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The 20-year anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is observed as mostly a failure.
1974 (May 17)
The twentieth anniversary of the historic Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed school segregation, was observed in the nation. In assessing the impact of the decision, the editors of the Atlanta Constitution, the South's leading daily newspaper, admitted that even after a generation, racial prejudice and discrimination had not been eliminated. This fact gave credence, in the editor's opinion, to the view that one cannot legislate morals. Yet, the Constitution said, “there is no denying that tremendous progress has been made in race relations in our country since 1954. ... The progress, the vast changes in education, in employment, in housing, in politics, was the result of a struggle for civil rights that was given a decisive impetus on the day the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.” The noted Black syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, in his assessment of the Brown decision twenty years later, found that “we are still a racist society," and that the historic school decision did not deliver justice to the Black plaintiffs of 1954, or even to their children. “Some of the litigants in that 1954 decision,” he said, “never saw a day of desegregated education. They saw evasion, circumvention, massive resistance and a generation of litigation.” One of the plaintiffs, Linda Brown Smith (the “Brown” in the famous 1954 case) was now a grown woman with children of her own. In Atlanta, at an April 1974 meeting of the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists (ASBS), a mostly Black professional group, she recalled her family's motivations for permitting her to become a plaintiff. The family was incensed by the fact that their children had to wait in often inclement weather to be taken to Black schools in Topeka, KS when a white school was within walking distance from their home. Ironically, Smith said she now opposed crosstown busing to achieve racial desegregation in the schools.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.