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REVIEW
No. 200
FALL 2003
Fiftieth Anniversary of the Supreme Court Ruling
This article is excerpted from The College Board Review, Issue 200, Fall 2003
College Board Publications, 45 Columbus Avenue, Room 712B, New York, N.Y. 10023-6992
Copyright © 2003 by College Entrance Examination Board. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 56-46771.
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Department of Education.
In all of its publications, the College Board endeavors to present the works of authors who are well qualified to write with authority on
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are their own and do not necessarily represent those of the College Board; nothing contained herein should be assumed to represent the
official position of the Board or any of its members.
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40
The Life and Slow Death
of Jim Crow
Jim Crow, the informal term for the practice of segregation, takes its name
from an 1838 minstrel show character, played by a white actor singing
songs in blackface. The long, grim history of the policy of segregation,
which encompassed education from the outset, ironically contrasts with the
superficiality that white audiences associated with the minstrel show of
the same name. The contrast underscores the vast differences that
separated the races.
Jim Crow arose in the wake of the Civil War. Before, the existence of slavery
required a certain interaction between blacks and whites. It ended with the
Union’s destruction of the Confederacy. As C. Vann Woodward explained in
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first published in 1955, segregation
emerged because of a combination of political, economic, and legal reasons.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in January 1865,
outlawed slavery but did not give blacks the vote. With the collapse of the
Confederacy later that year, the defeated southern states reacted by enacting
various regulations that left their four million black inhabitants as powerless
as they had been while enslaved. In Washington, the behavior of southern
On the road to integration? A scene from the first-grade classroom of
Washington School, in Topeka, Kansas, two years after the Supreme
Court ruled in favor of desegregation.
P H O T O C R E D I T: J O E D O U G L A S C O L L E C T I O N , K A N S A S C O L L E C T I O N ,
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS LIBRARIES
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P H O T O C R E D I T: A M E R I C A N M I S S I O N A R Y A S S O C I AT I O N A R C H I V E S / A D D E N D U M
A M I S TA D R E S E A R C H C E N T E R , T U L A N E U N I V E R S I T Y, N E W O R L E A N S
42
The squalor that
characterized the true
face of separate-butequal policies: A school
for blacks only,
somewhere in the
South, circa 1946.
legislators caused an angry Congress to enact the Fourteenth Amendment. It prohibited states from “abridging
the privileges or immunities” of American citizens. Nor could states deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property
1865-70
without due process of law. Congress had the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.” But
the meaning of “appropriate” was never clarified, and this vagueness soon led to endless trouble for blacks.
Congress then passed the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which gave blacks the right to vote.
It also enacted strict laws to enforce suffrage for blacks, their right to serve on juries, and their right to
unfettered access to transportation and other services. Not included in this wave of reforming legislation was
P H O T O C R E D I T: N E W Y O R K W O R L D - T E L E G R A M & S U N N E W S PA P E R
PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
any mention of racially integrated schools. Given the rudimentary state of public education throughout the nation
The cost of victory only half-won:
In 1948, George W. McLaurin, a retired
professor, won the right to pursue a
doctorate in education at the
University of Oklahoma in the wake of
a district court ruling. The University
allowed him to enroll, but on a segregated basis, as this photograph shows.
McLaurin sued again, and, in 1950, the
Supreme Court unanimously ruled that
his segregation left him “handicapped
in his pursuit of effective graduate
instruction. Such restrictions impair
and inhibit his ability to study, to
engage in discussion and exchange
views with other students, and in general to learn his profession.”
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C R E D I T: U . S . A R M Y S I G N A L C O R P S
Wartime manifestation of
segregation: Japanese
American schoolgirls attend
class at the Santa Anita
Assembly Center, Arcadia,
California, in 1942.
During World War II,
the federal government
ordered the internment of
all Japanese Americans.
and the creation of schools for blacks (often paid for by donations from white liberals), the exception seemed a
minor oversight at the time.
Another wave of reactionary measures greeted the federal efforts. The last decades of the nineteenth
century brought a relentless tide of measures to strip African Americans of their new rights. Although
Reconstruction legislation promised blacks new rights, funding soon evaporated. Federal troops, ordered to guard
the rights of freed people, were recalled from the South. With the collapse of cotton prices in the 1870s, influential conservative politicians played to the fears of stricken white farmers, claiming that newly enfranchised
“Tote dat barge! Lift dat Boycott! Ride dat bus!”
