregation altogether. They would consider helping the students “only if their parents were solidly behind them, and only if the view was to end segregation in Prince Edward County.”21 Integration was a much bigger goal than Johns envisioned, but the students set out to garner their parents’ support. At a meeting at the First Baptist Church where Griffin was the minister, one- quarter of the county’s Black population met to hear Lester Banks, executive secretary of the NAACP’s Virginia State Conference, speak about their cause.22

Meanwhile, the Farmville Herald published what would be the first of many editorials against the Black community’s demands. Calling the student’s actions “ill- advised” and a “mass hookie,” the editor attributed the walk-out to the “lack of discipline

19 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School 26-30.

20 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School 26-30,

21 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School, 30-31.

22 Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School, 32.

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so obvious in the home, the church, the school, and in everyday philosophy of living.”23

As the case continued, Walls’s editorials became more vitriolic. Other than his diatribes in the editorial section, however, the newspaper paid no further attention to the Black community once the lawyers filed the lawsuit. Farmville’s Black population became invisible, at least in the local public record.

On Thursday, May 3, the NAACP filed a petition with the Prince Edward County school board demanding integration of the White schools.24 On Robinson’s and Hill’s advice, the students’ boycott ended May 7, 1951, two weeks after it began.25 Then, on

Wednesday, May 23, after the school board failed to respond to the petition, Spottswood

Robinson filed Davis v. Prince Edward County (1951), one of the five cases later included in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).26 The case dragged on for several years, and then after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954, Virginia fought the Brown decision for several more years. Anticipating the eventual outcome, local White leaders in Prince

Edward County prepared to hold to their oft-repeated threat to close the public schools and revert to a private school format.

After years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals finally set a deadline for adherence to the Brown directive of September 1959. Rather than

23 The Farmville Herald, April 25, 1951.

24 The demand was that the White schools be integrated. The county’s inferior Black schools would be closed. The NAACP understood that Whites would not send their children to schools in as poor a condition and as poorly equipped as the Black schools.

25 “Moton Students’ Claims Unjustified Board Feels Now,” The Farmville Herald and Leader, April 27, 1951.

26Davis v. Prince Edward County, Civ. A. No. 1333; 103 F. Supp. 337 (1952).

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integrate its schools, Prince Edward County delivered on its threat and closed all the public schools, not just the high school. In shuttering the twenty-one Black and White schools, 3000 students were locked out, about two-thirds of whom were Black. The schools remained closed until 1964. Despite the personal sacrifice suffered by the students and their parents, Southern Black youths’ separate acts of resistance helped propel Black America into the next phase of what Jacqueline Dowd Hall called “the movement of movements.”27

As described in Chapter 3, only about a third of the African-American children in the Prince Edward County schools could leave the county to attend school elsewhere. The majority remained. Many took advantage of the “occasional schooling in summer courses taught by out-of-county volunteers.”28 Others participated in “sporadic classes conducted by mothers, older teenagers and elderly schoolteachers in homes, church basements and tar-paper shacks,” according to Look Magazine journalist Joseph P. Blank.29

Charles Carter, fourteen years old at the time the schools closed, told a reporter: “I just began to learn to read and write when school closed. I don’t remember what I did for those four years. Mostly walked around. Sometimes caddied and cut lawns. I forgot how

27 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1234.

28 Joseph P. Blank, “The Lost Years: What Happened to the Children When Price Edward County, Virginia, Closed Its Public Schools?” Look Magazine, November 29, 1966. Copy without page numbers in the William Odum Collection, Longwood College. Box 1 Folder 3 Item 12.

29 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

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to read and write and spell and do arithmetic.”30 At the time of the interview, he was struggling to catch up and was considering dropping out altogether.

Seventeen-year-old Eunice Dove remembered, “I could see what was happening to myself and others in those four years. I sat around a lot and got tired. I felt lost.... Some kids never went back to school but I’m going to finish – and then I am going to leave this county.”31 Eunice admitted that her mother tried to encourage her to work on her studies, but her mother had seven other children who took her time and attention.

Even some of the children who could obtain an education elsewhere felt the closing’s effects, especially on their friends who were not so fortunate. Rodman Lee told the Look reporter: “When I got back here, I felt that closed schools closed people up.

Kids forgot how to work, learn, and get along with others.... They can’t put into words the things that are going on inside of them.”32

The school closure significantly impacted Dr. Linda Eanes Jefferson’s family. At the time, the family consisted of twenty-one children, five of whom had already graduated from high school before the school closed. The sixteen remaining children all suffered some impact on their education, depending on their age at the time. Nathaniel

Eanes remembered that some family members living outside of Farmville offered to take some of them in so they could continue their education, but his parents refused. Nathaniel told the interviewer that his father “could not send one-off to get an education without

30 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

31 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

32 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

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sending the whole family. So, he decided that we would stay home cause [sic] he could not afford [to] send us all out with different families to schools.”33

Dr. Jefferson described the aftermath: “When the public schools reopened in the fall of 1964, many students who had been forced from school five years earlier were beyond traditional school age.”34 After missing five years of school, many of these children chose not to re-enter school but continued working. According to Jefferson, they felt “ashamed of sitting in classrooms with students as much as five years their junior.”35

At the same time, as her research shows, children between ten and eleven “were entering a classroom for the first time at a great disadvantage or were placed in age- appropriate grades without the benefit of the first five years of formal preparation.”36

Vincent Eanes recalled: “Here I’m twelve years old, and they sent me to Worsham

Elementary School,” placed in a class with children much younger than himself.

Nathaniel Eanes also struggled to catch up. He finally graduated from high school at age twenty-three.37

33 Linda Eanes Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact of The Prince Edward County School Closing on One Family’s Educational Achievements and Occupational Choices in Adulthood: A Study in Recollective Memory” (Dissertation, PhD in Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University), 58-59.

34 Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact,” 58-59.

35 Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact,” 58-59.

36 Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact,” 3.

37 Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact, 60-61, 66.

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The experts who tested several hundred Prince Edward Black children after the schools reopened agreed. They reported that those between six and twelve years of age could not follow simple instructions or hold a pencil. Many of the teenagers could not read at a fourth-grade level, their intelligence scores were between fifteen and thirty points lower than their peers, and they suffered from low self-esteem. According to

Reverend Griffin, “some 400 to 500 [teenagers]...couldn’t read well enough to get any information from a school book,” a deficiency which he said “made school meaningless.”38

“It was a cause that was well worth the outcome.”39

In South Carolina, where the NAACP filed the Briggs case, the state and the

Clarendon County school board repeatedly threatened to close its schools before allowing

Black children to attend, pointing out that the Black children would suffer most. The

Black mothers of Clarendon County understood this truth and told Rev. De Laine: “Of course…If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have the same type of experiences as their parents had. We have never known the Whites to suffer as much as the colored people.”40

Even though Clarendon County did not act on its threat to close its schools,

Briggs had its victims too. Reverdy Wells, who helped organize the meeting at St. Mark’s

38 Jefferson, “The Perceived Impact,” 38

39 Willie “Chuck” Jenkins (2011).

40 J. A. De Laine, “Clarendon County Schools Must Be Closed Next Term,” Joseph A. De Laine Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library, crdl.usg.edu.

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church that challenged the parents to step up and support Rev. De Laine (See Chapter 3), graduated from the all-Black Scotts Branch High School in 1949. He was both class president and valedictorian. Even after he left Summerton, the long arm of Jim Crow found ways to limit Wells’s opportunity for upward mobility. Wells attended Allen

University for two years and then served in the armed services. Upon being discharged and while waiting for his high school transcript to be sent to Temple University, he began taking classes at Temple. When the Temple registrar received Wells’s transcript, the

Farmville administrators modified his grades from the high scores he earned to failing grades in retaliation for his support of Rev. De Laine.41 As a result, Temple did not accept him. Finally, in 1991 he received a valid, accurate copy of his transcript. Wells never graduated from college.

When Annie McDonald’s daughter, Rita, registered in the White school as a senior, she was determined to graduate. She told her parents that the White children harassed her, tearing up her papers or throwing away her books. When she got into a physical altercation with a White boy for tampering with her books, she was given detention for three days. Her father successfully demanded that the White boy receive the same punishment. Try as she might, though, Rita’s English grades grew worse and worse.

Finally, the United States Justice Department observer in the school investigated and determined that Rita’s teacher, upon instruction of the administration, falsified Rita’s scores to prevent her from graduating and walking with the White students. The plan was

41 Ophelia De Laine Gona, Dawn of Desegregation: J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 195.

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to force Rita into summer school from which she could receive a diploma without any special ceremony.”42

Robert Georgia, Jr., whose parents signed the Briggs petition, told J.A. De Laine,

Jr. that despite everything, he felt the effort was worth the sacrifices everyone made.

“Even though my brothers and sister may not have received a direct benefit by attending good schools, it has helped those after us.” Unfortunately, the legacy of racial hatred still permeates Summerton. Georgia went on to say that “here in Summerton, it looks like things are not much better than in 1949.”43

Joseph De Laine, Jr., who returned to South Carolina after retiring, felt the same.

In 2019 he told reporter Glenn Cook in town to evaluate changes since the Brown decision that “You would not believe the enmity I once had.” He said, “I would literally stop on the highway to spit on South Carolina’s ground before I left. That’s how much I hated the place.” Finally, however, his father’s and mother’s deaths stirred something in him, and he found he wanted to help. “That’s what my father did, and I needed to do something to honor him, even if I will never go back there to live.” He concluded by saying, “I don’t waste my time with hate at this point. Anger doesn’t help me anymore.”44

In a strange twist of fate, Joe Elliott, grandson of the named defendant in the

Briggs case, returned to Summerton after some years away teaching at a private Black

42 Annie McDonald as told to J.A. Delaine, Jr in Dubose, The Road, 114-115.

43 Dubose, The Road, 119.

44 Glenn Cook, “Segregation’s Legacy,” American School Board Journal, April 1, 2019. https://www.nsba.org/ASBJ/2019/April/Segregations-Legacy.

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school. Upon his return, he became the headmaster for Clarendon Hall, a private

Christian school built in Summerton in 1965 as part of the effort to avoid forced integration.45 Elliott tried to break down some of the racial barriers in the community by initiating sporting events with the Scotts Branch High School. “You would have thought the earth had turned upside down,” he told Cook.46 Soon Elliott noticed that people became distant and more formal. Then, in 2004, “I had a glass front door, and it sounded like a baseball bat hit it. I think it was children who probably heard their parents talking that were the culprits. But that was just the last straw,” he said. “ A lot of things were weighing heavily on me. It was just time to leave.”47 Like Rev. De Laine before him,

Elliott moved away from Summerton, and abandoned the home that was in his family for over 200 years. Sadly, for all the Black parents’ sacrifice during the Briggs case, their children and the children of their adversaries continued to suffer the ravages of segregation.

Today, according to House Majority Whip James Clyburn, “students in Clarendon

District #1 and scores of other school districts are little better off than they were before

Brown v. Board.”48 Clyburn points out that South Carolina dragged its feet complying with Brown and made no serious attempt to do so until the 1970s. Today the school

45 Cook, “Segregation’s Legacy,” np.

46 Cook, “Segregation’s Legacy,” np.

47 Cook, “Segregation’s Legacy,” np.

48 James E. Clyburn, “Op-ed: 50 years after desegregation ruling, SC schools remain separate and unequal,” The State, May 10, 2019. Note: The school district name changed from Clarendon County District 26 to Clarendon County District 1.

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district where Eliza and Harry Briggs lived is “95% minority and 100% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches.”49According to Clyburn, “Today many of our children are attending classes in crumbling buildings with inadequate facilities and equipment,” and Clyburn adds to the list the new deficiency of inadequate internet access.50

“The eyes of the world are on you, so behave.” 51

In Milford in southern Delaware, where eleven Black students initially integrated the high school, racial tensions erupted after what appeared to be a quiet, auspicious start.52 By October 1, spurred on by Bryant William Bowles, Jr., and his newly formed

National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), the community experienced “demonstrations, threats of violence, bomb threats at the school, school boycotts, [and] cross burnings.” Other disruptions “impaired the quality of public education in Milford for years.”53

49 Clyburn, “Op-ed”, np.

50 Clyburn, “Op-ed”, np.

51 Pauline Dyson quoted in speech delivered by Virginia Tryon Smilack, November 18, 1997, Papers of Collins Sietz, Wilmington Historical Society.

52 The students were Kenneth Baynard, Leo Blue, Orlando Camp, Charles Fleming Jr., Eugene Harris, Irene Pettyjohn, Lilliam Simmons, Madalene Staten, Annie Ruth Thompson, Edna Turner Sharp and Ronald Vann. Their names are captured in a memorial plaque in the lobby of the Milford School commemorating the event. They became known as the Milford Eleven.

53 Orlando J Camp and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven: Integration Fears Robbed Hope from Eleven Black Students. 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Cedar Tree Books, 2013), 43.

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One young Black woman attending Milford, Edna Turner, remembered her history teacher’s racism. She told Orlando Camp, author and one of the “Milford

Eleven,” that “she remember[ed] feeling ‘so very alone.’ She went to the back of the class and sat all alone.”54 She went on to tell Camp: “‘I was not introduced to my classmates. There was not one friendly teacher. I took my lunch alone, and there was not one friendly face in the cafeteria.’”55 As Camp wrote: “We were just eleven country kids with no outward signs of hostility or animosity, no chips on our shoulders, and we weren’t strutting into school. We were not trying to be Black Panthers, and we were not grabbing the microphone. We were just trying to get an education.”56

Another Milford student, Lillian Simmons, told Camp that she was afraid to go to an all-White school. “She wondered,” Camp wrote, “‘Are we going to get through this?’

She remembers that she was determined not to give up no matter what nasty names they called us.”57 Irene Pettyjohn was also frightened and told Camp how “she would run past the crowd gathered outside the school because there were so many White women and men screaming out to her...to go back where they came from.” After a policeman escorted her safely to the front door, “protestors would spit on her and call her the “N” word.”58 She confessed her relief when they all went back to the all-Black schools.

54 Camp and Kee, Milford Eleven, 43.

55 Camp and Kee, Milford Eleven, 43.

56 Camp and Kee, Milford Eleven, 44.

57 Camp and Kee, Milford Eleven, 155.

58 Camp and Kee, Milford Eleven, 162.

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As previously discussed, in northern Delaware integration started two years before the Brown decision in Claymont and Hockessin, locations of the Belton and Bulah cases and went fairly smoothly.59 One woman credited by parents and students alike for facilitating a smooth transition was Pauline Dyson. Dyson was a teacher in the one-room

State Line School in Claymont. Her students were children of Blacks who worked in the local steel mills. Dyson was one of the local Blacks that Superintendent Stahl approached to help garner support from the Black community for integrating the Claymont schools.

Dyson not only worked with Stahl and the NAACP on the case, but she also helped prepare the children for the transition to the integrated school.60

The Claymont and Hockessin parents were proud of how calmly the community managed the transition from segregated to integrated schools, but the children’s memories of transitioning vary. Joan Anderson wrote that “I felt comfortable being there.

I had new friends and enjoyed the many activities. I remember visiting the home of one of my friends. Her parents were very nice, and that put me at ease.”61 In contrast, Marlene

Saunders recalled that White children at Claymont called her names, threw spitballs, and

59 Delaware State News, September 1954.

60 Pauline Dyson quoted in speech delivered by Virginia Tryon Smilack, November 18, 1997, Papers of Collins Sietz, Wilmington Historical Society.

61 “Delaware: Belton v. Gebhart,” Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Topeka: University of Kansas Libraries, 2018), 19.

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would not let her sit on the bus.62 Shirley Bulah (Stamp) did not recall Whites’ animosity as a child, but she never forgot the Black community’s scorn. She told reporter Sean

O’Sullivan in 2003 that Black students “taunted her, stole her books, and pulled her hair.”63 She recalled one of her Black teachers saying to her, “I don’t know why your mother is doing this. We don’t want change at 107 [the name of the school].” In contrast, she remembered her first day at the White school and how welcome her teacher made her feel.64

Bernice Byrd Couch transferred from the State Line School to Claymont. She recalled that, as they were leaving the small elementary school, Dyson told them: “The eyes of the world are on you, so behave.”65 Additionally, she told them “that their behavior in high school would affect all colored children everywhere...I told them to remember that the White children would have a problem of adjustment too.”66 Couch’s other first memory of the move from State Line to Claymont was how big the building was. She remembered being intimidated by its size.

