This Sunday is the 72nd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow era and the legal defeat of the “separate but equal” doctrine.
As we descend further into the second Jim Crow era, our reflection of Brown centers on the wisdom shared by Equal Justice Society co-founder and board member Shauna Marshall, The Honorable Raymond L. Sullivan Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center on Racial and Economic Justice at UC Law San Francisco.
For Professor Marshall, the legacy of Brown isn’t only a historic Supreme Court decision, it’s family history: she is the first cousin once removed and goddaughter of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who, along with his wife Dr. Mamie Clark, conducted the famous doll experiments resulting in psychological evidence proving segregation’s damaging effects on Black children, evidence that became a critical piece of Brown.
The Legal Defense Fund wrote that: “The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: ‘To separate [African-American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’
“Dr. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too.”
The inherently American institution of racism is what brings us back to Professor Marshall, who spoke on the systemic nature of anti-Blackness in this country in the inaugural episode of the limited-run podcast “Black Hastings Speaks” with Professor Marshall and Professor Alina Ball.
“One of the things that amazes me is actually how ignorant we are about our history and how we’ve compartmentalized people of Color’s history, in this country as Black history, or African American history, or Asian American history, or history of Latino folks, et cetera; and we don’t see that as American history,” said Professor Marshall.
“This [historical] foundation is very wobbly because we were built on genocide and slavery. But I think what people don’t know and what I really hope this moment shows is that there has been a systematic progression of not only violence against the Black body, but in keeping Black people and other people of Color … oppressed and shut out of opportunities.”
“It starts not only with bringing us over as slaves in the most inhumane way, chained to bottom of boats, already signaling to the world that these bodies aren’t bodies that are human and need to be treated humanely, to our early slave codes in the 1600s and early 1700s, starting in Virginia and spreading to Maryland, which legalized black people as property … and that was followed by the cruelest system of slavery in humankind.”
“We finally get rid of slavery. And immediately with Lincoln’s death, Johnson turns the lands back over to the slaveowners. Within 12 years, all the federal support is taken away from the South. And since the 13th Amendment said, ‘you can no longer enslave people unless they’ve committed a crime’ … the South thinks, ‘let’s develop the Black Codes so that just about anything a Black person does is a crime, and then, we can re-enslave them as prisoners, or if they get out of line, or get too successful like they were in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we will continue the legacy of violence against their bodies.’ ”
“And then as the African American moved north, fleeing terror, the North welcomed them by putting them in poor neighborhoods with underfunded services, keeping them from jobs, locking them up.”
“… One of the biggest boons for the American middle class came after World War II. We have these segregated armies. My father … was in the 92nd Division. Who did they always send in first to battle? The Blacks and the Japanese because we were the fodder. Yet you come back to the United States, there are all these wonderful G.I. Bills that allow for homeownership and college money, and we were legally kept out.
“We were left out. We were redlined out. We were then overpoliced. Drugs are introduced to our communities. And then there’s this outcry of ‘Why haven’t they done better? Slavery has been over.’ And you punctuate that with the violence now not being perpetrated by the lynch mobs, but by the police. And every African American in this country knows, no matter what our income is, that when we’re stopped, our life is in danger.”
“And yet we’ve just turned a blind eye to it, because in my heart of hearts, my most cynical side feels as though once slavery was over, this country didn’t really know what to do with us. We now no longer had the value of being free labor.”
“And what do we now do with all these Black people? And so we have been terrorized and kept from opportunities, and our bodies have always been a source of violence. And so when you have a president who leads with division, the violence of the masses is encouraged. And here we are today.”
Professor Marshall shared this wisdom in 2020. And here we still are today.
On this 72nd anniversary of Brown, we must recommit to confronting the full truth of our country’s past and present, recognizing the foundational premise – as Dr. Clark concluded – that racism is inherently an American institution. Only by accepting this can we truly move on.