SHCY Newsletter #4 (Summer 2004)

Brown vs. Board of Education: Finding the Images and Voices of theChildren for Use in the Classroom

Lisa L. Ossian

"May 17, 1954. . . within an hour of the decision's announcement, the ‘Voice of America’ would begin beaming word to the world in thirty-four languages: In the United States, schoolchildren could no longer be segregated by race."

--Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education & Black America’s Struggle for Equality

In the black and white photograph, the ten-year-old girl held her six-year-old sister's hand as they walked to their all-black elementary school. The two little girls clutched buttoned-up winter coats and carried paper lunch bags as they made their way down a long stretch of railroad track with an enormous freight train towering above them. This was a lengthy, dangerous, and lonely walk, especially when another elementary school resided within their own Topeka, Kansas, neighborhood. Access and safety were just two of the many reasons for the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education on May 17, 1954. And Linda Brown—the girl in the picture—was more than "a named plaintiff"--she was a little girl trying to help her sister make the long trek every day to their segregated school.

Too often children have remained invisible within accounts of school integration even though children should be the central character of the desegregation drama. For example, Reed Sarratt's The Ordeal of Desegregation: The First Decade (1966) listed in its table of contents the following people: governors, legislators, presidents, school men, college officials, police, lawyers, judges, editors, clergy, and businessmen. But no children's names or references appeared in that index.

For this column about integrating the Brown decision into teaching children's history, I have suggested a number of primary sources that can help present the decision from a child's perspective. One of the most useful is Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents, edited by Waldo E. Martin, Jr. (part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture from St. Martin's Press). Martin's introduction outlines the events of the period preceding the decision, the components of the actual case and other desegregation cases, as well as examples of warnings by contemporary African American leaders that the Supreme Court decision might devalue black institutions and culture. This volume contains a six part introduction to the Supreme Court legal struggle; segregation cases dated from 1849 through 1955 along with briefs and other legal documents concerning Brown; the various popular responses to Brown from newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and political cartoons; and a chronology of segregation from 1793 to 1992.

Several books published just after the Brown decision came down offer contemporary views of the issue and provide documents and approaches useful for undergraduate instruction.. A short (only 120 pages) book written in first person and dedicated "To Children Everywhere" is Now is the Time by Lillian Smith (New York: The Viking Press, 1955) in which she describes what the decision might mean for the children of America. The following excerpt would work well as a class session's introduction to that day's event and meaning:

It was May seventeenth. Many of us sat at radio and television, waiting. For word had gone out that the Supreme Court would hand down its decision on segregation in the public schools, that day.

Events at home and abroad had confused and shocked us: the Army-McCarthy hearings, evasion and postponement in Congress, headline squabbles, suspicion of good men, trials, more and more investigations--and all the while, the Communist powers were moving like a tidal wave across Asia, dividing and weakening each country they touched.

. . . And so we waited that day, tense and expectant.

We knew what the decision would be. The necessities of our times had clearly determined it: not alone the world situation but the human situation here at home, in our childrenÆs lives, in our own hearts and minds, made it imperative that the highest authority in our land say clearly that there is no place, today, for legal segregation in a free and democratic nation. We knew. But we wanted to hear it said aloud. And when the words came, simple and plain, a deep pride swept across America.

Chief Justice Warren, who spoke for a unanimous court, did not clutter his pages with legal precedents. He based the decision on a truth more important that precedents: a child's right to learn. He stated, for the first time in the history of a country's highest court, that a child's feelings are important to a nation; that shame and rejection can block a mind from learning, hence segregation is a barrier to human growth which no state in our democracy can maintain legally in its public school system.

For a little while, that day, we forgot Asia and Africa. We were thinking of children. Of their needs. Bread, books, shoes? These we have tried to give them. But to grow as human beings they must have esteem, they must have belief in their own worth and the worth of others. Now they would have a better chance to grow. Every child could begin to feel at home here, knowing he is accepted in the American family. From this time on he will be safeguarded from those who do not care: from the bullies and the haters and the sick minds and the political opportunists who, in their greed, are willing to feed on our children's future to make their own present big." (pp. 10-11)

Smith's Now is the Time is divided into three sections. The last, called "The Twenty-Five Questions," presents those racist questions that, in Smith's words, "have won elections for politicians in the South.” Question number 1: "Don't you think each race should keep its culture separate?" Number 9: "Isn't the Supreme Court playing politics when it reverses itself?" These were the questions heard over and over again from various groups and individuals opposed to integration which give context to the times and the worries people had over this monumental social change. The sometimes startling questions, combined with Smith's detailed social science responses, could spark fruitful small group discussions in class.

