School funding, 1930:

Black teachers in the South earned c.60% of the white average; the average test score of a group of black teachers in Alabama in 1931 was below that of 9th-graders nationally. The black school year was two months shorter, so that black children could work in the fields. In 1932, 1/7 of the black teenagers in the South were enrolled in high school. In 1950, ¼ of black Americans were functionally illiterate; 1/8 of black adults had completed high school, as compared to 40% of whites.

Black children must walk to segregated schools that are far away, even if a neighborhood school is just down the block (Linda Brown lived 6 blocks from her neighborhood school, but had to take a 30-40 minute trip instead). Black children disproportionately choose white dolls to play with.

It has been argued that this is not a federal issue. The 14th Amendment states that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Results:

1955-64: % of black kids going to school with whites in former Confederate states went from 0 to 2%; in 1971, Richmond, Va.’s schools had 23,000 white and 2 black students

move to suburbs: Detroit loses 330,000 whites 1960-70; in Dearborn, MI 13 of 104,000 residents were black; in 4 other Detroit suburbs, 203 of 304,000 residents were black

Linda Brown-Thompson, 1984: integration “was not the quick fix we thought it would be.”

Clarence Thomas, 1995: “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Jack Balkin, law professor: “When the Constitution speaks in grand general phrases like ‘equal protection’ and ‘due process,’ it speaks to generations long after those who drafted it. It asks those future generations to look beyond the compromises and hesitancies that are inevitable in any age and to do justice in their own time. We must regard the grand phrases of due process and equal protection as promises that we have made to ourselves as a people….In this way our Constitution becomes more than a collection of rules and doctrines: it becomes a document of redemption….In determining whether a state is providing equal educational opportunity in different schools, courts should look not only at the inputs to the system but also at its outputs. They should ask whether, on average, the state is producing students of comparable educational achievement among its various schools. If minority students are left to fend for themselves in inferior schools with inferior educational opportunities, the Constitution is violated…”

Bruce Ackerman, law professor: “In moving beyond the promise of due process and equal protection, the citizenship clauses [of the Reconstruction amendments] were granting Negro Americans something different from the kind of respectful legal treatment provided to any white Englishman or Frenchman who permanently resided in this country. In extending citizenship, the opening lines of the Fourteenth Amendment were offering Negro Americans nothing less than a revolution in the human spirit….At the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, public education was in its infancy. We remained a nation of vast frontiers and weak school systems, where many learned to read and write from parents or ministers or private tutors….This world has vanished….Public education has become a fundamental part of the process by which we pass on our democratic values to the next generation….The Citizenship Clauses of the 14th Amendment require the states to organize their educational systems to avoid stigmatizing Negro children as second-class citizens in their own eyes and in the eyes of the majority….[These schools] must take affirmative steps to integrate the races sufficiently to make it clear to the average student that historical patterns of subordination are no longer enshrined in the state’s educational philosophy.”

John Hart Ely, law professor: “Neither the states nor the federal government can constitutionally maintain schools segregated on the basis of race….As of the fall of 1955 our order should…become fully applicable….Neither any state nor the federal government can constitutionally maintain separate schools reserved for white, negro, or any other group of children defined by ethnicity. Neither may they assign children on the basis of attendance zones (or for that matter school districts) that were delineated with an eye toward segregating the races….More than this the Constitution does not require. It does not, for example, demand that all schools within a district or other area contain the same percentages of white and Negro children.”

Derrick Bell, law professor: “I cannot join in a decision that, while serving well the nation's foreign-policy and domestic concerns, provides petitioners with no more than a semblance of the equality that they and theirs have sought for so long. The Court's long-overdue findings...are, regettably, unaccompanied by an understanding of the economic, political, and psychological advantages whites gain because of that harm....The detestable segregation in the public schools that the majority finds unconstitutional is a manifestation of the evils of racism the depths and pervasiveness of which this Court fails even to acknowledge….The Court substitutes one mantra for another: where ‘separate’ was once equal, ‘separate’ is now categorically unequal. Rewiring the rhetoric of equality constructs American racism as an eminently fixable aberration. By doing nothing more than rewiring the rhetoric of equality, the Court’s majority forecloses the possibility of recognizing racism as a broadly shared cultural condition. Imagining racism as a fixable aberration obfuscates the way in which racism functions as an ideological lens through which Americans perceive themselves, their nation, and their nation’s Other.”