This is, at best, a gross misrepresentation of the facts. And at worst, it’s an intentional lie meant to cover up years of continued flagrant flouting of the US Constitution by states that refused to integrate.
Did segregated schools rush to integrate? Did they create comprehensive plans to make sure that all children had equal educational opportunities? The simple answer is absolutely not.
The Little Rock Nine—Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo—the students who publicly attempted to integrate Central High School in 1957, were very prominent, visible members of this quest for school equality and integration.
But to get to Little Rock, we need to travel through Topeka, and we need to stop by the home of minister Oliver Brown in 1950. Oliver’s young daughter, Linda, was ready to be enrolled in school.
Oliver held Linda’s hand as they walked down the street of their mixed neighborhood to the elementary school that many of her friends attended. “Sit here,” he told Linda, leaving her in the waiting area while he entered the principal’s office, closing the door behind him.[2]
Linda could hear the voices inside the principal’s office getting louder. Her father reappeared, his face hard. He grabbed her firmly by the hand and marched her out of the school. Linda didn’t know what had happened, but she knew it wasn’t good.
He had just tried to enroll his daughter in the closest elementary school to their home, a school for white children, and was denied. The district said she would need to attend the more distant school for Black children. It’s not that Oliver Brown didn’t think Linda could learn at the all-Black school; it’s that he didn’t think she should have to.
Oliver Brown would become the lead plaintiff in the landmark Brown v. Board Supreme Court case, by nature of his last name being first alphabetically. Brown v. Board of Education was actually a number of cases joined together, lawsuits from multiple states and Washington, D.C., all suing over the doctrine of “separate but equal” rendered under Plessy v. Ferguson, which had told people like Clara Brown that she wasn’t a citizen of the country she was born in.
Attorney Thurgood Marshall argued the case in front of the Supreme Court in 1952, and before the Supreme Court could release their opinion, the chief justice died. Eisenhower appointed a new chief justice, the governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren decided to order that the case be reheard so he could listen to the oral arguments.
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Earl Warren was born in the late 1800s to Scandinavian immigrants who had moved to California, and he embarked on a fifty-year career in public service, working as a prosecutor and later serving as the only person to be elected to three terms as governor of California. In fact, Warren did something that’s basically unheard of in American government: he won both the Republican gubernatorial primary and the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Warren’s version of good government was one that was efficient, transparent, and nonpartisan.
As a prosecutor, Warren and his team tackled corruption head-on, vigorously racking up conviction after conviction, to the tune of thousands of people being sentenced for bribery, bootlegging, prostitution, and fraud.
Perhaps Warren’s most famous prosecution, however, was Alameda County sheriff Burton Becker. Becker was openly a “Klailiff,” or vice president of a KKK chapter. He ran for sheriff on a platform of Christian values, vowing to clean things up when it came to crime. Becker was easily elected, given that his opponent was implicated in the grisly murder of a dismembered woman found floating in an estuary.
Warren had his eye on Becker, and during one of their meetings issued a stern warning to him to clean up his act. Becker was defiant, urging Warren to “take care of his own business, and I’ll take care of mine.”[3]
While the KKK openly supported Prohibition, Becker was engaged in one of the largest graft operations in the country. Liquor still operators paid off Becker’s deputies. But if they refused to pay up, Becker would raid them, making the public think he was cracking down on crime. An informant kept him abreast of any impending federal enforcement actions. A series of low-level criminals testified before a grand jury that they had been paid off by Becker, and Becker was finally sent to San Quentin prison.
In May 1922, some fifteen hundred Klansmen gathered in the hills above Oakland, California. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle read: “Standing with bared heads before the fiery cross of the Invisible Empire, 500 novices were initiated into the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Oakland Friday night. An American flag snapped in the breeze, and on the flag-draped altar was a Bible, a sword, and a goblet of water. The group of novices was surrounded by a phalanx of white-robed members of the Klan. Kneeling, they recited the oath, and were sprinkled with water from the goblet. Many of the novices are said to have fainted during the ceremony.”[4]
Warren was having none of it.
Earl Warren was elected attorney general in 1938 and governor in 1942, and he held these positions during World War II, when California assisted the federal government in incarcerating more than one hundred twenty thousand Japanese Americans. Even when the incarceration camps closed in January 1945, he argued against releasing the people imprisoned there, saying, “If the Japs are released, no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap…. We don’t want to have a second Pearl Harbor in California. We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it.”[5]
These racist and xenophobic viewpoints would later haunt Warren.
Warren rose to national significance when he ran for vice president on the Republican ticket with Thomas Dewey, and later, in the 1950s, he threw his support behind Dwight Eisenhower. In exchange for his support, Eisenhower promised Warren the first seat available on the Supreme Court, a decision Eisenhower would live to regret.