62 Sean O’Sullivan, “She Shaped History,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 23, 1996.

63 Sean O’Sullivan, “She Shaped History,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 23, 1996.

64 O’Sullivan, “She Shaped History.” The school for Blacks was referred to as 107-C. “C” indicated “colored.”

65 Edward Kenney, “Pioneers Honor Claymont’s Role in Integration,” The Wilmington News Journal, September 19, 2004. Jim Parks, “Claymont’s Big Part in Desegregation is Remembered,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 23, 1996.

66 Pauline Dyson quoted in speech delivered by Virginia Tryon Smilack, November 18, 1997, Papers of Collins Sietz, Wilmington Historical Society.

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Bernice Byrd also remembered her experience at Claymont as positive, although she did acknowledge being frightened initially. When she entered Claymont, she was eleven and the only Black seventh-grader. For the rest of her time at Claymont, she was the only Black student in her class, though there were other Blacks in the school.67 Joan

Anderson said, “she felt more like just a kid going to high school than someone making history.”68 Charles Hill agreed. “We didn’t think it was that big a deal back then,” he said.69

Lois Mae and Lorraine Williams had unhappy memories of changing schools.

“White friends who the week before had run in and out of their homes...now would not speak to them, let alone play in their yards,” she recalled.70 In particular, Lorraine remembered how hearing the “N” word applied to her for the first time affected her with a deep desire to reply in kind. “We didn’t know.”71

In contrast, Lois Mae Johnson and her sister Lorraine Rivera were thrilled about their change in school. They described how they “discovered another world in that school

67 Esteban Parra, “Commemoration of Color in Claymont.” The Wilmington News Journal, November 19,1997.

68 Robin Brown, “Civil Rights Pioneers Honored in Claymont,” The Wilmington News Journal, April 25, 2007

69 Jim Parks, “Claymont’s Big Part in Desegregation is Remembered,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 23, 1996.

70 Beth Miller and James Merriweather, “After Desegregation, Students Endured an Ugly New World,” The Wilmington News Journal, May 17, 2004.

71 Miller and Merriweather, “After Desegregation,” np.

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up the hill...The geography books – everything was in mint condition.”72 They further remembered that “All the pages were there, and there were [sic] no scribbling. We thought we were in luxury. It was like a palace.”73 The Black children’s memories were varied and appeared encouraging. While there were some unfortunate incidents, there were also positive ones providing hope that with time, the discomfort of the parents, children, and teachers would disappear and the attention return to education.

Unfortunately, thirty years later, education sociologist Russel W. Irvine and professor of multicultural education Jacqueline Jordan Irvine analyzed the impact of integration on Black children, and their conclusion was disheartening. They argued that

Black schools with Black teachers operating in a Black community provided benefits that integration destroyed. In essence, when Mrs. Dyson told her students that “the eyes of the world are on you,” she charged them, as representatives for their race, to make their parents and their community proud. This was a heavy burden to lay on elementary and high school children.

The Irvines argued that the Black community lost its sense of cohesiveness and self-pride with the advent of integration. They point to an article by educational psychologist Ronald A. Krol, who “found there was no statistically significant research from 1955 – 1977 that showed that desegregation influenced [B]lack children’s

72 Miller and Merriweather, “After Desegregation,” np.

73 James Merriweather and Beth Miller, “Brown: Desegregation Reactions Varied in State,” The Wilmington News Journal. Is there a date for this article?

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achievement positively.”74 By 2002 things looked more promising. Ronald F. Ferguson and Jal Mehta reported progress in narrowing the gap among social groups since Brown, although it remained large. They went on to state that “the nation’s future depends fundamentally on the degree to which schools and communities can raise skill levels among children from all racial, ethnic and socioeconomic” groups.75 An even more recent study by historian of economic policy, Richard Rothstein, attributed much of the learning gap to social and economic disadvantages. Rothstein argued that most disadvantaged

Black children attend segregated schools because they live in high-poverty, segregated neighborhoods, which exacerbated the learning gap.76 Rothstein advocated for economically integrated schools where disadvantaged Black students can associate with more privileged students citing evidence that this form of integration helps lower the achievement gap for Black students. “As long as children’s hearts and minds are not nurtured in ways that propel them toward their potential in whatever schools they

74 Ronald Kohl, “A Meta Analysis of the Effects of Desegregation on Academic Achievement,’ Urban Review 12 (1980): 211-224, quoted in Russel W. Irvine and Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, “The Impact of the Desegregation Process on the Education of Black Students: Key Variables,” The Journal of Negro Education, 52, no.4 (Autumn,1983): 421.

75 Ronald F. Ferguson with Jal Mehta, “Why Racial Integration and Other Policies Since Brown V. Board of Education Have Only Partially Succeeded at Narrowing the Achievement Gap,” in Achieving High Educational Standards for All: Conference Summary (2002), (The National Academies Press: Open Book,2002), www.nap.edu/read/10256.

76 Richard Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap, Segregated Schools, and Segregated Neighborhoods – a Constitutional Insult,” Race and Social Problems 6, no. 4 (December 2014): 1.

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attend,” Rothstein argued, “the work that Brown v. Board of Education and other desegregation cases began remains undone.”77

It is clear that the children’s experiences varied, heavily influenced by their new teachers’ behavior and the White students they encountered. There is evidence in these reflections that not all the children had unhappy experiences, but many did. Some of the children were afraid of Whites. In Milford, where they faced mobs of screaming, angry

White parents as they entered the building, the experiences were traumatic. This was the type of ugliness from which Naja Griffin Johnson’s mother tried to protect her children.

Fear of this sort of White racism played its part in keeping Prince Edward County Blacks from willingly sending their children to White families to be educated when the schools closed. For other Black parents, their life experiences informed their decision to send their children to White schools. They accepted that their children would struggle, believing in the long-term positive benefits.

“The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.”78

Historian Marybeth Gasman points out that the Supreme Court acknowledged the adverse effects of segregation only within an all-Black context.79 Brown scholarship also focused predominately on understanding the impact on Black students engaged in the

77 Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap,” 194.

78 Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, (1466-1536) in Quotefancy.com.

79 Marybeth Gasman, Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), 1.

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real-life process of integrating the public schools. The White children who also had to transition to new school culture and deal with the tensions adults created received minimal attention. For example, in Farmville, equal public education was also denied to poor White children when the public schools closed. Still, although their parents could not afford to send them to the new private schools for Whites, even when receiving state vouchers, poor Whites supported the county’s decision to close the schools. At least 130

White families, comprising 247 children, said, when surveyed, that they would prefer their children go to public schools but only if they would not be “tremendously outnumbered by the Negroes.”80 Look magazine reported: “In this low-income-level, tobacco-and-pulpwood area...many White families find it a hardship…to send their children to the Academy, where tuition fees average about $300 per year per child.”81

Journalist Joseph Blank explained that families “have had to second-mortgage their farms and other property,” but more often than not, their children too were not getting an education.82 “‘There’s no question that we have White children who are not in school,’” a

Longwood College professor told the journalist, “‘You see them around farms during

80 Joseph Blank, “The Lost Years,” Look Magazine, November 29, 1966. The county established The Academy as a private segregated school after closing the public schools. Tuition was paid by vouchers provided by the state. The school board offered to set up a similar arrangement for the Black children but the parents refused.

81 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

82 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

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school hours. The families won’t admit they’re not in school, out of shame and reluctance to be heard complaining.’”83

According to an article in The Afro-American, three years after the Farmville schools reopened, 98.5 percent of the 1661 children in the Prince Edward public schools were Black.84 The article continued to explain that “with the exception of the children of a teacher at Hampden Sydney College, who sends his children to the public schools out of conviction, the few Whites who send their children to public school do so because their parents cannot afford the private schools.”85 When poor Whites did attend the public schools, the counselors guided them toward classes that would prepare them for the workforce, in much the same way as they guided Black students toward industrial skills and away from college preparatory classes. As they did with Black children, educators assumed that the White students of lower socioeconomic status could never afford – and did not aspire to – higher education.86

The quality of the rural schools that served the poor Whites was often as poor as the Black rural schools. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Harry Ashmore reported that

“In every state [in the South] there are counties in which the best White school by any

83 Blank, “The Lost Years,” np.

84 Barry Barkan, “Then Years Later: No Catching Up – Black Students in Prince Edward County Remain Victims of School Closing in 1959,” The Afro-American, March 22, 1969, William Odum Collection. Longwood College, Box 1 Folder 3, Item 3, 1.

85 Based on my research, I believe that this professor was William Odum.

86 Alesia Montgomery, Robert Rossi and others, Educational Reforms and Students at Risk: A Review of the Current State of the Art. U.S. Department of Education: October, 1993. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED364649.pdf.

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standard of comparison is inferior to the worst Negro schools in the larger cities.”87 The funding gap was significant and increased further with building consolidation designed to improve the rural schools’ offerings by concentrating students in fewer buildings.88 The strain on rural White schools increased as White populations moved to the cities, and funding shifted to White schools in urban areas.89

When White agricultural workers migrated to the urban areas in the 1930s and

1940s, housing patterns often forced them into school districts that were overcrowded and underfunded, although not to the extent of the Black urban schools.90 Their economic challenges also more closely mirrored those of the Black migrants than the White middle class. Funding for public education using property taxes presented the same challenges for poor Whites as for poor people of color. Access to schools and the often inferior quality of the instruction produced the same illiteracy levels in poor Whites as poor

Blacks and further alienated poor Whites from the mainstream economic opportunities.

Additionally, many of the techniques used to intentionally disenfranchise Blacks impacted Whites who could not pass the literacy tests to vote or afford the poll taxes, although other Whites often made exceptions for them. Illiteracy left them outside the political mainstream as well. Disenfranchisement robbed poor Whites of their right to vote as clearly as it robbed Blacks of the same. Only White privilege continued serving

87 Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the School (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 110.

88 Ashmore, The Negro, 111.

89 Ashmore, The Negro 118.

90 Ashmore, The Negro, 118.

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poor Whites, and they clung to every vestige of White supremacy it provided. Finding themselves positioned unfavorably between Blacks and the White middle class, poor

Whites became distrustful of government and resentful of those non-Whites against whom they competed for work and social position. Sixty-five plus years after Brown,

American public schools are still largely segregated, at first by class and then by race within class.

Researchers only recently began investigating the adverse effects of segregation and educational disparity on impoverished Whites as well as Blacks. Table 2 below demonstrates the correlation between education and economic security. This correlation

Table 2: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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was as real in the Brown era as it is now and as accurate for poor Whites as for people of color.91 To realize Brown’s promise all segments of American society must benefit. For now, sixty-five plus years after Brown, American public schools are still largely segregated, first by class and then by race within class.

In a 2017 article in the Hechinger Report, journalist Andre Perry began by stating that poor Whites are just realizing “they need education equity as much as Black folks.”92

The Council of Chief State School Officers defines equity in education as “students not being limited by their circumstances with regard to the ‘resources and education rigor’ necessary for success.”93 Perry argues that “apart from racism, poor White folk have been treated like poor Black people for decades [when it comes to educational equity].”94 Like other underprivileged sectors of society, less affluent Whites must fight for the resources they need, and “a cheap voucher to a low-performing school isn’t the same as giving schools that low-income students attend the resources needed for their success.”95

Acknowledging that in the politically charged atmosphere that drives American educational policy, conversations about achieving equity for all students are challenging to sustain, Perry’s article at least indicates that slowly attention is being paid to the issue.

91 Andre Perry, “Poor Whites Just Realized They Need Education Equity as Much as Black Folk, The Hechinger Report (April 11, 2017), np. www.hecingerreport.org.

92 Perry, “Poor Whites,” np.

93 Perry, “Poor Whites,” np.

94 Perry, “Poor Whites,” np.

95 Perry, “Poor Whites,” np.

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“A rising tide lifts all boats,” and improvement in schools for low-income Whites cannot help but benefit the other minority groups that share those schools.96

Summary

The combined stories of the children of the Brown struggle highlight a significant historical event that is perhaps under-appreciated. As youthful activists, the students’ part in the drama was not just to boycott or picket for change. Their most significant role was to take that first fateful step across the color line into a previously all-White world and

“here be dragons.”97 They were inside the beast their parents raised them to avoid if not to fear. Supposedly, their lives and the lives of other Black youths promised to improve, but it was they who had to make it work. As Mrs. Dyson warned them, all eyes were on them. As a result, the children were both the victims and the beneficiaries of the desegregation struggle. They were required to assimilate into the culture of the White schools and find a place for themselves in the new social landscape. Inside the school buildings, they were without the protection of their parents or Black teachers. They were on their own, and only they could make it work.

96 President John F. Kennedy used this expression in several speeches but the original source, according to Kennedy’s speech writer, Ted Sorenson, was the slogan of the New England Council. Ted Sorensen, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 227.

97 Medieval map makers painted pictures of dragons and sea monsters on unexplored parts of the ocean, often with the expression, usually in Latin, hic sunt dracones, indicating danger.

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How the cultural upheaval in school affected the children was a function of their personalities, how well prepared they were for what they encountered, and how much protection from abuse White teachers and administrators provided. As evidenced by the memories cited above, the results were mixed. Some had positive experiences and were thankful for the opportunity. Some did not. Some received a better education as a result.

Some did not. The day-to-day implementation of Brown was the essential last step in the saga. What is true is that these young Black activists were the only ones able to run the final mile in the long race for equal education. They did what the moment asked of them, and history owes them a debt.

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“I am tired of trying to save the White man’s soul.”1

CHAPTER 6: THE LAWYERS AND THE JUDGES

Illus. 13: Brown attorneys on the steps of the Supreme Court. Image courtesy of The Crisis. (Left to Right) Charles Scott, James M. Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, Frank Reeves, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis Redding, U. Simpson Tate, and George E.C. Hayes. Robert L Carter is missing.2

1 Thurgood Marshall, May,1951, quoted in Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (New York: Random House, 1998), 199.

2 U. Simpson Tate was the attorney for the Southwest Region, which included Texas, for the NAACP. While not one of the attorneys in the five cases he was a respected advisor to the legal team. Frank Reeves was a Howard Law School alum and also served the NAACP in an advisory capacity.

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Anyone who doubts Thurgood Marshall’s sincere belief in the absolute necessity of integrating the public schools’ needs but read the transcript of the Texas Sweat v.

Painter (1950) trial in which Marshall told the U. S. Supreme Court: “I want this court to know that I don’t care how equal those schools are [the University of Texas and Prairie

View], if they were exact duplicates, with the same faculty and to the ounce in cement.

They are segregated and cannot be equal in any sense of the word.” 3He went on to say,

“We want governmentally enforced segregation destroyed.”4

By the time of this encounter, Marshall had abandoned Houston’s “top-down” strategy and committed to a frontal attack on Plessy and legalized segregation. The organization announced its change in strategy in June 1947 at its 38th Annual Conference and began positioning new cases to be able to argue the constitutionality issue while the

Texas case wound through the appeal process.5 Meanwhile, in Texas, Marshall fought on two fronts. As he wrestled with the entrenched Jim Crow attitudes of the Texas legal system, he also became involved in open debate on the new strategy with Texas newspaperman Carter Wesley. Carter Wesley owned the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper with a multi-state distribution. Wesley was an influential member of the Black community in the Lone Star state. As early as 1946, Wesley told Texas readers, “it can be safely said that the majority of Negroes want adequate and sufficient opportunities for

3 Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).

4 “Segregation Stories Near Climax,” The Houston Informer, April 8, 1950.

5 “Memorandum to Mr. Wilkins from Mr. Marshall – October 28,1947,” General Office Files 1940-1955, II: Box A73 Folder 7, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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education and are not presently geared for an anti-segregation fight.”6 Wesley and

Marshall debated the issue in an animated exchange of letters over some months, but when the NAACP announced its new strategy in June 1947, Wesley took the private debate with Marshall public. Wesley argued for a dual approach; fight for integration if you like, but at the same time “fight to equalize any schools the Whites insist upon building separately for Negroes.”7 In the editorial, Wesley challenged Marshall to respond, and he did. In a speech before the Texas Conference of Branches in September

1947, Marshall stated, “It no longer takes courage to fight for mere equality in a separate school system.”8 What was needed, according to Marshall, was direct action. “The only possible method of success is to take a firm position in opposition to segregation. You cannot accomplish this by giving lip service to the opposition...and then continuing to build monuments to this segregation in the form of...‘Jim Crow DeLuxe.’”9

In Advancing Democracy, historian Amilcar Shabazz explored the growing fissure between those like Wesley, who advocated for interracial conciliation and

6 Carter Wesley, “What We Want in Education: An Editorial,” The Houston Informer, October 27,1946, www.houseofrussell.com/legalhistory/sweat.

