It is difficult to convey to someone who wasn't living in the South the magnitude of the Brown decision. On the 40th anniversary of the decision, I revisited that day for the Washington Post:
I REMEMBER nothing of my 13th birthday, which was celebrated in some now unrecallable fashion on a May Saturday in 1954. But I will never forget what happened the following Monday. ...
I was stumbling, unfocused, through the seventh grade at Myers Park Junior High in Charlotte, N.C. It was just past midday when a knock on the classroom door aroused me from my post-lunch slumber. The assistant principal, standing just outside the partially open door, carried on a whispered conversation with our fourth-period teacher. At conversation's end, our teacher closed the door and turned (in my mind's eye, in slow motion) to face the class. Our distracted chatter dropped to a hush as we noted his ashen face. I believe I remember, 40 years later, his exact words:
'Children,' he said slowly and deliberately, 'the Supreme Court has ruled. Next year you will go to school with colored children.'
['A Southern White Recalls a Moral Revolution.' The Washington Post May 15, 1994, Sunday, Final Edition]
In fact, nothing happened the next year. Or the next. Five years later, I graduated from a still all-white public school without ever having attended school with a black child. In fact, I finished college and law school, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and was a law professor teaching Brown when the Supreme Court finally brought a meaningful end to the de jure segregation of the public schools of the rural and small-town South in 1972....
Looking at today's cases from the vantage point of the Brown decision, the idea that the Supreme Court would condemn the valiant efforts of the Louisville community is extraordinary. The people of Louisville want a community that is not separated by race, beginning with a school system in which white and black children learn to know one another.
Brown condemned a system of Southern racial apartheid, a system of racial domination and subordination. It is the worst form of literalism to believe that the cases now before the court can be decided by the fact that the phrase "classifying by race" can be used to cover two radically different notions. Only by blinding oneself to history and common sense can one assume that the use of race to maintain the monstrosity of the Jim Crow regime of the South and the use of race to achieve an integrated society in Louisville are one and the same.
It appears that precisely that is where we have come in our law and in our government.
The prophets would have called for sack-cloth and ashes.
The Pope, apparently, for restoring the Tridentine mass.
What would Jesus do?
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