There was already a former member of the KKK on the Supreme Court, Justice Hugo Black, previously a senator from Alabama, and the brother-in-law of Virginia Durr. Black tried hard to distance himself from the Klan after being sworn in, going out of his way to hire Catholics, Jews, and African Americans for court jobs and taking the extraordinary step of publicizing these hires. He wanted to send a clear message that his days of prejudice were behind him. Still, Black authored the Supreme Court Korematsu opinion that said the incarceration of Japanese Americans was constitutional.
In 1953, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Fred Vinson, had a massive heart attack and died in office. Eisenhower made good on his promise and offered the position of chief justice to Earl Warren. Eisenhower viewed Warren as a man much like himself: a man whose popularity transcended party. A pragmatist who cared about people. A man who had dedicated his life to public service.
While Earl Warren had never been a judge, he had significantly more prosecutorial experience than nearly any judge before or since. In fact, five of the nine Supreme Court justices in 1954 had never had any meaningful experience as a judge. Justice Felix Frankfurter had been a law professor, William Douglas came from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Robert Jackson had been an attorney general, and Hugo Black had briefly been a night court judge early in his career. This broad array of experiences created a certain type of intellectual diversity on the court. By contrast, today’s Supreme Court justices are mostly professional judges.
It was later the Warren court that gave us Miranda v. Arizona and Gideon v. Wainwright, establishing the constitutional right to remain silent and the right to an attorney.[6]
When Thurgood Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education a second time, Warren and Marshall already knew of each other. Marshall had advocated for the end of school segregation in California, under a suit filed by the family of nine-year-old Sylvia Mendez, who objected to being forced to attend a school for Mexicans. As governor, Warren later signed a bill into law ending public school segregation.[7]
Warren knew that whatever opinion the court issued in Brown would be controversial. And he wanted to send a strong, unanimous message. He knew that any amount of dissent on the court would empower segregationists to disregard their decision.
As it turned out, Justice Jackson was in the hospital at the time the court was getting ready to release their written opinion. Warren brought him the drafted opinion, which he agreed to sign, and the next day, when the court was scheduled to read their opinion aloud from the bench, Jackson checked himself out of the hospital in order to attend the hearing.
“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the bailiff called, announcing that the court was in session. Chief Justice Warren began to read. The tension in the room grew, each word Warren spoke bringing him closer to what the crowd wanted to know: Can separate be equal?
“We come to the question presented,” Warren read. “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” Warren paused, aware of the gravity of what he was about to say.
This was the moment that Linda’s dad was waiting for. This was the question that would change America.
“We unanimously believe that it does,” Warren answered.[8]
A wave of emotion swept the normally silent Supreme Court chamber. Warren later said that he could barely hear it, but he felt it in ways that defied description.
We unanimously believe. Unanimous was better than Thurgood Marshall could have hoped for. The Brown family read about the decision afterward. “We lived in the calm of the hurricane’s eye, gazing at the storm around us, and wondering how it would all end. I don’t think my father ever got discouraged,” Linda Brown recalled as an adult.[9]
The news of the decision made some people jubilant, the result of many years of hard work, persistence, and sacrifice. It made other people irate. School integration was an affront to their religious and moral beliefs.
For centuries, many white Christians believed that God made the races different, and that it was only natural that some should be subservient to others. They used scriptures like Luke 12:47 to justify their beliefs: “He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
After Brown came down, protesters on the steps of the Supreme Court held signs that read things like “Race mixing is communism,” “Stop the race mixing march of the antichrist,” and “Communists infiltrated our churches. Now it integrates our schools. II Peter 2:12.”
(I looked up II Peter 2:12 in the King James Bible, likely the translation the protester holding the sign in 1954 used. It reads: “But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.” The protester was likening Black children to animals.)
Listen, y’all don’t need to write to me saying, “That’s not true Christianity.” I’m not asking you to believe it is. But these were not fringe beliefs in many of the evangelical churches in the South. This was how most white Christians at that time and in that place interpreted the scriptures. It was what they heard from their pulpits, and what they wanted taught in schools. White supremacy and white Christian identity are inextricably linked in American history. Facts don’t require our personal approval for them to be facts.
After the first Brown decision, the court ordered a second hearing. The first opinion that was released in Brown went over the why of this issue—why it was important to integrate schools, because separate cannot be equal. The second hearing focused on the how. How were schools around the country going to integrate? The Supreme Court recognized that different regions of the country were going to require different approaches. In Brown II, the Supreme Court ordered schools to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
What does the phrase with all deliberate speed mean to you? You might hear it and think quickly and deliberately speed things along, right? Be speedy about your integration. Deliberately be speedy. That’s absolutely what I thought, and what I was taught as a high school student.