7 Carter Wesley, “We Query the NAACP: An Editorial,” Houston Informer, August 23, 1947.

8 “Preliminary Statement of Thurgood Marshall at Meeting of the Texas State Conference of Branches at Denison, Texas – September 5, 1947,” General Office Files, 1940-1955, II: Box A73 Folder 7, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

9 “Preliminary Statement of Thurgood Marshall at Meeting of the Texas State Conference of Branches at Denison, Texas – September 5, 1947,” General Office Files, 1940-1955, II: Box A73, Folder 7, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. .

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separatism, and those like Marshall, who lobbied for total economic and political equality.10 Members of the rank-and-file aligned with the different sides, but the NAACP had the upper hand and continued to push its agenda. The internal tension between the two competing ideologies was evident in each of the Brown cases but was not new. From its founding, there was discussion, sometimes heated, of the best approach to achieve

Black equality that would eventually lead to the final resignation of W.E.B. Du Bois from the NAACP in 1948.

An analysis of the five Brown cases reveals that Marshall, too, was often conflicted. Except for Bolling, each of the other four cases included an equalization argument, seemingly as a backup should the direct attack on the constitutionality of segregation not move the justices. The practical reality of Marshall’s approach, which was off-putting for some Blacks, was that, should the lawyers be successful in overturning Plessy, not only would Blacks be allowed to go to school with Whites, as

Black-only schools closed, they would have to go to school with Whites. Blacks of the separatist persuasion found that eventuality unappealing. Thus, the practical ramifications of a sweeping NAACP victory would be born, not by the New York attorneys but by the membership. Marshall did not seem aware of any concerns of this nature. Journalist and author Juan Williams argued that “in truth [Marshall] did not always focus on individual soldiers in the battle.”11

10 Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 44.

11 Williams, Thurgood Marshall, 185.

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“The issue . . . is crystal clear, and we have stated that from the very beginning .... The attack is upon segregation and nothing else.”12

While the legal strategy of the NAACP was not always clearly defined, its tool kit was. According to historian Brett Gadsden, the NAACP saw “litigation – opposed to direct action – as the most viable [and permanent] mode of Black insurgency.”13 Charles

Houston, Dean of the Howard Law School and the first special counsel of the NAACP, envisioned the civil rights lawyers as “‘a vanguard and protector of the rights of the masses’ and believed they should ‘anticipate, guide and interpret group advancement’ to cultivate a more human world.”14 In the 1940s, however, qualified Black lawyers in the

South were often few and far between. The ones available usually did not have the luxury of specializing and were often overcommitted. Black attorneys handled every kind of case, big or small, civil or criminal. One day they drew up a will, the next day defended an accused murderer in criminal court, and the day after argued an appeal before a federal judge. Additionally, most Black lawyers covered large areas of a state or even multiple states to support as much of the Black community as possible.

At the same time that the need for Black attorneys was growing, the numbers were declining. Where in 1900, there were 326 Black lawyers in the eleven original states

12 Thurgood Marshall quoted in “Segregation Stories Near Climax,” The Houston Informer, April 8, 1950.

13 Brett Gadsden, “‘He Said He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus’: The Shifting Terms of the Challenge to Segregated Public Education, 1950-1954,” The Journal of African American History 90, no. 1 and 2 (Winter, 2005): 12.

14 Gadsden, “Shifting Terms,” 12.

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of the Confederacy; by 1940, there were only 157.15 The decline in the number of Black attorneys admitted to the bar was attributable to pressure applied on them by the Klu

Klux Klan and the restrictions on their ability to practice prevalent in the Jim Crow states.

Table 3: Number of Black Lawyers in Old Confederate States: 1880-194016

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 Alabama 4 13 6 12 11 4 4 Arkansas 5 30 27 20 26 16 8 Florida 8 13 13 14 13 10 10 Georgia 6 17 33 18 27 14 8 Louisiana 7 30 15 13 8 8 6 Mississippi 12 26 24 21 14 6 3 North Carolina 6 14 25 19 27 27 27 South Carolina 22 (15) 23 29 17 14 13 5 Tennessee 15 35 73 43 33 26 16 Texas 5 12 28 33 31 20 22 Virginia 18 38 53 37 52 57 48 ToTAL 108 251 326 247 256 201 157

Source: W. Lewis Burke, All for Civil Rights: African American Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868-1968 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 3.

As law professor W. Lewis Burke pointed out, of the few lawyers “that practiced

[defense] law became even stronger advocates for civil liberties...Any Black defense lawyer was a civil rights lawyer,” by default.17 Some scholarship focused specifically on

15 W. Lewis Burke, All for Civil Rights: African American Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868-1968 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 3.

16 According to Lewis, there is no official record for fifteen of the twenty-two South Carolina lawyers in 1880 but were included in totals based on secondary sources.

17 Burke, All for Civil Rights, 3.

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the development of early civil rights lawyers emerged in the past twenty years. In All for

Civil Rights: African American Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868-1968, law professor W.

Lewis Burke provided the first book-length look at the struggles of the 168 Black South

Carolinian lawyers admitted to the Bar between 1868 and 1968.18 Burke, however, pointed to J. Clay Smith, Jr.’s work, Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer,

1844-1944, as the most significant study of Black lawyers.19 In Burke’s opinion, this was true, not just because Smith’s work provided an encyclopedia of Black attorneys by state up to 1944 but also because of the extensive research necessary to briefly describe each lawyer’s struggle in the field. Professor Burke’s and historian Belinda Gergel’s work,

Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy, combined input from multiple sources to produce a nuanced biography of this influential South Carolina jurist.20

Kenneth W. Mack took a similar approach to Smith’s by combining a series of biographical essays in Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer in order to understand the dynamics of Black lawyers who worked at a time that civil rights law was in its infancy.21

18 Burke, All for Civil Rights.

19 J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1944-1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

20 William Lewis. Burke and Melinda F. Gergel, Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

21 Kenneth W. Mack, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

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These scholars demonstrate that as civil rights litigation increased, the need for lawyers willing to go up against their locality’s cultural norms also increased. In states like Delaware, where there was only one Black attorney, or South Carolina, where there were only five Black lawyers in 1940, not all of whom took civil rights cases, protecting the Black community was a daunting task and a lonely one. In studying the small group of lawyers involved in the civil cases that made up Brown, one realizes that they were a group of individuals whose commitment to Black civil rights was not casual. These were activist lawyers in the mold of (often molded by) Charles Houston. Most, although not all, were Howard Law School graduates trained to be civil rights lawyers. The Brown cases in which they became involved were not the first battles they fought, nor would they be the last.22

The network of activist lawyers in place by 1940 resulted from the long-term strategy of Charles Houston to maximize Black legal resources. Houston designed a multi-layered hierarchal organizational structure for the NAACP’s legal team that became the legal phalanx that forced open the road to the Supreme Court. The first layer was the national office with its small full-time staff made up of Thurgood Marshall, Jack

Greenberg, Robert L. Carter, Franklin Williams, and Constance Baker Motley.23 Before turning the legal department’s reigns over to Marshall, Charles Houston established the

22 For more about Charles Houston and his impact on Howard University Law School and the lawyers who graduated under his tutelage, see Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

23 Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 37.

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tradition of designating dedicated lawyers as state or local counsel. Examples include

Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson for Virginia, Louis Redding for Delaware, Howard

Boulware for South Carolina, Elisha Scott for Kansas, Carl Johnson for Missouri, and others. In addition to handling cases for the NAACP branches in their states, these attorneys comprised an advisory committee and a link between national and state initiatives.

The third layer was the local lawyers, whose expertise varied. While perhaps not as skilled, they were good foot soldiers, fighting in the trenches and doing the vital leg work. For example, in Kansas, Charles Bledsoe served as the NAACP attorney for the local branch but was weak in the NAACP strategy’s constitutional nuances. The Scott brothers were also not as polished attorneys as those in New York, though they thought themselves to be. Battling at the U.S. Supreme Court level took exceptional talent, training, and personal style. Bledsoe and the Scotts did not have the court presence or experience to handle arguments before the Court, but they were essential in dealing with the tactical elements at the local level.

Most importantly, the Black communities trusted the local attorneys, who played essential roles in keeping the cases’ participants and supporters engaged and focused on the end game. Greenberg explained, given the scarcity of Black attorneys in southern states willing to take civil rights cases, “Black lawyers operating at the local level were essential to civil rights claimants.”24 As Greenberg wrote: “We…could have done

24 Greenberg also explained, however, that “the few Blacks who could afford to hire lawyers often wouldn’t hire Black lawyers because they anticipated that the courts wouldn’t treat them fairly,” Greenburg, Crusaders, 37-38, quotation on 38.

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nothing without the lawyers on the frontlines in the South.”25 Each lawyer understood his or her place on the team and generally played their positions well. They did not always consult with the NAACP before taking on cases but asked for assistance when the cases grew beyond their ability to manage or appeared to be headed for appeal at the federal level. If the case was relevant to the organization’s goals and the national office had the manpower, the NAACP might agree to assist with a case if not take it over completely, as was done with the Topeka case. Greenberg seemed to have a genuine appreciation of the challenge the local lawyers faced. He acknowledged: “Without this group of trailblazing

Southern Black lawyers, who had to temper their resentment with humor and too often swallowed their bitterness altogether, we never could have accomplished what we did.”26

Both the local and state lawyers were free agents and looked to their clients for compensation. Some on the NAACP legal advisory team were on retainer. Spottswood

Robinson, for example, was paid $4,000 per year.27 Others received compensation from the national office based on time and expenses.28 More often than not, even they ended

25 Greenberg, Crusaders, 37-38.

26 Greenberg, Crusaders, 41.

27 Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund – June 9,1947,” “General Office File 1940- 1955,” II: Box A73, Folder 11, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

28 In his confirmation hearing for U.S. Circuit Judge, in 1961 Marshall explained the payment arrangements as follows: “We have regional counsel on a retainer in several areas of the country, and they are on retainer for the purpose of keeping us advised of any possible violation of civil rights, particularly against Negroes in this area…and if they are requested to give help to any matter that is referred to my office.” United States Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Congress, Volume 108, Part 14, January 1, 1962, U.S. Government Printing Office.

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up working mainly pro bono for the plaintiffs. All of the state counsels also had private practices that were their primary source of income. The NAACP always looked to the local branch, if not the plaintiffs, to pay its fees and expenses but was frequently disappointed. Money was always an issue and a tension point between the national office and the plaintiffs and between the local attorneys and their clients.

The South Carolina NAACP’s financial statement for October 1, 1951, through

September 30, 1952, provided an example of the level of compensation that attorneys received from the NAACP.29 During that year, which saw significant activity in the

Clarendon County case, Boulware received $516.83 from the state coffers, Robinson received $50, Marshall, even though employed by the national office, received $100 probably for expenses, and W.B. James received $50. Even in 1952, these were not substantial amounts.

The attorneys in Virginia borrowed from Houston’s organizational design to create a similar load-sharing arrangement for themselves. In the early 1940s, Oliver Hill helped organize the Virginia State Conference Legal Staff – an offshoot of the Whites- only Old Dominion Bar Association – comprised of Black attorneys across Virginia. The lawyers, located in different parts of the state, provided services so that no one attorney had to travel all over the state to handle civil rights cases. For example, Martin A. Martin lived in Danville, Roland Eley was in Richmond in the central part of the state, Victor

29 “Financial Statement-South Carolina NAACP Defense Fund, 10/1/’51-9/30/’52,” Modjeska Simkins Papers,1909-1952: Topical Papers, NAACP 1951-1952, University of South Carolina, https://docsouth.unc.edu.

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Ashe on the coast in Norfolk, and so on. Local lawyers affiliated with these primary attorneys to further reduce the workload. The only Black female attorney to join the

Association, Lavinia Marian Fleming Poe, was the organization’s secretary.30 Spottswood

Robinson joined after passing the bar.

A criticism of the NAACP and its progeny, the Legal Defense Fund, especially in later years, was that it stopped caring about individuals as it focused on establishing legal precedents as building blocks to overturning Plessy.31 The focus of the legal battle did not always align with the more pragmatic interests of the plaintiffs. The most glaring example was the Black teachers’ fate and Robert L. Carter’s somewhat calloused response to Topeka attorney Earl Reynolds’s sincere concerns about their futures when the schools integrated, as discussed in Chapter 4. The competing objectives created what historian Brett Gadsden called the “competition of interests” that arose between the local people, attorneys, and jurists. The competition, though real, was not debilitating. Even though the judicial system’s rigors required the plaintiffs to surrender a good deal of control of the case to their attorneys, they still needed each other to achieve their objectives, even when those objectives were not perfectly aligned.32

30 Peter Wallenstein, “These New and Strange Beings: Women in the Legal Profession in Virginia, 1890-1990,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101, no. 2 (April 1993): 210. [ http://www.jstor.com/stable/42493]. Poe became the first Black female attorney licensed in Virginia. Two years later she qualified to appear before the Supreme Court; Oliver W. Hill, Sr., The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond (Jonesboro, AR: GrantHouse Publisher, 2007), 149-151. According to Hill there were two other Black female attorneys practicing in Virginia at the time Bertha L. Douglass in Norfolk and Inez C. Fields in Hampton. Neither joined the organization.

31 Gadsden, “Shifting Terms,” 12.

32 Gadsden, “Shifting Terms,” 12.

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Examples of Gadsden’s argument are the Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart cases. “All were pleased with the eventual outcome – the provision of a bus for Shirley

[Bulah], the admission of Black students to better-equipped schools (Belton), and the eventual Supreme Court ruling that deemed segregation in public education unconstitutional” for the New York lawyers.33 Thus, the plaintiffs’ practical desire to secure transportation for their children to the segregated school or allow them admittance to a White school closer to their home, facilitated the NAACP’s desire for a full-blown challenge to segregation in public schools.34

It is fair to say that some of the lawyers with whom Marshall worked developed a sense of their place in history after Brown. Several of the more prominent, such as

Greenberg, Carter, and Hill, wrote autobiographies, and historians and journalists wrote biographies of others like Houston, Marshall, and Robinson. These men’s stories provide fascinating details and interesting anecdotes of their experiences and are well worth reading.35 Other team members depended on history to document their contributions, and their stories are worth capturing here.

33 Gadsden, “Shifting Terms,” 13.

34 Gadsden, “Shifting Terms,” 13.

35 McNeil Groundwork; Oliver Hill, Sr., The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond (Jonesboro, AR: Grant House Publisher, 2007); Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson III, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 2018); Greenberg, Crusaders; Mark V. Tushnet, ed., Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001) and The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Williams, Thurgood Marshall.

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“How can you boast about being the first when you realize it is the result of racism and antipathy?”36

Illus. 14: Louis Redding Courtesy: National Park Service

One attorney with a reputation for altruism and whose role in Brown was pivotal was Louis Redding of Delaware, although he was also one of the less remembered attorneys on the team (Illus. 14). s the lead attorney in the Belton case, Redding was the only one of the Brown attorneys before the Supreme Court who did not graduate from or teach at Howard Law School. Redding graduated from Harvard Law School and had no legal counterparts as the only Black attorney in Delaware. Whites-only legal associations did not welcome Redding, and as a result, his professional relationships were limited.

Unlike the attorneys in the other cases, however, Redding had a vibrant 1200 member

36 Louis Redding quoted in Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 91.

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NAACP branch in Wilmington to support him in civil rights disputes that contributed over $1200 to the expense of the Belton case.37 The Belton case he led triggered a succession of lawsuits and one of the most protracted civil rights education struggles in the United States.

As the sole Black attorney in Delaware and given Redding’s reputation for success, it was natural for Sara Bulah to approach him seeking assistance in obtaining transportation to and from school for her daughter, Shirley. Explaining that the NAACP no longer took equalization-type cases, Redding told Mrs. Bulah he would help but only if he could structure the case as a direct attack on segregation. Years later, Sara Bulah told journalist Carl Rowan that “he [Redding] said he wouldn’t help me get a Jim Crow bus to take my girl to any Jim Crow School but if I was interested in sending her to an integrated school, why, then maybe he’d help.”38 Daughter Shirley Bulah also recalled some years later: “Lawyer Redding said to my mother, ‘If you go all the way, I’ll take the case. Don’t be like so many others that start and then stop.’” She said her mother answered, “‘I’m here for the duration.’”39 True to her word, Sara Bulah’s family stuck with the case, even though they endured retribution from locals, resulting in the loss of their business selling eggs.

