[September 25th marks the 60th
anniversary of the Little Rock Nine
integrating the city’s all-white Central High School. So this week, after a special post on Little Rock and
race, I’ll focus on a few other early Civil Rights moments, histories, and
figures.]
On the forgotten figures at the heart of the crucial Civil Rights victory.
I don’t think I would get much argument if I called Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) the most famous Supreme Court decision
to advance social justice and equality (ie, as contrasted with equally famous high
court decisions such as Dred
Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, or Citizens United that upheld or amplified inequalities instead). With
yesterday’s blog subject and NAACP
Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall successfully arguing the case for the
plaintiffs, a group of African American parents constituted out of the
plaintiffs from five parallel lower court cases including Brown, Chief
Justice Earl Warren and the Supreme Court returned a unanimous, landmark
decision that overturned the concept of “separate but equal” in the nation’s
public education system, set in motion the long, slow, painful, crucial process
of desegregation, and is generally considered the first key moment and
victory in the modern Civil Rights Movement.
So Brown is already very well known,
and justifiably so. But I would nonetheless argue that its plaintiffs, and most
especially the 13 Topeka parents who filed the initial 1951
class action lawsuit against that city’s Board of Education on behalf of
their 20 children, remain almost entirely unremembered and unknown. Like Rosa
Parks and many other seemingly individual Civil Rights activists, these
parents took action as part of a coordinated campaign: the Topeka chapter of
the NAACP decided in the fall of 1950 to challenge the “separate but equal”
doctrine in the city’s schools, and the group of parents were recruited and
selected by local NAACP leaders including chapter president McKinley Burnett,
secretary Lucinda
Todd (who also became one of the plaintiffs), and lawyers Charles Scott,
John Scott, and Charles Bledsoe. Yet that broader context does not in any way
invalidate the unique
and interesting identities and stories of each of those thirteen Topeka
parents, such as lead plaintiff Oliver Brown (a welder, assistant pastor, and
the only male plaintiff, fighting for his third-grade daughter Linda) or Lena
Carper (a clinical child care worker at a children’s hospital, fighting for her
daughter Katherine), to name only two. While it might be more difficult to
remember a moment through 13 brave individuals (as opposed to through one like
Rosa Parks), each and every one of them deserves a place in our collective
memories of Brown and the Civil
Rights Movement.
Moreover, better remembering the Brown
plaintiffs would help us remember the vital historical lesson for which I
argued in this
piece for the Washington
Post’s Made by History blog. As
I argued there, many (if not most) of our most significant legal and social
advances and victories have originated with courageous and dedicated
individuals, relatively “ordinary” Americans (ie, not presidents or other
already-prominent public figures) pursuing justice and equality for their own
lives and families. To be sure, they have had to ally with powerful friends and
organizations to achieve that success, just as the Topeka families worked with
the NAACP at both the local and national level. And of course the powers that
be (such as the Supreme Court) have not always come down on the side of these
activists for justice. But often they have, and in any case these inspiring
individuals and families represent a crucial and far too easily overlooked
thread in our collective history and story. Just one more reason to better
remember the 13 parents who set in motion Brown
v. Board of Education.
Next Civil Rights post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other Civil Rights histories or figures you’d
highlight?
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