Herblock’s sarcastic reference to Showboat, the
1927 Broadway musical that included a scene
depicting blacks singing as they toil on the river
docks. The cartoon appeared in the Washington
Post in 1956, during the African American effort
to end segregation by boycotting buses in
Montgomery, Alabama. It shows an
angry white Alabamian vainly demanding that
the African American wait for the bus.
P H O T O C R E D I T: L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S
blacks would displace them. Secret organizations like the Ku Klux Klan helped spread racial hatred, most starkly
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P H O T O C R E D I T: L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S
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Stars and Bars revived:
University of Alabama
students burn
desegregation literature
during a demonstration
in Tuscaloosa on
February 6, 1956. They
were protesting the
enrollment of Autherine
Lucy, an African
American student.
expressed in lynchings throughout the South. In the meantime, new regulations effectively stripped the freedoms
the federal government had granted blacks.
Supreme Court rulings during this period consistently subverted blacks’ rights, leaving them defenseless
against southern whites’ determination to impose their will. The Court’s refusal to recognize the rights of African
Americans was clearest in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which formally enshrined the notion of “separate but
equal” for the two races. The case involved an open challenge to a local Jim Crow law. In 1892, Homer Adolph
Plessy had been arrested in Louisiana for sitting in a railroad car reserved for whites. The New Orleans Parish
P H O T O C R E D I T: A R K A N S A S H I S T O R Y C O M M I S S I O N
criminal court had ruled against Plessy’s argument that segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
Segregation dies slowly.
Elizabeth Eckford after being
denied entry to Little Rock
Central High School, in Little
Rock, Arkansas, September
4, 1957. Hazel Massery
shouts insults as Eckford
walks to the bus stop.
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1870-99
His appeal went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 7-1 (with one justice not participating) in 1896 that segrega-
tion was not discrimination. The implications for education were soon apparent. Three years after the ruling, the
Court heard a case involving a Georgia school board’s decision to solve overcrowding in a black public school by
D IMT:I SLSI BI ORNA R Y O F C O N G R E S S
P H O T O C R E D I T: A R K A N S A S H PI SHTOOTROY CCROEM
Two worlds meet in
1957. Mary Brent,
principal of Glenn
School, in Nashville,
Tennessee, greets
pupils at what had
been an all-white
institution. Token
integration began in
Nashville that year.
turning the blacks’ high school into a grade school—leaving the black students without a high school. Black par-
ents went to court to prevent the operation of any white high school in the county until black children were provided with equal facilities, as stipulated by the Plessy ruling. But the justices unanimously upheld the school
board, anticipating George Orwell’s phrase, “some are more equal than others.”
A white man kicks
Alex Wilson, a black
reporter, outside Little
Rock Central High School
in September 1957. As
he was attacked,
Wilson said: “I fought
for my country and
I’m not running
from you.”
P H O T O C R E D I T: A R K A N S A S H I S T O R Y C O M M I S S I O N
Jim Crow weakened gradually in the twentieth century. A major reason was legal activism. The establishment
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The face of northern racism,
22 years after Brown v. Board.
An anti-busing demonstrator,
turning the American flag into
a lance, joins an attack by
other whites on an African
American lawyer outside
Boston City Hall in 1976.
46
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 saw the creation of steady legal resistance to segregation, disenfranchisement, and white mob violence against blacks. By the 1920s its
representatives were conducting dozens of legal battles at the local level. The NAACP went on to gain
national fame as lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston undertook legal investigations and
litigation to overthrow segregation in public schools. It was a campaign that included the two lawyers’ victory in
having a black student admitted to the University of Maryland in 1935, and NAACP’s triumph before the Supreme
Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Economic and political factors also weakened segregation. Black migration to the northern cities began
early in the century and gathered pace through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Segregation
in factories and in the armed services gradually broke down as the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations responded to legal and political pressure from blacks.
The Brown v. Board decision marked the opening of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
The 20th
Century
during which black and white activists worked to implement the Supreme Court’s rulings on desegregation and
P H O T O C R E D I T: S TA N L E Y F O R M A N / T H E B O S T O N H E R A L D
enfranchisement. Despite stubborn, frequently violent resistance in communities throughout the South, the civil
rights movement triumphed in bringing about the rights that the federal government had accorded blacks with
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments during Reconstruction.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the burial of Jim Crow. Yet
the troubled history behind the implementation of civil rights reveals the great gap between what the justices
decided in 1954 and what the present Supreme Court attempted to clarify in its affirmative action ruling earlier this year.
The disparity between the promise and reality of equal rights continues to haunt the nation. ■