Another useful—and small—contemporary publication is Kenneth B. Clark's Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955/148 pp.) Clark had prepared a report on "The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development in Children," for the Division of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee, which the U.S. Supreme Court cited in their May 1954 decision. Clark presented this perspective on the case:

This decision was the climax of a long series of legal cases which have challenged the constitutionality of various forms of racial segregation in public education and other areas of American life. The Court's decision also took into account a growing body of knowledge in psychology and the social sciences, the result of extensive research into the development of racial attitudes and the effect of prejudice on the development of American children. The research, which had been carried on by social scientists for many years, made it possible to present to the Court a coherent and systematic picture of the effects of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation on personality development. (p. 11)

His first chapter, "How Children Learn About Race" presents a basic child development question: "Is it natural to dislike people who are different from one in physical characteristics or is this learned behavior?" The rest of the chapter cited other studies, including the famous "doll test" administered by Clark and cited in the Brown decision. This chapter provides an effective introduction to the psychological arguments regarding children's growth and development presented to the courts in the early 1950s.

A decade after the decision, Lillian Smith compiled a second book on the topic. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964) provided additional first person accounts of young adults' experiences in the Civil Rights Movement (profits from the book went to the Congress on Racial Equality) as well as intriguing black and white photographs (one photo depicts a crowd of white protesters; in the corner stands a determined little white girl with the handwritten sign, "I am integrated and I like it," p. 58).

Her dedication explains her motives:

To the young in the Movement who wisely or sometimes unwisely have risked their lives for a way of freedom that will bring growth to all; and to the older ones, whether in years or experience, who have learned that freedom is a hard thing, that change means inner as well as outer change, that nonviolence has to do as much with truth as with love . . .

Smith asked respondents: "When did the revolution begin inside?" She summarized, "For some it happened yesterday. For some it is beginning today. For a few it happened years ago. Eyes turn, and are looking in a new direction. Ears pick up a sentence never understood before. A child moves across one's imagination, a crash startles one's soul, a whisper shakes the memory." (p. 107)

Although most of Smith's book records the early 1960s, one passage from a white college woman's perspective recounts her childhood memories of the 1954 Brown decision and then her subsequent volunteer work within the Movement.

I was twelve when the Supreme Court decided segregated schools wouldn't do. I took it for granted that before long things would be different at our school. But nothing happened. And nothing much happened anywhere. In our school, some of the kids told more rough jokes than usual, repeated more words that would hurt Negroes if they heard, some said they'd fight back if desegregation came, they'd show those colored kids what was what. A lot of us didn't like this talk but we didn't do anything. Most of us wouldn't have minded integration. But we didn't do anything. We didn't tell our principal how we felt, or the teachers, or the school boards, or those white kids who were muttering the nasty jokes. We were scared. Not scared of the integration experiment but scared to act freely according to how we really felt; scared of those mobs folks talk about, scared that Negroes, if they came to our school, would get hurt, scared of the unknown, I suppose. So, we made ourselves indifferent. We tried to tell ourselves we felt all right about it but after all, why was it our business to speak out!

People away from here asked why? Why didn't you do something! Remember how the commentators asked it over and over? And nobody could say. I was dumb, I couldn't say. But now I know this is what segregation has done to us whites: it has paralyzed us; we don't dare act out what we know is right. We don't dare say what we know should be said. We let the demagogues say anything but we are mute. Oh I know: we are scared of the goons and the ghosts and the monsters segregation has bred. For a hundred years, the nice people sat here and let politicians and the power structure that supported them chain our minds with their lies until we couldn't think straight. Listen to intelligent white people talk on this subject! Most of them lie and they don't care; they don't want to find the truth, they just repeat sleazy excuses they've heard before.

Historians of childhood should never forget the image of Linda Brown, who held her little sister's hand on their long and lonely walk to a segregated school. These books are just a few examples that can give undergraduates a sense of the experiences of the Americans most affected by the Brown decision: the children.

Postscript: For a poignant post-Brown decision photograph dated 1957, one of Delois Huntley can be found in America’s Children: Picturing Childhood from Early America to the Present, edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2003).

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