37 “New NAACP Head Here Sees UnLimited Goals,” The Wilmington Sunday Star, December 9, 1951. Should this be Unlimited?

38 “Delaware Wants Its Schools to be ‘Separate, Equal,’” quoted in Carl T. Rowan, “Jim Crow Schools on Trial: The Persons, The Places, The Issues,” reprinted from December 1953 Minneapolis Morning Tribune, Kenneth Clark Papers, Box 63, Folder 6, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

39 “Delaware Wants Its Schools to be ‘Separate, Equal.’”

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Near the same time, Ethel Belton also approached Redding for assistance, and he told her, as he had Sara Bulah, that he would only take the case if they sued to integrate the high school. Ethel Belton also agreed to Redding’s conditions. Judge Collin Seitz, whom Redding encountered earlier when leading the fight to integrate the University of

Delaware, eventually combined Bulah v. Gebhart and Belton v. Gebhart and the case became known as Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart (1952).40

Despite the apparent gruffness in his reply to Bulah and Belton, Redding’s willingness to take the case reflected a family tradition of public-spiritedness. Louis

Redding’s father “cultivated in [him] a sense of an inordinate responsibility for the less fortunate and respect for the inherent worth of all people.”41 At the same time, as part of

Wilmington’s Black middle class, the Redding children developed a noticeable elitist attitude, in part instilled by Howard High School principal Edwina Krause. Principal

Krause dominated the cultural as well as the educational tempo of Howard. At the time of

Redding’s education, Howard was the only school for Blacks in Wilmington and the only high school for Black children in the state.42 The curriculum was a cross between college preparatory and mechanical arts, representing a compromise between Booker T.

Washington’s and Du Bois’s educational philosophies.

40 Parker v. University of Delaware, 75A.2d 225 (Del. Ch. 1950); Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862 (Del. Ch. 1952).

41 Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 46.

42 Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware, 58.

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Howard High School in Wilmington had an excellent teaching staff due, in large part, to the Jim Crow segregation that made it difficult for Black teachers with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees to find employment in White academia. The prestige of Howard’s principal and teachers, such as poet and activist Alice Nelson-Dunbar, helped attract other teachers with excellent credentials.43 Redding acknowledged benefiting from this infusion of excellence. The education he received, coupled with his parents’ emphasis on learning as a means for upward mobility, prepared Redding to enter Brown University. In

1928 he graduated from Harvard Law School to his father’s immense pride. He earned admittance to the Delaware bar in 1929 with the mentorship of Judge Daniel O. Hastings through an arrangement that Redding refused ever to discuss.44

Redding served as the NAACP’s Delaware legal counsel while running a private law practice in Wilmington. His first major civil rights success was Parker v. The

University of Delaware in 1949, which integrated the University of Delaware.45

Chancellor Collins Seitz, who later heard Belton v. Gebhart, wrote the decision that ordered the university integrated.46 In another example of the interracial cooperation

43 Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a poet, activist, newspaper editor and teacher. She taught at Howard High School during the time the Reddings went to school there. She was a neighbor to the Reddings.

44 Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware, 87-89.

45 Parker v. University of Delaware, 75A.2d 225 (Del. Ch. 1950).

46 Delaware is one of three states that has a Chancery Court, which was established in 1792. The Chancery Court, which is comprised of one Chancellor and four Vice- Chancellors, is one of three Delaware courts that can hear constitutional cases. It can also issue injunctions and temporary restraining orders. The others are the Delaware Supreme Court and the Delaware Superior Court.

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discussed in Chapter 4, Redding was assisted in the Bulah and Belton cases by a local,

White Jewish attorney, Irving Morris, and Jack Greenberg, a newly hired White NAACP attorney. Morris was a 1950 Yale graduate who served as a researcher for the initial case

(Illus. 15).47 Little known outside his Delaware community, Irving Morris represented the underdog from the beginning of his career. After Belton, he continued to work with

Redding on the Delaware school cases, but his primary focus was criminal cases.48

Though not a Howard Law School graduate, Morris’s personal values mirrored those that

Charles Houston instilled in his students.

47 Paul Milford, “Celebrated Lawyers,” The Wilmington News Journal, June 13, 1994;. “Irving Nathaniel Morris,” by Rabbi Michael S. Beals, Congregation Beth Shalom, July 1, 2016, Wilmington, Delaware.

48 In 1953, Morris became involved in the appeal of three men accused of rape. (Curran v. State of Delaware, 259 F.2d 707 (3d Cir. 1958). Morris took on the appeal, not because he believed the men were innocent but because the police lied under oath and denied them a fair trial. Morris was successful in having the men released after eleven years in prison. See: Irving Morris, The Rape Case: A Young Lawyer’s Struggle for Justice in the 1950s (Wilmington, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011). Journalist Harry Themal called Morris “one of the top lawyers in the city. He was renowned for his thoughts and actions about civil liberties, and as a lawyer dealing with people whom the system had wronged. Morris explained his motivation: “I believed lawyers went to law school not merely to represent corporations...or just to make money; they went to learn how to help those who needed help, even if it meant working for little or no compensation. You need to include the citations for these footnote quotes.

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Illus. 15: Irving Morris Courtesy: New York Times

Redding came before Judge Collin Seitz again when he filed the Bulah and Belton cases in Chancery Court. In addition to claiming that White and Black schools were not equal, in keeping with the NAACP’s new strategy, Redding argued that segregation was unconstitutional in both cases. In his decision, Chancellor Collins Seitz dodged the constitutionality issues focusing instead on the Plessy argument. He ruled that since the schools were not equal, the school board must admit the Black children to the all-White schools. The Delaware Supreme Court upheld his decision, making this the only case where the state court struck down segregation. Then, in a strange twist of bureaucracy, the state appealed Seitz’s ruling to the Supreme Court. The name of the case changed again to Gebhart v. Belton and became part of Brown.49

During the years that it took for the Bulah case to reach the Supreme Court,

Redding received only a nominal fee from the national NAACP. His clients could not afford the lawsuit’s cost, and Redding paid those expenses not covered by the local

NAACP out of his own pocket. To support his family, he had to maintain his usual

49 Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d862 (Del. Ch. 1952).

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private practice workload. His was a one lawyer office with only a secretary to assist him.

According to historian Annette Woolard-Provine, he worked long hours, sometimes until

2 or 3 in the morning. His family often did not see him during the week.50

When the final Brown decision came down, Redding was in New York City and reported a sense of relief, but at the same time, he did not expect White Southerners’ compliance. “For the court’s pronouncement is not self-executing,” he wrote in The

Nation two weeks after the initial decision was released.51 He stated with guarded optimism that “very probably the Southern states, by and large, will react as maturely functioning and worthy constituents of the national union.”52 However, he also warned that “crafty evasive devices would be as offensive to such a clear judicial will as clamorous-defiance, and hardly less discernible.”53 He also suggested that “the economic disabilities of the South affect all the public services it affords and would not excuse any protracted continuance of separate educational facilities now declared ‘inherently unequal.’”54

Journalist Harry Ashmore, the author of The Negro and the Schools, was also guardedly hopeful. In the same issue of The Nation, he wrote: “It is clear that for the most part, Southerners may be expected to undertake calmly and rationally to work out the

50 Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware, 126.

51 Louis L. Redding, “Evasions Barred,” The Nation 178, no. 22 (May 29,1954): 455-456.

52 Redding, “Evasions,” 455-456.

53 Redding, “Evasions,” 455-456.

54 Redding, “Evasions,” 455-456.

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tremendous social adjustments that ultimate integration of the public schools will require.”55 He concluded by saying that “the practical problem for most Southern communities is to hammer out an acceptable compromise somewhere between the polar positions of the Southern White who does not yet accept the Negro as his equal, and the

Southern Negro who is no longer willing to accept anything less.”56

Both Ashmore and Redding were, unfortunately, correct. For example, in northern

Delaware, integration in the Wilmington schools initially went smoothly. This was not the case in southern Delaware in Kent and Essex counties. In the small town of Milford, which straddled the Kent and Sussex county line, trouble erupted early in 1954. After the

Supreme Court ruling in May 1954, but before the Milford school board finalized its integration plans for the all-White Milford High School, the local Black preacher, Rev.

Randolph Fisher, advised his congregation to enroll their children in Milford High

School. As the local representative of the NAACP, Fisher petitioned the board to allow

Black students to attend the all-White high school in September 1954.57 Fischer obtained the services of Louis Redding. They met with board president Dean Kimmel at his home, and the three worked out an arrangement to allow tenth grade Black students to register for the new term, even though Kimmel knew it would cause anxiety amongst the White parents.58 For some reason, the board never told the White parents about the plan to begin

55 Harry S. Ashmore, “Varied Patterns,” The Nation 178, no. 22 (May 29,1954): 456.

56 Ashmore, “Varied Patterns,” 456.

57 Orlando J. Camp and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven: Integration Fears Robbed Hope from Eleven Black Students. 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Cedar Tree Books, 2013), 32.

58 Camp and Kee, The Milford Eleven, 34.

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gradual integration of the high school. When the school opened on September 8, things went smoothly, according to author and former Milford High School student Orlando

Camp, and continued to go well for the first week. A school dance scheduled for the second week sparked fears among the White parents that Black and White kids might dance together, triggering a mass meeting on September 17 at the American Legion Hall.

Camp reported that 1500 people attended. The Milford Chronicle reported that a large percentage of those in attendance were not residents of Milford.59 A petition signed by an estimated 800 to 900 people was presented to the school board the following Monday.

Meanwhile, because of the tension in the area, the school board decided to close the school on Monday and hold a public meeting in the school auditorium. After the public meeting, the board met in private for the rest of the day into the evening. As they deliberated, they asked Reverend Fischer to have the Black students not return to school until the following Monday to provide time for tempers to cool. The board prepared a radio announcement in which it reiterated that integration was still the official policy but that the Black students would stay away from school for a week to allow time for cooler heads to prevail. They announced that schools would reopen the next day. Death threats against the board members followed the announcement. At 1 AM on Tuesday morning, the board announced that due to the threats of violence, schools would be closed until further notice.60 The following week saw multiple meetings between local and state

59 The Milford Chronicle, September 24, 1954, 4.

60 Wilmington Morning News, September 22, 1954, 1.

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officials and the NAACP, all struggling to find a way to honor the Supreme Court decision but avoid violence. On September 27, 1954, with how best to proceed long-term unresolved, the Milford schools reopened amidst loud demonstrations but under heavy protection by state and local police.

Some Whites in Milford decided that the best way to counter the NAACP’s influence was to engage with an organization equally dedicated to the segregation Whites preferred. They welcomed the arrival of White Supremacist Bryant Bowles, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP). Bowles organized a rally that attracted people from Milford and the surrounding area. The purpose, according to Camp, was to “organize the White community with a registered charter that established Bowles as a legal representative for the White NAAWP.”61 With

Milford’s mayor’s support, Bowles urged the White parents to boycott the Milford schools. The Whites now had Bowles to lead them but the Blacks, according to Camp,

“had for the first time the law and the Supreme Court on our side” and Louis Redding as their attorney.

Tension in the city grew. Bowles’ supporters encouraged people to expand the boycott to include businesses whose owners supported integration, pitting neighbors against neighbors. All of the members of the school board resigned, and a new school board was selected. On September 30, the new school board announced that all schools would reopen the next day and the return of the eleven Black children to the Black high schools in Dover and Georgetown, forty miles away. Louis Redding filed an injunction

61 Camp and Kee, The Milford Eleven, 65.

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and a temporary restraining order in Chancery Court on October 2 on behalf of the eleven

Black students. On October 12, the Chancery Court denied the restraining order but ruled in favor of the eleven Black students. The Milford school board immediately appealed to the Delaware State Supreme Court. In February 1955, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that “Brown v. Board of education did nullify Delaware’s segregation laws but did not require immediate integration.”62 The court instructed the Milford school board to take no action until the Brown II announcement, hopefully with specific guidelines. This ruling ended attempts for integration in Delaware, and the eventual decision in Brown II slowed the process further. It was not until eleven years after the first attempt that the Milford schools were finally fully integrated.63

As the Milford case percolated through the courts, Redding filed another lawsuit,

Evans v. Buchanan, on behalf of forty students in Claymont.64 The case took five difficult years to resolve, ending when the Southern District Court ordered the Delaware State

Board of Education to develop and implement a statewide desegregation plan. As in many other states, full implementation of the Brown decision across Delaware took until the mid-1960s to accomplish. Delaware closed its last officially segregated all-Black school in 1967. Problems developed again in 1970, leading Redding to reopen the Evans case as changes in housing patterns had the de facto effect of re-segregating the schools.

In his 70s, Redding participated only nominally and eventually dropped out of the case,

62 Camp and Kee, The Milford Eleven, 97.

63 Camp, and Kee, The Milford Eleven, 117.

64 Evans v. Buchanan, 435 F. Supp. 832 (D. Del. 1977).

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leaving the battle to Irving Morris and younger men. The case became the most protracted “busing” case in civil rights history.65

What success Louis Redding achieved in Delaware was not without assistance from others dedicated to racial justice. However, he was the constant warrior. The Black community’s trust in him was an essential element in accomplishing the ultimate goal.

The NAACP legal brain-trust supporting him was also critical to his ability to counter

White supremacy. As with all the other cases, the parents’ courage and their willingness to endure the lengthy legal process, linked with the support of like-minded local attorneys, forced a chain of events that appear ordained when viewed through a historical lens. In truth, nothing in the civil rights struggle ever was that simple or that easy.

65 Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware, 58.

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“Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.”66

Illus. 16: Elisha Scott, Sr. John Scott Charles Scott Courtesy: Library of Congress Courtesy: Washburn Law.edu

The lawyers on the ground in the educational battle did not always agree with the team of attorneys from New York. Tensions occasionally ran high, especially when those in the trenches felt that their efforts were not appreciated or their skills were not valued.

A glaring example is the tension between the Topeka lawyers and the national team, especially Charles Carter. The Topeka case began as the bottom-up effort described earlier and involved local attorneys Charles Bledsoe and John and Charles Scott, sons of

Elisha Scott (Illus. 16). Elisha Scott was the best-known Black attorney in Kansas during the 1930s and 1940s and had participated in many cases on behalf of the NAACP. One case of particular note was his involvement in the lawsuits that resulted from the Tulsa

66 Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), 67.

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Massacre. Scott handled over sixty cases on behalf of the Black families who suffered losses from the terrorism. However, when it came to the most important case of his career, Brown v. Board of Education, he was excluded.

Despite Elisha Scott’s experience and reputation for aggressively defending his clients, the Brown legal team only allowed him on the case’s periphery. Scott’s love of alcohol made his involvement in the actual court hearings problematic for the NAACP lawyers.67 Instead, the NAACP looked to two of his sons, John Jefferson Scott and

Charles Sheldon Scott, to shepherd the case in its initial stages. The Scott brothers grew up in Topeka, which was a segregated community. Charles, in particular, remembered the wounds inflicted by segregation, especially in high school sports.68 All three of Elisha

Scott’s sons followed in Scott Senior’s legal footsteps graduating from Washburn

University Law School. They were veterans of World War II, and were active in the

NAACP. Elisha Scott, Jr. (not pictured) was not involved with the case. He left Topeka in

1946 and moved to Flint, Michigan, to practice law with his uncle, R.M. Van Dyne. He stayed active in the NAACP, however, and attended the 1948 Legal Conference in

67 In Simple Justice, Richard Kluger relates the story of a drunk Elisha Scott entering the court room during the Topeka case, and disrupting it. Only the respect the judge had for Scott’s past contributions kept him from being held in contempt. Esther Brown also made frequent reference to Scott’s alcoholism in her letters to Franklin Williams during the Webb case. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vantage Books, 2004), 415.

68 Art Schaaf, “From the Seeds of Discontent Came a Harvest of Change, Slowly Ripening,” Topeka Capital-Journal, May 13, 1979.

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Kansas City.69 John and Charles Scott remained in Topeka and joined the family firm,

Scott, Scott, and Scott.

