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PARTISAN REVIEW
knowledge and deeper understanding of the human experience and des–
tiny, have to be more than the sum of their ethnic, religious, and cultural
parts. In our modern world, everyone will need a lot more education just
to survive, to get along with others, or to argue with them intelligently.
Civility and civilization will depend upon the ability to reason, to interact
with each other.
This was the promise of the U.S. Supreme Court's
Brown vs. Board
if
Education ofTopeka, Kansas, et al.
decision of 1954. You remember that rul–
ing-and the finding-for the state to separate the Negro child from
others of similar age and qualifications solely on the basis of race instills in
the Negro children a "feeling of inferiority as to their status in the com–
munity that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be
undone." The Court unanimously struck down racially separate public
schools as "inherently unequal," thereby overruling its "separate but equal"
ruling of 1896 which had upheld racially-segregated railroad transporta–
tion facilities in Louisiana.
Never mind that the
Brown
ruling that reversed (in the field of public
education, at least)
Plessy vs. Ferguson's
"separate but equal" doctrine also
revived in the Congress, and in several state legislatures, the notion of
"interposition and nullification," or that it stirred racial passions---so much
so that there was massive resistance to the desegregation mandate. And, put
aside the criticism of the Court, from legal scholars and others, for apply–
ing social science data to drive a legal opinion, that the judges used
psychology as support for a new legal doctrine to vindicate the constitu–
tional rights of the Negro children. And never mind that the U.S. Supreme
Court only acknowledged in footnote 11 that social science had persuaded
it that state-imposed segregation harms Negro children, but ignored the
same social science evidence that such segregation also harmed
majority
group children's personality development- creating in whites moral confu–
sion and conflicts, racial arrogance, and feelings of superiority-it was a
decision that sparked the 1950s Civil Rights movement.
Those who had struggled for so long to convince the courts, executive
branch, and Congress to declare enforced segregation as bad law and bad pub–
lic policy carried the Supreme Court's decision to the streets, and suites; to
the depots, public accomodations, and to the campuses. There was fervor and
ferment in the
air
which ushered in a period of confrontation and optimism,
and a feeling that Negroes could
really
be "free by '63." By 1968, Martin
Luther King,]r.-after having faced down dogs, and race-baiters, and the van–
guard of the resistance to desegregation-after having endured the doubletalk
and doubletakes of the well-intentioned who had argued for gradualism, Dr.
King said he had seen the promised land. He could taste victory over the
tenacity and virulence of race as a divide between human beings.