Illus. 17: Charles Bledsoe – Courtesy: National Park Service

Charles Bledsoe was another member of the Scott firm (Illus. 17). Bledsoe also served as legal counsel for the Topeka NAACP. He brought his partners into the Brown case as it began to take shape. As previously mentioned, Bledsoe wrote to the NAACP to support Lucinda Todd’s request that it provide experienced attorneys to help the Topeka chapter’s fight to integrate the Topeka elementary schools. This was the type of case the national office tried to initiate in Wichita but failed after being out-maneuvered by the

69 “Resume of the NAACP Legal Conference, Monday, June 21, 1948, Kansas City, Missouri,” II: Box A36 Folder 2. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Black teachers. Given the lack of support in the local Black community for the Topeka case, Bledsoe’s and the Scotts brothers’ involvement was important. Elisha Scott’s reputation and the three men’s association with the local community served as a bridge between the Rev. Burnett McKinley and the NAACP attorneys. The inclusion of local lawyers was essential to the hierarchical strategy Houston put together years before. Even if they were not considered as skilled as the national team at legal maneuverings, their constituency knew and trusted their judgment. They may have been more skeptical of the polished lawyers from New York.

The NAACP wanted to make the most of the opportunity in Topeka. It was clear to the national team that Elisha Scott was beyond his prime, and Bledsoe had a limited grasp of the constitutional issues. They needed to provide someone to shore up the local effort. It is interesting to read the initial correspondence between Robert Carter and

Bledsoe. In it, one can see the shift, almost in mid-filing, from an equalization strategy to a Fourteenth Amendment direct attack on Plessy. Carter wrote Bledsoe: “You will note that in this complaint, stress is laid on the unequal features between the two schools.”70

He went on to suggest that they shift emphasis to the fact that “the statute which permits the city to provide segregated facilities for Negro and White children is unconstitutional.”71 After outlining several suggestions on the approach, Carter concluded with, “if it is agreeable to you, let’s attempt to iron this problem out

70 Robert L. Carter to Charles E. Bledsoe, September 18, 1950, “Kansas Memory,” Kansas Historical Society, www.kansasmemory.org/item/213410.

71 Carter to Bledsoe, September 18, 1950.

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together...Would you, therefore, send me a draft of the complaint as you would file it, and let me make suggested changes, etc. [sic].”72 He then proceeded to offer more assistance saying, “or, if it is more convenient, send me all the information needed in the complaint, and I’ll try drafting one.”73 These exchanges launched the Brown case. The New York team’s concern about working with Bledsoe solved itself when he moved his practice to

Chicago before the hearing.

Illus. 18: Jack Greenberg. Courtesy: National Park Service

A few weeks after the conclusion of arguments in the Belton case, Marshall assigned Jack Greenberg to line up social scientists to testify in the Topeka case (Illus.

18). Esther Brown assisted him in this task, and they got along well. It may be, in part, because they had similar backgrounds. Both Greenberg’s and Brown’s parents immigrated from Eastern Europe and approached democracy from a progressive-socialist

72 Carter to Bledsoe, September 18, 1950.

73 Carter to Bledsoe, September 18, 1950.

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perspective. Both were Jewish but not particularly active in their faith, by their own admission, especially during their younger years. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Brown had contacts with the local Jewish community through which she reached out to Hugh Speer, chairman of the Department of Education at the University of Kansas City. Speer served as an expert witness, testifying to the differences between the Black and White Topeka schools.

Some years later, as the New York lawyers, along with Redding, Hill, and

Robinson, prepared to argue the cases individually before the Supreme Court, Charles

Scott expressed an interest in taking part in the oral arguments before the Court. Evidence suggests that as early as 1951, Charles Scott wanted to certify to argue before the United

States Supreme Court and intended to try to meet the qualifications.74 After all, his father’s efforts and later his and those of his brother laid the foundation for Kansas’s legal battle. In particular, Charles wanted to be part of what he believed would be the last battle in the war. Robert Carter wrote Scott a diplomatically worded letter attempting to dissuade him. “Are you sure you want to do that?” he queried.75 “I have considerable trepidation myself...in view of the great amount of background knowledge necessary for any to be really ready to make a proper presentation,” he confessed, “and I have been on

74 Charles Scott to Robert L. Carter, September 21, 1951, “Brown v. Board of Education, Correspondence, 1952-1953,” II: Box 134, Folder, Papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

75 Robert L. Carter to Charles Scott, November 23, 1953, “Brown v. Board of Education, Correspondence, 1952-1953,” II, Box 134, Folder. Papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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top of the job of preparation for the last six months.”76 He told Scott he thought it would

be challenging “to come in cold and prepare for argument now.”77 Nonetheless, he

committed to Scott that if upon consideration, Scott still wanted to do it, he would “take

the matter up with our Legal Committee.”78

Scott was clearly offended, replying to Carter: “In your letter under date of

November 23, 1953, you inferientially [sic] reflected my inability, or lack of

qualifications, to present any part thereof [of the Topeka brief].” Later in the same letter,

he reiterated: “I wish to advise that the lawyers in the city of Topeka are just as

competent to discuss or explain the contents of our brief as any other lawyer.” Having

vented, Scott wrote that he would “forego the opportunity of taking part and will not

make any further requests.”79 Carter responded with an apology. The final docket listed

John Scott as counsel on the appeal and Charles Scott as the respondent’s attorney.80

76 Carter to Scott, September 23, 1953.

77 Carter to Scott, September 23, 1953.

78 Carter to Scott, September 23, 1953.

79 Charles S. Scott to Robert L. Carter, November 27, 1953, “Brown v. Board of Education, Correspondence, 1952-1953,” II, Box 134, Folder 8. Papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. It was impossible for every lawyer involved in preparing the cases to argue it before the Supreme Court. The following attorneys are on record but did not necessarily participate in the actual arguments: Harold Boulware, Robert L. Carter, Jack Greenberg, Oliver W. Hill, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood W. Robinson, III, Charles S. Scott, William T. Coleman, Jr., Charles T. Duncan, George E.C. Hayes, Loren Miller, William R. Ming, Jr., Constance Baker Motley, James M. Nabrit, Jr., Louis H. Pollak, Frank D. Reeves, George M. Johnson, Charles W. Quick, and Herbert O. Reid.

80 Listed along with John Scott were Charles L. Black, Jr., Elwood H. Chisolm, William T. Coleman, Jr., Charles T. Duncan, George E.C. Hayes, Loren Miller, William R. Ming, Jr., Constance Baker Motley, James M. Nabrit, Jr., David E. Pinsky, Frank D. Reeves, and Jack B. Weinstein. Attorneys for Appellants and for Respondents were Harold

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Several newspaper articles, historical websites, and the Kansas Historical Society stated that Charles Scott argued the Topeka case before the Supreme Court. This appears to be an overstatement. While the Scott brothers did argue before the Kansas Supreme Court, a document in the National Archives entitled “School Segregation Cases – Order of

Argument” shows that neither brother participated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s arguments, although both were present (Illus. 19).

Illus. 19: Source: National Archives, Record Group 267, Records of the Supreme Court, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-case-order

Boulware, Robert L. Carter, Jack Greenberg, Oliver W. Hill, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood W. Robinson, III, and Charles S. Scott. “Brown v. Board of Education, In the Supreme Court of the Unites States, October Term, 1953.” Papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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As with the other attorneys, the Scott brothers’ involvement in civil rights activism did not begin or end with the Brown case. Before the Topeka case, the brothers filed a lawsuit challenging a recently passed local ordinance allowing Topeka theatres to deny admission to Blacks, and they worked with their father on the Webb v. School

District 90 (1949) desegregation case.81 In the 1960s, Charles worked as a volunteer attorney with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee that defended Mississippi civil rights activists and as the national legal counsel for the Congress of Racial Equality

(CORE). John Scott moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954, where he worked for the

Department of the Interior as an assistant solicitor until 1984.82

‘‘It’s a good feeling knowing that you were one who participated.’’83

Tension between the national staff and the state NAACP attorneys was also not uncommon, as evidenced by Jack Greenberg’s criticism of Harold Boulware’s handling of the Pearson v. Clarendon County transportation case (Illus. 19).84 In 1947, Boulware agreed to represent Rev. De Laine and Levi Pearson in their fight to obtain bus transportation for the Black children of Clarendon County. Boulware began by petitioning the school board for the bus transportation the parents demanded. When the

81 Schaaf, “From the Seeds of Discontent,” 2; Webb v. School District No. 90, 167 Kan. 395, 206 P.2d 1054 (1949).

82 “Scott Family,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, http://plainshumanities.unl.edu.

83 “Harold R. Boulware Lawyer was a Pioneer in Civil Rights,” New York Times, January 30, 1983, Section 1, 26.

84 Greenberg, Crusaders, 81.

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board did not respond by December, he filed suit in federal court. In June 1948, just one day before the scheduled hearing, Marshall withdrew the case when the court determined that the plaintiff, Levi Pearson, did not have standing (he did not live in the school district he sued).

Illus. 20: (L-R) Harold Boulware, Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood Robinson. Courtesy: Library of Congress

When discussing the case in later years, Greenberg wrote a veiled criticism of

Boulware because he failed to verify the plaintiff’s residence information. “How could

Boulware make such a mistake? He practiced alone, had limited experience in complex cases, and mostly handled marginal matters,” Greenberg wrote.85 Greenberg granted that

Boulware knew more about rural justice than he did, but that was faint praise. Given the important civil rights cases that Boulware handled for the NAACP, including Duval v.

Seigneus, Thompson v. Gibbes, Elmore v. Rice, and John Wrighten v. the University of

South Carolina, Greenberg’s contention that Boulware had limited experience in

85 Greenberg, Crusaders, 119.

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complex cases was unfounded; another example of the elitism that was prevalent in the national office. Rev. De Laine’s daughter Ophelia Gona came to Boulware’s defense. She felt that the NAACP ignored Boulware’s “vital role in bringing Briggs to trial” and that

“he never received adequate acknowledgment for his careful groundwork.”86

Harold Boulware’s credentials also belie Greenberg’s criticism. Boulware was one of the many NAACP attorneys who graduated from Howard Law School and the first in South Carolina trained as a civil rights lawyer.87 After completing his studies at

Howard, he returned to South Carolina in 1940 to practice and opened an office in

Columbia. In 1941 he became the NAACP’s Chief Counsel in South Carolina. As with the Scott brothers, Harold Boulware was known to his constituents as a dedicated and hardworking attorney. As one of the few Black attorneys in South Carolina, he fought constantly to improve Blacks’ civil rights in his state, but he also took criminal cases involving Black defendants, such as the Willie Toliver rape case discussed in Chapter 2.

Boulware filed one of his first important education cases in 1943, demanding equalization of teachers’ pay in the state. The original plaintiff was Melissa T. Smith, a teacher at Burke High School in Charleston. The plan was for Smith to file her petition and then leave for New York to attend graduate school to avoid harassment and retaliation. However, when the Charleston County School Board “did an end-around

86 Ophelia De Laine Gona, Dawn of Desegregation: J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 194.

87 W. Lewis Burke, All for Civil Rights, 3.

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Smith’s petition,” Smith withdrew from the case.88 Boulware and the state conference identified Viola Duval, a Howard University graduate, as a possible replacement for

Smith. Duval v Seigneus (1943) was filed in 1943 and scheduled for hearing in February

1944 before Judge J. Waites Waring, a judge who later played an important role in the success of the Briggs case.89 The case was Marshall’s first foray into South Carolina and his first time before Judge Waring. Waring ruled in favor of Duvall. As a result, her salary increased from $12 per week to $100.90 Shortly after the decision, the army drafted

Boulware.

Upon returning to South Carolina after his army service, Boulware's first case was the important Elmore v Rice (1947).91 Elmore challenged the Democratic party’s Whites- only primary. Boulware was lead counsel on the case, assisted by Robert L. Carter.92

Again, Judge Waring presided and declared the White primary unconstitutional. The

Democratic party was determined to prevent Blacks from voting in the primaries. They initiated a scheme of “private clubs” to which a person must belong to vote in a

Democratic primary. Judge Waring issued a permanent injunction against this new chicanery.

88 James L. Fedler, Civil Rights in South Carolina: From Peaceful Protests to Groundbreaking Rulings (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012), 28-29.

89 Viola Louise Duvall, et al. v. J. F. Seignous (1943): Case No.: 1082.

90 Burke, All for Civil Rights, 171.

91 Elmore v. Rice, 72 F. Supp. 516 (E.D.S.C. 1947).

92 Burke, All for Civil Rights, 172.

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In 1947, Boulware took on a precedent-setting civil rights case supporting a twenty-seven-year-old veteran denied admittance to the South Carolina Law School because of his race.93 Consistent with the NAACP’s early top-down legal strategy,

Boulware and Marshall filed John Wrighten v. the University of South Carolina (1947), demanding integration of the White law school. Once again, Judge Waties Waring heard the case but, in this instance, relied on the Gaines decision to guide him.94 When the state appropriated the funds to build a separate law school at South Carolina State College, the state’s Jim Crow school, the president, Miller Whittaker, was enthused. Even though accepting the ruling perpetuated segregation, Whittaker felt a law school for Blacks in a state with only five Black attorneys was worth celebrating. Marshall disagreed and appealed the ruling but eventually told Boulware to withdraw the appeal when Wrighten himself withdrew from the case. Wrighten registered at the Jim Crow law school and graduated in 1952.95

The same year Boulware filed the Wrighten case, Reverend De Laine and Levi

Pearson hired Boulware to assist with their request for bus transportation for the Black children of Clarendon County. After Marshall withdrew the case, Rev. De Laine and

Pearson did not give up. In 1949 they met again with Marshall, Boulware, and others to try again. By then, the NAACP no longer accepted equalization cases. The stakes were

93 Wrighten v. Board of Trustees, 72 F. Supp.948 (1947).

94 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938). In this decision the Supreme Court ruled that if a school was provided to Whites in a state then a school must be provided to Blacks in the state or Blacks must be admitted to the Whites’ school.

95 Burke, All for Civil Rights, 175.

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high, and to proceed with a new case, Marshall insisted on at least twenty parents agreeing to sign on as plaintiffs to an integration case. On November 11, 1949, with twenty-nine families listed as plaintiffs, Boulware filed Briggs v. Clarendon County in federal court with Marshall as co-counsel. In a pre-trial hearing with Judge Waring in

December 1949, Waring told Marshall he did not want to hear another equalization education case. Instead, he challenged Marshall to attack segregation head-on. Marshall withdrew Briggs v. Clarendon County and refiled the case as a constitutional challenge entitled Briggs v. Elliott. The court ruled 2-1 in favor of the school district, with Judge

Waring dissenting. Waring’s dissent positioned Marshall to appeal directly to the

Supreme Court. When the case made it to the Supreme Court, Boulware was there.

Boulware continued to handle NAACP cases until he became a municipal judge in 1968 and then a family court judge in 1974. He died in 1983.

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“The good of the people is the greatest law.” Cicero

Illus. 21: James Nabrit George E.C. Hayes Courtesy: National Park Service Courtesy: National Park Service

In 1950, Charles Houston was dying, and he knew it. When he could no longer continue to work with Gardner Bishop on the Washington D.C. desegregation case, he selected Howard Law School associates James Nabrit and George E.C. Hayes to take his place (Illus. 21). Nabrit and Hayes were both faculty members at Howard Law School and long-time friends of Houston and Marshall. Despite their close relationship, the

Bolling case revealed another point of ongoing debate within the NAACP’s inner circle.

Nabrit’s and Hayes’s opinion as to how best to approach an integration lawsuit differed significantly from the rest of the team. Where Houston and Marshall believed overturning

Plessy was the imperative, Nabrit and Hayes argued that the better approach was to challenge segregation as a violation of the Due Process provisions of the 5th Amendment.

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One can imagine the four men sitting around, drinks in hand, arguing the pros and cons of

their competing ideas.

When Nabrit and Hayes took over the case after Charles Houston became ill, they

did so only once Gardner Bishop and the other plaintiffs agreed to change the focus to a

direct demand for integration. Nabrit and Hayes understood that Washington D.C. posed

a very different legal challenge since, at the time, the Fourteenth Amendment only

applied to the states, not to the federal government that managed the District. Thus, the

team needed a different argument than Marshall’s Plessy approach. They saw Bolling as

the perfect opportunity to use their 5th Amendment strategy. As Greenberg explained:

“They would have none of our [the LDF’s] modulated, less than all-or-nothing

approaches. They argued that segregation was impermissible as a matter of constitutional

principle, without regard to physical or psychological evidence.”96 In effect, Hayes and

Nabrit wanted to turn the tables and force the government to justify segregation on legal

grounds, and if it could not, it must rule the practice inherently unconstitutional and a

violation of Due Process. This was a new and challenging legal strategy, and to be

successful, they needed help.

Following Houston’s example, Nabrit and Hayes enlisted Howard law professors’

assistance to research precedents and developed legal arguments for the case.97 They did

this without the involvement of Marshall and the NAACP LDF, honoring Bishop’s

96 Greenberg, Crusaders, 172.

97 Daniel Hardin, “D.C.’s Fighting Barber and the End of Public School Segregation,” Washington Spark, August 20, 2015

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insistence that the NAACP not be involved. Nabrit and Hayes chose to rely on the “strict scrutiny test, namely that laws that treated groups differently on the basis of race were required to have a compelling justification.”98 Unless the defendants could prove otherwise, the two attorneys argued, segregation in the schools served no purpose and was unlawful.

It took several years to foster the case through the legal system to the Supreme

Court. In the end, in April 1951, the District Court decided against Bolling. However, before Nabrit and Hayes had a chance to file an appeal, the Clerk of the Supreme Court contacted Nabrit and asked him to file a petition for certiorari in the Bolling case. On

November 10, 1952, the Court granted certiorari in Bolling and scheduled arguments after Davis. Arguments began on December 9, 1952.99 During oral arguments before the

Supreme Court, Nabrit mesmerized those inside the courtroom with his compelling arguments ending with: “The heart of the nation’s capital, in the capital of democracy, in the capital of the free world, there is no place for a segregated school system.”100 He went on to say: “The country cannot afford it, and the Constitution does not permit it, and the statutes of Congress do not authorize.” Nabrit also stated emphatically that “the Negro

98 Robert J. Cottroll, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Cast, Culture, and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003),138.

99 By granting certiorari, the Supreme Court asked that the records of a lower court’s ruling be sent to it for review and consideration, bypassing the formal appeal process.

100 Quoted in Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 313.

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should not be viewed as anybody’s burden. He is a citizen. He is performing his duties in peace and in war.”101

The Bolling case demonstrated the debate within the Black community and within the organization itself over the NAACP’s frontal-attack strategy on segregation.

Greenberg quotes Robert Carter as saying that all African-American parents wanted was the same educational opportunity available to White children and students. “If ending school segregation was the way to that objective, fine; if, on the other hand, securing equal facilities was the way, that too was fine,” Greenberg relayed.102 Despite the official strategy that made overturning Plessy the team’s priority, they often tended to focus on immediate results, not on idealized legal precedent. Hayes and Nabrit gave them both.

The highly charged atmosphere of the Brown cases, the exhausting schedule the attorneys maintained, and the difference in their backgrounds and education were bound to cause tension from time-to-time. Heated debates over strategy and the emergence of super-egos were bound to happen. The camaraderie of those who attended Howard Law

School could not help but make others occasionally feel on the outside. Nevertheless, despite all the typical human drama behind the scene, the face the lawyers turned to the plaintiffs, the courts and the press was professional and united. These men kept their goals in sight and pushed aside their personal differences. They knew they were getting

101 Asch, Chocolate City, 313.

102 Robert L. Carter quoted in Greenberg, Crusaders, 118. Despite Marshall, being one of the originators of the strategy to confront the constitutionality of segregation head on, he started the Briggs case as an equalization case.

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close to their goal, and they were astute enough not to let minor differences side-track their mission. In victory, it seemed they all forgot or forgave all slights.

“Judicial abuse occurs when judges substituted their own political views for the law.”103

Discussion of the legal minds essential to Brown’s success would be incomplete without mentioning at least two judges whose roles were pivotal to the outcome. Despite their training, judges are human and cannot help but bring their cultural indoctrinations into the courtroom. The two judges that were extremely helpful in moving two of the

Brown cases forward were no exception. Judge Collin Seitz came to the bench as a committed liberal. Judge J. Waites Waring started his legal career as a segregationist but evolved his opinion of racial justice and brought his newly obtained idealism to bear in

Illus. 22: Judge Julius Waties Waring Courtesy americanhistory.si.edu

103Lamar S. Smith, Quotes, BrainyQuote.com (Brainy Media Inc,2021) https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lamar_s_smith_232056

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the Briggs case. The role he played in Briggs would be frowned on today but was essential in guiding Marshall to an effective strategy.

Judge Julius Waties Waring served as a judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina from 1942 to 1952 (Illus. 22). He was Chief

Judge from 1948-1952, during which time he presided over several important civil rights cases, including Briggs. Historian David Southern applauded Judge Waring as one of the few White officials who openly argued that racial justice was impossible as long as the states sanctioned segregation.104 Changing one’s cultural indoctrination is difficult, but that is what Judge Waring did. Judge Waring’s liberalism came to him late in life, however. Waring initially believed that upper-class Southerners had to change the culture over time without federal government interference.105 His conversion was not overnight.

Like many who embrace a new ideology, once convinced, he became a radical integrationist and the segregationists’ worst nightmare.

Waring’s enlightenment began with the civil rights cases he heard, starting with

Duval v. Seigneus (1944), discussed previously, and Thompson v.Gibbes (1945), both which equalized teachers’ pay in South Carolina. Next was the appeal of Elmore v. Rice in 1947 where Waring found the Whites-only primary unconstitutional. During this period, Waring and his wife began their own study of race in America, beginning with

104 David W. Southern, “Beyond Jim Crow Liberalism: Judge Waring’s Fight Against Segregation in South Carolina, 1942-52,” The Journal of Negro History 66, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 209.

105 Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Sara Crichton Books, 2019), 95-103, 175.

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reading W.J. Cash’s Mind of the South and then moving to Gunnar Myrdal’s An

American Dilemma.106 They also read American history, anthropology, and sociology.107

Still struggling with exactly how to confront racial injustice that he now saw all about him, Judge Waring ruled conservatively in the previously discussed case, John Wrighten v. the University of South Carolina. Still, he required the state to either build a law school for Blacks equal in quality to the law school at the University of South Carolina or integrate the university. However, the case that shocked Waring into fully reexamining the underlying assumptions of his Southern way of life and Jim Crow White supremacy was United States v. Shull (1946), over which Waring presided.108

The government prosecuted Lynwood Shull for attacking and blinding Army Sgt.

Isaac Woodward, on February 12, 1946. An all-White jury acquitted Shull. While no surprise in South Carolina, the beating and the verdict stunned a nation, including

President Truman. Truman pointed to the Woodward case as the catalyst for his

Executive Order 9981 that integrated the armed services.109 Waring, equally appalled, confided his feelings about the government prosecution’s ineptness during the taking of his oral history some years later. He admitted to being embarrassed by his forced participation.

106 W. J. Cash, Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).

107 Gergel, Unexampled Courage, 171-175.

108 United States v. Lynwood Lanier Shull, Case 16,603 (1946).

109 President Harry S Truman, Executive Order 9981 issued July 26, 1948.

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The year after the Shull case, Waring and the NAACP lawyers (Boulware and

Marshall) met again over the Briggs case. When Judge Waring realized that the Briggs appeal would be on his docket, he decided that it was time to bring the court’s process power to bear on Plessy. As historian David Southern explained in the initial hearing: “A

White Southern judge appointed by White supremacists was prodding the NAACP to contest Jim Crow straight out.”110 Waring instructed Marshall to withdraw the equalization case he had filed and refile it as a direct attack on segregation. Southern argues that Marshall went against his decision not to bring any more equalization cases because the schools in the Briggs case were so unequal that he was confident he could win on that issue. Judge Waring challenged Marshall to be bolder. A case challenging the state’s constitutional had to be heard by a three-judge panel. Unless the court upheld the lower court unanimously, the plaintiff was entitled to appeal to the Supreme Court. A two to one decision against the appeal from the lower court, with Waring dissenting, positioned the NAACP to move directly to the United States Supreme Court. Knowing he had Judge Waring in his corner, Marshall refiled.

After his role in the Briggs decision, Waring, and his equally liberal northern wife, paid a high social price for their outspokenness. Where once Waring had been part of the Charleston “gentry” with a lineage back to the colony’s founding, now he was a social pariah.111 According to Southern, “no local Whites crossed the threshold of the

110 Southern, “Beyond Jim Crow Liberalism,” 219.

111 Even though Waring came from one of Charleston’s oldest families, its resources were in decline when Waring wanted to go to law school. As a result, he studied law “the old- fashioned way,” reading law text on his own and working in a local law firm. He passed

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couple’s house after 1947.”112 White supremacists perpetrated acts of violence against the

Warings, including cross burnings, shots fired through their windows, and death threats.

Southern points out that not a single White person stepped out to support the Warings.113

Not to be dissuaded, the Warings spent more and more time out of the South, including in

California, and especially in New York, where Elizabeth Waring had many contacts.

They entertained famous liberals, both Black and White, including the NAACP’s Walter

White and Eleanor Roosevelt. Southern suggests that the Warings influenced Eleanor

Roosevelt to move from her neutral position on Southern racism toward the left in alignment with the judge’s new liberal opinions on race. Whether this was the cause,

Eleanor Roosevelt joined the NAACP the week of the Brown decision.114

Judge Waring retired after the Briggs case, and President Truman replaced him with an avowed segregationist, George Bell Timmerman, Sr., an example of Truman’s fluctuating feelings about civil rights.115 Heralded for integrating the armed forces,

Truman consistently failed to be a strong leader in the civil rights quarter. Like those before him, he did not support federal anti-lynching legislation, and although he commissioned the “To Secure These Rights,” President’s Committee on Civil Rights,

the bar in 1902. Of the primary actors in the legal drama, he is the only one who did not attend a formal law school. Gergel, 96.

112 Southern, “Beyond Jim Crow Liberalism,” 217.

113 Southern, “Beyond Jim Crow Liberalism,” 224.

114 “NAACP Member,” The Kansas City Call, May 28, 1954.

115 Timmerman was one of the two judges that ruled against Briggs when Marshall appealed the case. Judge Waring was the third judge and dissented, setting the case up for appeal to the Supreme Court.

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1947 report, he took no steps to implement any of the recommendations. In this area, he might have taken a lesson in bravery from Judge Waring.

Illus. 23: Judge Collin Seitz Courtesy: Delawareonline.com

Another judge who played a pivotal role in the Brown saga, although with less direct intervention than Judge Waring, was Collin J. Seitz ( Illus. 23). As a member of the

Delaware Chancery Court, Seitz typically specialized in complicated corporate cases.116

For a short time in the 1950s, fate pushed him into the spotlight with three civil rights cases, the most important being Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart.

The product of a parochial education, Seitz earned his law degree from the

University of Virginia, then returned to Delaware and a job at the firm of Southerland,

116 See footnote 44 page 232 for explanation of the Delaware Chancery Court.

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Berl & Potter. In Seitz’s spare time, he volunteered for the American Civil Liberties

Union (ACLU) and then became active in the Democratic Party.117 He was the youngest vice-chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court and the first of the Catholic faith.

When Louis Redding and Jack Greenberg brought suit against the University of

Delaware in Parker v. University of Delaware (1950), Vice-Chancellor Seitz presided over the case.118 He ruled in favor of the plaintiff and ordered the University to accept

Blacks immediately.119 In 1951 Seitz became Chancellor, but only after some debate caused by his liberal position, especially on civil rights issues. Delaware was a Jim Crow state, and Seitz’s work to integrate the Catholic school system had not gone unnoticed.120

Additionally, the Parker decision further threatened to jeopardize his appointment to

Chancellor, but in the end, the legislature confirmed him. Shortly after winning his appointment, Seitz met Redding and Greenberg again in court, this time in the Belton and

Bulah cases. These cases challenged segregation at the elementary and secondary levels even though the plaintiffs’ original request was simply for bus transportation for Black students to their respective schools.

117 Collin J. Seitz, “Segregation: What is Past is Prologue,” Delaware History 24, no. 4 (Fall/Winter, 1991-1992): 271-229. Wilmington Historical Society, 222.

118 Parker v. University of Delaware 75 A.2d 225 (1950).

119 Seitz, “Segregation,” 224.

120 Annette Woolard-Provine, “Introduction to: ‘What is Past is Prologue,’” in Proud Moment for Delaware: Louis Redding Esq. and the Hon. Collin J. Seitz and Their Contribution to the Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Delaware Heritage Commission, 2004).

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In 1952, Seitz ordered the schools to admit the plaintiffs even though he knew the school board would appeal the ruling. He wanted to go further but did not believe a lower court could overturn a Supreme Court ruling, namely Plessy. To be on the record, Seitz stated his objection to segregation in his opinion. That same year, the Delaware Supreme

Court upheld Seitz’s decision allowing Black children admittance to the White schools.

In 1954 the Supreme Court upheld Seitz in its Brown decision, even going so far as to refer to Seitz’s language in its decision, which pleased him.121

After serving in the Chancery for twenty years, Seitz moved to the United States

Court of Appeals. While serving, he sat on the Girard College case.122 Funding for

Girard College was from a bequest of Stephen Girard specifically to “build and operate a residential school for impoverished White, [male] orphans.”123 Girard was an orphan who made his fortune in the United States immediately after the Revolutionary War in shipping and banking. His endowment to the Girard school was the most significant philanthropic gift up to that time. The provisions of Girard’s will ran afoul of the Brown decision in its exclusivity for White males. Seitz heard the case and struck down the

White provision.124 Later cases would open the school to females. The school is now 90

121 Woolard-Provine, “Introduction,” 220.

122 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al v. Revelle W. Brown, et al, Civil Action No. 39494, July 5, 1967. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/desegregation/philadelphia.html

123 Stephen Girard, “The will of the late Stephen Girard, Esq.: procured from the office for the probate of wills: with a short biography of his life,” Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) Joseph Meredith Toner Collection, 21.

124 Seitz, “Segregation,” 228.

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percent Black and is still in operation. The City of Philadelphia manages the endowment, although it struggles to operate within its means during economic slowdowns.125 Seitz’s decision in the Girard cases is an example of the influence of the Brown decision beyond racial integration, which only continued to expand over time.

The judges in both Belton and Briggs used similar tactics to position their cases for direct appeal to the Supreme Court. The cases’ timing at the appellate level was such that one wonders if the jurists consulted to develop the tactic or if the similar strategies were coincidental. Regardless, there is little doubt that Seitz and Waring significantly assisted Marshall in his battle to overcome segregation by using the appeal process to move the two cases forward.

Summary

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Proverbs 19:21.

In contrast to many of the plaintiffs whom they represented, the lawyers in the

Brown cases were well-educated and influential men in their profession. They jousted with White lawyers on an equal footing, and they knew how to use the legal system to their advantage. They sometimes argued amongst themselves over strategy and approach, but they agreed on their goal. Most importantly, they made a difference for those they represented and the lives of the Black community at large, and they helped change

America’s racial landscape. Looking at the group of Brown attorneys, one must recognize

125 “Judge Bars Changes at Girard College,” Associated Press, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/desegregation/philadelphia.html

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that as passionate and hard-working as these men were, they saw the struggle much differently than the plaintiffs and their families. For the plaintiffs, the battle was up-close and very personal. For the lawyers, while the battle indeed held personal ramifications for them as Black men, the personal danger was far less and the ramifications of a loss less personally devastating or immediate. As much as anything, theirs was an intellectual battle, the ideological struggle of perceived good over evil and one they hated losing.

It is essential to understand that the lawyers did not fight the resistance battle alone. They received help from the local leaders, the plaintiffs, the women, teachers, volunteers, students, and even the judges overseeing the cases. The attorney’s function was to prepare themselves and prepare the legal ground, so they were up to the task when the right case came along. The power of the Brown cases was in the serendipity of the right five sets of lawyers being in place and ready when the right five Black communities initiated the right five cases and with the right Supreme Court justices to hear them.

The plan Charles Houston mapped out to overturn Plessy morphed over time.

When it came to fruition under Thurgood Marshall’s guidance, it looked much different than either imagined. Houston designed a stair-step approach that built precedent after precedent to box the courts in until forced to recognize Black rights. Marshall strove for a victory that would overturn Plessy and sweep away all vestiges of segregation, at least in public schools, with one fell swoop. He turned to the frontal attack to avoid the school- by-school, state-by-state fight that the top-down attack on universities required. What he got was far from the ideal. After Brown II, the NAACP again found itself fighting school district-by-school district, county-by-county, state-by-state again, this time from the bottom up. Years later, Marshall confided in his friend David Hutchinson: “In 1954, I

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was delirious. What a victory! I thought I was the smartest Negro in the entire world.

Then with the decision in Brown II and its evasive ‘with all deliberate speed’ clause, I was shattered! They gave us nothing and then told us to work for it. I thought I was the dumbest Negro in the United States.”126 In his analysis and strategy report prepared for

Houston in 1930, Nathan Margold cautioned: “There remains for consideration only the danger of stirring up intense opposition, ill-will, and strife as a result of any attack upon a custom so deeply entrenched...as is the segregation of the races in the public schools.”127

Surprisingly, even with their experience and given fair warning, Houston and Marshall totally underestimated Whites America’s ability to resist and circumvent the Brown decision.

126 Dennis J. Hutchinson, “A Century of Social Reform: The Judicial Role,” in American Lawyers: Public Servants and the Development of a Nation, Paul D. Carrington, ed. (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2012), 168.

127 Nathan Margold, “The Preliminary Report to the Joint Committee Supervising the Expenditure of the 1930 Appropriation by the American Fund for Public Service, NAACP.” II: “The Margold Report” in “Central Office Records, 1913-1950,” Papers of the NAACP. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 94.

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That the Negro is so disadvantaged educationally and culturally in the states where segregation is required is the strongest argument against its continuation for any period of time. Yet those who use this argument as a basis for interminable delay in the elimination of segregation in reality are seeking to utilize the product of their own wrongdoing as a justification for continued malfeasance.... There is no local option on the Fourteenth Amendment.1

CHAPTER 7: EPILOGUE

The purpose of this dissertation is to use the struggle for equal education as a lens through which to view Black resistance from a new perspective. In looking at the five cases together, one realizes the human energy and emotional commitment needed for each endeavor. It is not a question of one person deciding to bring a lawsuit then working with one lawyer to see it through to resolution. The push for change came from the bottom – from the people living the experiences they wanted to change. It involved poor sharecroppers and wealthy socialites, college professors and high school students, New

York lawyers, and small-town attorneys. Eventually, they joined with the national

NAACP, which provided the expertise to fight the legal battle in the higher courts. Top- down histories tend to lose the sense of how frantic, unconnected, and often desperate the multiple endeavors were. This dissertation demonstrates how determination and personal sacrifice forged the multi-faceted chain of resistance that was Brown.

The long journey to the final Brown decision impacted hundreds of local individuals who lived with White supremacy in place for centuries in their communities.

1Thurgood Marshall quoted in Leon Friedman, ed., Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55 (New York: Chelsea House,1969), 399-402. Quoted in Camp, and Kee, Milford Eleven, 112; Also see Kluger, Simple Justice, 271-274. This footnote is a bit confusing. Was it quoted in two places?

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In these five cases alone, one can estimate that hundreds were directly involved and thousands impacted by the decision to challenge Jim Crow. Consider then that these were not the only five cases Black resistance spawned after World War II. In Virginia alone,

Oliver Hill estimated his law firm handled seventy to eighty cases at any given time, and education was not the only issue of concern. Extrapolate Hill’s eighty cases across the

United States, and the number of individuals involved in the resistance movement is staggering. Blacks’ demands for fair housing, access to public facilities, fair employment, legal justice, and voting rights moved from quiet hope to direct confrontation. Legal activism as a form of resistance was a relatively silent attempt at uplift compared to the marches and demonstrations that soon forced racial justice into the public consciousness in the King era. Less visible, perhaps, but with the potential of being equally effective.

Even then, victory meant different things to different participants. Harry Briggs told the Civil Rights Library interviewer that “we found freedom,” and Eliza Briggs agreed, adding that “we can go places we could never go before.”2 No one handed them the freedom they relished. They fought for it. They risked their futures and those of their children. At a celebration at Judge Waring’s home the night of the Brown decision,

Walter White, NAACP executive secretary, specifically applauded the Clarendon plaintiffs’ bravery. He reminded the revelers that “they took a stand even though to take such a stand might have meant death at almost any time… Without them…neither the

NAACP…nor the Supreme Court could have taken the stand which they have taken

2 “Interview with Eliza and Harry Briggs,” Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Civil Rights Digital Library, crdl.usg.edu.

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today.”3 In a similar vein, Esther Brown told the celebrating Topeka residents that Brown could not have succeeded without “us – the little people.” She went on to say that “the most brilliant lawyers couldn’t have succeeded but for the help of people like you here tonight.”4 She was right, and this work has elevated their stories.

On that same day, The New York Times pictured Thurgood Marshall, with George

E.C. Hayes, and James Nabrit, the lawyers in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), shaking hands and beaming on the steps of the Supreme Court. Three years after the 1954 decision, however, Rev. De Laine told a very different gathering, “After Three years of rejoicing that this high Tribunal has rightfully declared that segregation is discrimination; we are not yet free. We are still held in check by those who are determined to abridge our constitutional rights.” He went on to warn the group that “the May 17, 1954 decision was a decisive battle, but the war is not over.”5

The Brown II decision one year later effectively gutted the potential of the initial decision by giving the offending states time to make changes “with all deliberate speed.”6

The fast-moving train of civil rights litigation hardly slowed down after the initial celebration. The lawyers were immediately back in court fighting to have the Brown

3 Poppy Cannon, A Gentle Knight: My Husband Walter White (New York: Reinhart & Co., 1956), 193-195.

4 “Topekans Celebrate Supreme Court Victory,” The Kansas City Call, May 28, 1954.

5 J. A De Laine, “The Decision of May 17, 1954,” Joseph A. De Laine Papers, Civil Rights Digital Library. crdl.usg.edu.

6 Oliver Brown et al v. Topeka Board of Education et al. 349 U.S. 294 (1955). This second ruling is generally referred to as Brown II.

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decision implemented and taking on new school integration fights as Brown’s bright promise faded. As Harry Ashmore pointed out, “integration could only be ordered in the five school districts cited in the five specific cases.”7 In the 11,173 additional districts that practiced segregation, the change forced the NAACP once again to fight for integration district-by-district, a return to the days of the graduate school cases. As

Ashmore explained, “the limit of the Supreme Court action is the setting of a new legal precedent.”8 The Supreme Court overturned Plessy setting aside the separate-but-equal doctrine, but acceptance and implementation of the Court’s decision required practical application on a national level. Given Whites’ strong prejudice and determination to resist, that was now not possible.

“Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.”9

In truth, the five Brown cases were like a stone thrown into a pond. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals touched by the ripples created by the decision as they flowed outward from the center. Each of their perspectives is valid in that they describe the impact on their lives. No two experiences were the same, and individuals internalized the change in their lives and their community’s culture differently. Equally

7 Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the School (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 134.

8 Ashmore, The Negro, 134.

9 Khaled Hosseini, “Khaled Hosseini: The Threads That Connect Us,” www.shelf- awareness.com

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important, an individual’s memory can change over time as one experiences the impact of the Court’s decision.

This work brings forward some of the contributions and experiences of actual participants and, where possible, in their own voices. The focus is on those who slipped into the shadows outside the spotlight shone on the major historical figures. They lived these events and stayed the course when the outcome was unknown. Life did not stop for the Briggses or the De Laines or the Griffins with the Brown decision, nor did it necessarily get better. Life, in fact, for some, got harder as Whites penalized them financially and socially in retribution for their involvement in the case. Like Rev. Griffin, others found themselves in court again, fighting the White supremacists of Prince Edward

County to open the schools. Many like Oliver Brown, Carol Johns, and Shirley Belton failed to directly enjoy the fruits of their efforts, but that does not mean their efforts were unimportant. At the same time, while Brown may have been the high point in some of the civil rights lawyers’ lives, in others, it was just another, albeit important, case in a struggle that started before Brown and continued after it.

The families and supporters who participated in the five Brown cases were the effort’s heart and life-blood. There were no successful leaders without them. Each was an integral part of the puzzle. They represented other equally unknown soldiers of the civil rights struggle who also demanded the civil liberties the Constitution is supposed to guarantee. When we consider that there is a human story motivating and guiding each participant, we see that the strength of the warp and woof of our society is not only in its leaders. The American fabric’s strength comes from the individuals old and young, educated and uneducated, Black, White, and brown, male and female, gay, straight, and

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transgender, who believe that justice is worth fighting to acquire and sacrifice for to maintain. Concerned Whites can educate themselves on the issues to obtain at least an intellectual understanding of the price these activists paid. However, given the automatic privilege that Whites experience without asking and enjoy without apology, it is hard to comprehend what life on the other side of the color line requires just to stay even.

Listening to the voices of those who were intimately involved and personally impacted is one way to understand why they fought and why they persisted.

“It’s all too easy to stand on the mountaintop as a historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that.”10

Despite the Brown participants’ disappointment, there were positive benefits to the Court’s decision. The battle against school segregation became a broader battle against spaces architecturally designed to suppress and control Blacks’ access to White privilege. This battle was more successful. While still fighting school integration suits, the NAACP blanketed the courts with suits challenging segregation in public swimming pools, theatres, public parks, and housing. Finding a footing in these battles, it moved on to constitutional rights covering the gamut from voting rights to fair employment. The

Association did not ignore these issues previously. In fact, just the opposite is the case.

However, with the Brown decision, the federal government wrenched the unused sword from the states’ hands to assist its citizens of color, and the NAACP moved forward quickly and decisively to take advantage of the favorable climate. However, from

10 David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We are and What We Stand For (New York: Simon Schuster, 2017).

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experience, they knew that the arc of justice could swing back toward the center if not further, and they needed to put mechanisms in place to minimize the impact when it happened.

Some historians maintain that Brown’s most important contribution was empowering the civil rights movement’s classical phase, as Bayard Rustin called it. In the decision’s wake, protests began erupting across the country as people demanded the rights the Court promised. Though never a tightly coordinated partnership, the lawsuits filed and won by the NAACP helped codify in law the things that King and other protest leaders marched to implement at the practical level. The NAACP brought the lawsuits and fought through the long, messy legal battles that arose when the activists’ efforts met resistance. With King’s assassination in 1968, the “classical phase” – the glory days – of the civil rights movement faded as other issues such as gay rights, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, women’s rights, and the HIV pandemic began to share the stage with racial issues. Black resistance cycled into a new phase. The Black movement of the 1990s was more subdued than the protest movement of the 1960s. A new generation of

Americans saw the goals espoused by civil rights leaders as less politically extreme.

Nonetheless, the tradition of resistance continued and erupted again in public protests with the #Black Lives Matters movement in 2013.11

As to its primary purpose, and looking at Brown as a vehicle intended to integrate the public schools, historian Michael Klarman espoused a dissenting view of Brown’s

11 The #Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began with the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Claiming self-defense, Zimmerman was acquitted.

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impact, stating emphatically “that Brown had little direct impact on school desegregation.”12 Klarman supported his position by pointing to the small percentage of

Blacks attending desegregated schools between 1955 and 1963. A salient perspective is missing from Klarman’s argument, however. Brown underwrote the civil rights

Map 5: Source: Steve Suitts, Vanessa Elkan and Dorian Woolston et. al., “A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South’s Public Schools,” The Southern Education Foundation, (2010). www.southerneducation.org

12 Michael J. Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” The Journal of American History 81, no.1 (June 1994): 85.

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movement not because it “eliminated” school segregation but because it overturned

Plessy. Plessy was the rampart, the dyke, if one will, that jurists could not or would not try to vault to protect Black citizens’ rights. Plessy was the foundation of White supremacy that excused the faint-hearted from taking action. The importance of Brown is that it voided Plessy. The loss of cover exposed the racist rhetoric and practices of government officials, clergy, and others. With Plessy eliminated, Blacks no longer had to fight the Constitution to get their rights. Now the Constitution was truly a tool Blacks could use to obtain the rights previously denied them. Brown’s precedent soon became the weapon of choice for other minorities – women, LGBTQIA+, Latinx, religious minorities, and others – fighting for equal opportunity.13

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”14

In one aspect, Klarman’s point is valid and this discussion would be incomplete without examining the consequences of the legal decision on public education and the

Black community. There is no doubt that life in America changed because of the Brown decision. As said before, some changes were for the better, such as opening public spaces to all citizens and eliminating sanctioned “Black only” or “White only” accommodations.

At the same time, White resistance to school integration was profound, immediate, and unrelenting. White segregationists used the courts’ slow process to delay and delay and

13 LGBTQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual plus other orientations.

14 Montesquieu, (1689-1755).

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then delay again implementing Brown’s mandates. Simultaneously, White segregationists used the time-proven element of violence and intimidation to undermine communities’ resolve to integrate their schools. As a result, the long-cherished dream of equal education for all of America’s children began to fade. The racial diversity and associated racial understanding that integration initially promised were slow to come and did not happen in many cases. Many schools, once predominately White, became almost totally non-White. Funding for inner-city schools suffered from upper-middle-class movement to the suburbs. As a result, inner-city school populations declined, requiring the shuttering of facilities. The closings disrupted neighborhood schools and neighborhood cohesiveness. As observed by Paul Ciotti of the Cato Institute, “In successful school districts, neighborhood schools are the hub of much community social activity. When students are bused clear across the district to a faraway magnet school, the fabric of the community is torn apart.”15 In many areas, charter schools began to cater to select demographics of talent or economic status, exacerbating class consciousness, further dividing the community.

Meanwhile, the United States demographics changed, at least in part, due to the country’s racist immigration policies. In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and

Nationality Act, which established first-come-first-served criteria for admitting immigrants to the United States. According to historian Ira Berlin, before the act’s passage, the United States’ foreign-born population was less than 5 percent, and “The

15 Paul Ciotti, “Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment” (The Cato Institute, March 16, 1998), 22. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-298.pdf.

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United States was no longer a nation of immigrants.”16 By eliminating quotas based on national origin, the number of immigrants legally entering the United States increased in each decade since 1965, until by the year 2000, one American in ten was foreign-born, and the new citizens were disproportionately Black.17 The influx of Blacks from continental Africa outpaced the numbers brought to the United States as enslaved persons.18 The African immigrants, combined with Blacks from the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific rim, shifted population distributions away from majority White. In his article in the New York Times, journalist Sam Roberts reported that the U.S. Census

Bureau estimated that by 2042 America would have a minority-majority, meaning that the total number of combined minorities in the United States will outnumber the total number of Whites.19 These statistics are frightening to White supremacists and contribute to at least some of the White backlash apparent in some sectors of the political spectrum.

In 2014 America’s public schools reached that tipping point. Today in the South, non-White students constitute 48 percent of the school population, and 40 percent of

16 Ira Berlin, “Migrations Forced and Free,” Smithsonian, February 2010, 80.

17 In 2019 the Migration Policy Institute reported that 84,990 African and 101,246 Caribbean immigrants became U.S. Citizens compared to 81,040 from European countries. “Acquisition of U.S. Citizenship by Country of Birth,” Migration Policy Institute, n.p. migrationpolicy.org.

18 Berlin, Migrations, 85.

19 Sam Roberts, “Majorities in US Set to Become Minority by 2014,” New York Times, August 14, 2008.

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those children are in significantly segregated schools.20 The majority of students in the

South’s public schools are non-White and come from low-income families. These students are scoring the lowest on state-mandated tests and national performance exams.21 As in the pre-Brown era, the South lags the rest of the country in per-pupil

Table 4: Public School Racial Mix Projections

Source: Pew Research Center, National Center for Education Statistics, U. S. Department of Education

20 Laura Meckler and Kate Rabinowitz, “The Changing Face of School Integration,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2019.

21 Kamina A.Pinder, and Evan R. Hanson, “360 Degrees of Segregation: A Historical Perspective of Segregation-Era School Equalization Programs in the Southern United States,” Amsterdam Law Forum 2, no. 3 (2010):49-70.

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expenditures, and therefore, low-income students of color receive much fewer resources than needed to be successful. As a result, once again, “the Southern states are now underfunding the education of a majority of their students.”22

Regardless of origin, Black Americans all shared the decline in the quality of

American public education, which impacted them disproportionately. Seventy years after

Brown, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) rated

America’s education against other industrialized nations. The United States received a rating of “mediocre.”23 The Atlantic reported the results, stating: “This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries.”24 The report states that the United States “ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading,” representing little change since 2000. The OECD attributes “fifteen percent of the

American score variation [as being] explained by socio-economic differences between students.”25 The United States Census Bureau confirmed that Blacks remain at the bottom of the Median Household Income rankings. This means that integration did not provide quality education for many Blacks or the improved economic opportunity for which they hoped.

22 Steve Suitts, Vanessa Elkan and Dorian Woolston et. al, “A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South’s Public Schools,” The Southern Education Foundation, (2010). www.southerneducation.org

23 Julia Ryan, “American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math,” The Atlantic, (December 2013): www.theatlantic.com.

24 Ryan, American Schools, np.

25 Ryan, American Schools, np.

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The OECD report points to the skewed distribution of wealth amongst racial categories in the United States. The report is a striking reminder of White privilege’s continuing influence derived from centuries of publicly sanctioned segregation and racial discrimination. In an echo from the past, funding for education continues its uneven distribution, with communities with higher property values receiving a disproportionately larger share of total available funds than areas with lower property values. Along with the economic disparity, America’s racially segregated residential areas continue to hinder diversity in the classroom. Even as Blacks move to the suburbs, the communities with higher property values are disproportionately White, and people of color dominate the schools in the more impoverished communities.

Table 5: Distribution of Wealth Amongst Racial Categories in U.S.

Race/Ethnicity of 2017 Median Household 2018 Median Household Household Head Income (2018 dollars) Income

All races/ethnicities $62,626 $63,179

Asian 83,376 87,194

White, not Hispanic 69,851 70,642

Hispanic (any race) 51,389 51,450

Black 40,324 41,361

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2018, and 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplements. Complied by Peter G. Peterson Foundation. pgpf.org

At the root of the issue is the funding mechanism itself. Traditionally a tax on personal property funded public schools. Historically, when America had a rural

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economy with many small communities, neighborhoods were more homogeneous, and there was a more universal standard of living, according to sociologist Bruce Biddle and educational psychologist David Berliner.26 Funding for public schools by taxing property was a relatively equitable method of cost-sharing and income reallocation.

With the migration to the cities and then later to the suburbs, financial differences became more pronounced depending on where people lived. At the same time, homeownership increased. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of people owning their own homes grew from 47.8 percent in 1930 to 55 percent in 1950 to

66.5 percent in 2010. The most significant increase in homeownership resulted from the passing of the GI Bill in 1944, which subsidized home mortgages for White veterans.27

As homeownership increased, the disparity in property values used to calculate property taxes widened.

Still, the practice of community funding for public schools based on property values continued, and those living in more affluent areas with higher property values, thus higher property taxes in real dollars, saw little benefit or justification for helping to fund those living in more impoverished areas.28 This means that “the amount of funding that communities are able to provide for their schools varies according to community

26 Bruce J. Biddle and David C. Berliner, “A Research Synthesis/Unequal School Funding in the United States,” Educational Leadership 59, no. 8 (May 2002): 5.

27 “Home Ownership Rate for the Unites States,” U.S. Census Bureau, October 27, 2020. The home ownership rate is the proportion of households that are owner occupied.

28 Biddle and Berliner, “A Research Synthesis,” 6.

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affluence.”29 This is reminiscent of the Delaware dual school board arrangement where

Whites and Blacks in a community each funded their schools with property taxes levied against the respective community. The disparity in Black and White communities’ property values contributed significantly to the under-funding of Black schools. The current system results in the same under-funding for low-income communities across the

United States

Meanwhile, Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) signaled the waning of support for forced integration as a remedy to overcome segregation driven by residential patterns. Kennedy wrote: “Where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices...It is beyond the authority and beyond the ability of the federal courts to try to counteract these kinds of continuous and massive demographic shifts.”30

Educator Daniel Amsterdam argued that the Freeman case is just an example of one of the many discriminatory practices that increased segregation in the suburbs in the

1990s.31 Forced integration as a way to improve educational performance is in decline as a viable strategy to ensure equal educational opportunities.32 The issue is more complicated than previously thought. While research demonstrates that Black students do

29 Biddle and Berliner, “A Research Synthesis,” 7.

30 Freeman v. Pitts 503.U.S. 467 (1992).

31 Daniel Amsterdam, “Toward the Resegregation of Southern Schools: African American Suburbanization and Historical Erasure in Freeman v. Pitts, History of Education Quarterly, 57, no. 4 (November 2017): 451-479.

32 “Public School Rankings – 2020,” https://worldpopulationreview.com/state- rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state.

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better in a diverse environment, and White students do no worse, integration alone did not guarantee equal educational opportunities.33

For Black southerners, the battle must now turn to ways to transform the South’s educational funding mechanisms so that the South’s Black children are not left behind those in other states. Neighborhood schools in areas with a high concentration of more impoverished people require funding levels consistent with those in more affluent areas.

Part of the problem is that the old “bootstrap” ideology continues to echo as many taxpayers view funding schools for underprivileged children, especially those of color and those living outside their community, as an unfair use of their tax money. Many taxpayers still believe that the poverty that eventually impacts school funding results from an individual’s failure to work hard or to some genetically determined poverty cycle, essentially blaming the victim.34 As Biddle and Berliner admitted: “To voice such

33 Meckler and Rabinowitz, “The Changing Face.”

34 Biddle and Berliner point to R.J. Hernstein and Charles Murry, The Bell Curve: The Reshaping of American Life by Differences in Intelligence (New York: The Free Press, 1994); A.R. Jensen, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); J.R. Kluegel and E.R. Smith, Beliefs About Inequality: Americans View of What is and What Out to Be (New York: Aldine de Bruyter, 1986); and Dale Patrick Moynihan, ed., On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (New York: BasicBooks, 1969), 6.

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Map 6: Source: Steve Suitts, Vanessa Elkan and Dorian Woolston et al., “A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South’s Public Schools,” The Southern Education Foundation, (2010). www.southerneducation.org

arguments openly are not acceptable in the United States, but the beliefs that…justify them are still embraced privately by many White, affluent people who use them to rationalize resistance to proposals for equal school funding.”35

35 Biddle and Berliner, “A Research Synthesis,” 6.

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These versions of the racist arguments used in the pre-Brown era to justify underfunding Black education prevail and with the same results. It is also important to note that according to Biddle and Berliner’s research, the impact of inequitable funding goes beyond the district, even into the individual schools within the district or even individual classrooms. They point out that even within a well-funded school district, there are often disparities in services provided the mentally, emotionally, or physically disadvantaged students.

With a growing Black middle-class, there is an opportunity to bring more pressure on school boards and municipalities to change the funding mechanism so that all students in a state, regardless of economic status, have access to quality education. This is particularly true if the various Black ethnic groups combine their political strength in the endeavor. The challenge is to overcome the property owners’ reluctance to absorb tax increases even when it benefits their children. There is strong resistance to the concept of tax redistribution to provide equitable funding for all schools in a city or state, and now some of those homeowners who must absorb the increase are middle-class Blacks.

Resistance to a tax increase is a long tradition in the United States. In the fight for equitable funding, Blacks may find themselves in a new battle for equal education – one as difficult to wage as the fight against Jim Crow.

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“You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.”36

There is a word of caution, however. Many educators believed that solving the funding issue, while necessary, was only one leg of a three-legged stool. They pointed to what became known as the Kansas City Missouri (KCMO) desegregation “experiment” as proof that money alone cannot improve underprivileged children’s academic standing.

David Armor, a sociologist, and educational consultant, testified in 1997 that “integration had no effect” on the test scores of the minority students, nor does it cause a decline in the scores of White students.37 Historian Ronald F. Ferguson argued that socioeconomic disparities among families that are “morally objectionable and politically dangerous” must also be addressed before low-income and minority students have opportunities equivalent to their White peers.

The Kansas City Experiment came about due to a lawsuit filed by a group of mothers, including some educational activists, who took control of the Kansas City,

Missouri school board in the mid-1970s. Facing financial disaster and federal government intervention, they joined with the school district in 1977 in a lawsuit against the State of

Missouri and suburban school districts.38 Their suit contended that “segregation in

Kansas City is the result of the housing and other policies of the suburban jurisdictions,”

36 Paul Ciotti, “Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment” (The Cato Institute, March 16, 1998), 3. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-298.pdf 3., 1.

37 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 19.

38 Jenkins v. Missouri, 959 F. Supp.1151 (1977).

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in which neither the state nor the federal government intervened.39 Eventually, the suit’s structure was changed by the judge in the case, Judge Russel Clark. Clark dropped the suburban school districts from the suit, and the school district became a defendant rather than one of the plaintiffs.

In the three decades after the Brown decision, enrollment in the KCMO schools declined from 70,000 to 36,000 students, and the district went from majority White to majority Black.40 The decline was caused, at least in part, by Whites moving to the suburbs or placing their children in private schools. According to Ciotti, “The real reason

Whites wouldn’t send their children to school in Kansas City was quite simple – the

KCMSD couldn’t offer White students as good an education as they were already getting in their neighborhood suburban schools.”41 Ciotti’s explanation was much too simplistic.

The reasons for the moves were complex, but certainly, White racism played a significant part.

Ciotti was correct, however, that Kansas City did not provide its students with a quality education. Not only were school buildings in dismal physical condition, but resources such as textbooks, lab equipment, and libraries also were outdated or simply not available. Many teachers were ill-trained, and the school administration was weak.

The chronic underfunding of the district schools, which began in 1969, the same year

39 Fred Schecker, “Trial Begins in Six-Year-Old Kansas City Case,” Education Week (November 9, 1983), www.edweekorg.

40 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 3.

41 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,”16.

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Black students became the majority in the district, points to the racial animus that Ciotti discounted. For the next nineteen years, voters turned down requests for tax increases to address the district’s deficiencies.42 White city leaders’ active participation on the school board and in school funding support also stopped as they moved their children out of the public school system and chose to turn their attention to other issues. As a result, the school board became populated with individuals without the expertise or experience to address the chronic problems or manage a $400 million (and growing) budget.

When Judge Clark, a federal judge from Springfield, Missouri assigned to the case began, he asked the plaintiffs and the defendants to submit separate remedy recommendations for him to evaluate and from which he would choose. The plaintiffs’ plan, which eventually Clark selected, focused mainly on increasing integration by attracting Whites back to the district rather than direct actions to improve educational quality.43 To improve the racial mix, the plaintiffs presented Judge Clark with a list of physical improvements and enhancements that, if implemented, they believed would attract White students back to the Kansas City schools. The list became known as the

Field of Dreams plan. The plaintiffs argued that “going to school with middle-class

Whites would increase blacks’ achievement,” and it is evident from the record that Judge

Clark accepted this logic. The argument continues to have proponents, such as historian

Richard Rothstein who wrote in 2014, “Integrating disadvantaged black students into

42 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 3.

43 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 4.

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schools where more privileged [White] students predominate can narrow the black-White achievement gap.”44

The “Build it, and They Will Come” approach advocated by the plan required funding, and Judge Clark took extralegal measures to increase property taxes, institute a

1.5% income tax on non-state residents working in the city, and eventually, requiring the

State of Missouri to make up the shortfall, which by that time was $110 million annually.

Based on the open checkbook that Judge Clark gave the plaintiffs and their lawyer,

Arthur Benson, the plaintiffs considered it their job “to build a school system that would give students a better education than they could get anywhere else in the area.”45 Again, this was all done believing that as suburban middle-class Whites flooded back “into the district, they would integrate the schools, and their middle-class aspirations would change the school culture from one of failure to one of success, whereupon blacks’ achievement would rise to match that of Whites.”46

The plan was a dismal failure. Not only did Whites not move their children back to the public schools, but the district’s standardized test scores did not improve. The three-grade-level achievement gap remained the same, and Black students dropped out in record numbers growing to an average of 56 percent in the 1990s, with some schools as

44 Richard Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap, Segregated Schools, and Segregated Neighborhoods – A Constitutional Insult.” Race and Social Problems 7, no.1 (March 2015): 23.

45 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 5.

46 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 5.

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high as 71 percent.47 In 2020 only 66 percent of students in the Kansas City schools graduated from high school.48 As one high school guidance counselor observed, “It’s not unconstitutional to give the students a lousy education; it’s only unconstitutional to give them a segregated one.”49

In his final analysis of the Kansas City Experiment and its eventual failure, Ciotti points to the plan’s lack of attention to “things that really make a difference in children’s lives.”50 According to Ciotti, this included such things as “appointing qualified principals, supervising instructional practices, developing a curriculum, providing incentives, hiring good teachers, and firing bad ones.”51 Of these, dealing with the teachers’ competence was one of the most frustrating and disappointing challenges the school board faced.

As in Topeka and Wichita, keeping their jobs was the teachers’ priority in Kansas

City. They did not support any measures aimed at improving teaching quality that incorporated any type of performance measurements. The Black churches supported the teachers who were active members of the local Black congregations. When any board action appeared to threaten Black teachers’ jobs, the churches supported the teachers.52

47 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 20.

48 “KCPS By the Numbers,” https://www.kcpublicschools.org, [accessed March 5, 2021]

49 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 20

50 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 14-15.

51 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,”14-15.

52 Ciotti stated that the two largest employers of Blacks in Kansas City were the post office and the school district. If teachers lost their jobs, given the Jim Crow issues prevalent in Kansas City at the time, there was no place for them to find jobs with equivalent salaries.

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Plaintiff’s attorney, Arthur Benson, told Paul Ciotti that “Black preachers closely monitored the district’s hiring and promotion practices, with the result that the district essentially couldn’t fire anyone.”53

The Kansas City Experiment’s failure was evident early on, but efforts to follow the doomed plan continued for twenty-five years and cost $2 billion. Even after the courts surrendered control of the district in 1999 and despite the billions spent, the school district lost its accreditation in 2000, regained it provisionally in 2002, lost it again in

2011, and only managed to regain provisional accreditation in 2014 as it continued to struggle with poor test scores and low attendance. In 2020 the Kansas City Schools was

57 percent Black; 28 percent Hispanic; 9 percent White; 6 percent Other.54 Clearly, the problem in Kansas City was one that money alone could not solve. Perhaps only through a failure of the magnitude of the Kansas City Experiment and its long-term effects could society develop a complete understanding of the complexity involved in integrating inner-city schools and improving educational quality at the same time.

One aspect of the failure in Kansas City that Ciotti’s analysis failed to consider was that segregation in Kansas City before and after the Brown decision was primarily a function of housing patterns, which themselves were discrimination driven. Restrictive covenants introduce by real estate developer J.C. Nichols combined with government- sanctioned “red-lining” in housing loans perpetuated housing patterns along a clearly

53 Ciotti, “Money and School Performance,” 15.

54 “KCPS By the Numbers,” https://www.kcpublicschools.org.

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defined geographic boundary – Troost Avenue that ran north and south through the heart of the city’s residential section.55 The majority of Black families lived east of Troost

Avenue and attended schools in that geographic area. Whites lived west of Troost and attended schools in a geographic area that tended to be majority White. As Richard

Rothstein, historian of economic policy, contends, for most cities, “residential segregation is ‘de jure,’ resulting from racially-motivated and explicit public policy” of a nature that is self-perpetuating.56 Rothstein contends that “without awareness of the history of state-sponsored residential segregation,” policymakers will find it difficult to

“fulfill the constitutional mandate to remedy the racial isolation of neighborhoods or the school segregation that flows from it.”57

The Brown decision focused on one aspect of the educational disparity – racial segregation in schools and the inherently unequal school systems it created. It did not address housing patterns that drove the system, although the NAACP fought housing segregation in separate efforts. In places like Topeka, where school facilities were deemed equal, parents focused on access to neighborhood schools, not balancing the

55 For more on Kansas City racial issues, including residential segregation see Charles E. Coulter, “Take Up the Black Man’s Burden”: Kansas City’s African American Communities, 1965-1939 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006); Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), and Sherry Lamb Schirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

56 Richard Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap, Segregated Schools, and Segregated Neighborhoods – A Constitutional Insult,” Abstract. Economic Policy Institute, November 12, 2014, epi.org, np.

57 Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap,” np.

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racial mix of those schools. Efforts to “balance” the racial mix in schools with local demographics resulted in court-mandated busing. The use of busing to racially balance the Kansas City schools racially failed as it has in most other cities, and most communities eventually abandoned the technique as courts realized that children were bused from majority Black schools across town to majority Black schools. Today, it is evident that “Education policy is constrained by housing policy.”58

At the time of the Brown decision, Black activists believed that giving Black children access to an integrated education would be the springboard to economic improvement. However, the Kansas City Experiment demonstrated that it takes more than forced racial mixing and state-of-the-art facilities to provide the uplift for which

America’s minorities strove. It takes a realization that overcoming those racist policies of the past requires a holistic approach to the socio-eco-political problems facing America’s underprivileged and under-served communities. It takes Whites’ recognition of the historical racism and support for those solutions that can overcome it, and that may still be the hardest of all commodities to come by.

58 Rothstein, “The Racial Achievement Gap,” np

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