May 17 marked the 71st anniversary of the 1954 court decision called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS – but the case began here, in Virginia.
In 1951 Virginia public education operated under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” but the definition of “equal” left much to be desired. In Farmville’s high school for African-American children 450 students crammed into a building designed for 180. There was no gymnasium. No cafeteria. No science labs. No athletic fields. The newer school for white students up the road had all of these.
The response from city fathers to the overcrowding was to build unheated tar-paper shacks that surrounded the school like so many chicken coops.
For 16-year-old Barbara Johns, this was separate but far from equal, and so she planned to lead every student on a student strike – declaring they would not return to school until the school system agreed to build facilities truly equal to those Prince Edward County’s white students attended.
In 1951 this was, by all measures, a gutsy thing to do, and the students took the precaution of calling Richmond’s civil rights lawyers for representation. There was not a great deal of support at first. Attorney Oliver Hill, who would later win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recalled years later that “We were talking about these children being out on strike and we were fully of the opinion that we were going to advise them to go back to school…”
According to the 1965 book, They Closed Their Schools, Spottswood Robinson III, who would later become the first African American appointed chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, remembered “I pointed out to (the students) that there were attendance laws. That was when one of them said that the jail was not big enough for all of us…”
Impressed by the students’ determination and reasoning, Hill and Robinson agreed to take the case provided that the issue became integration, not equal facilities, and that the students gather the support of their parents – no easy task from a generation raised not to rock the boat.
But rock they did. And the rest became history, however slowly the arc of that history was bent.
Miss Johns and her classmates succeeded because they were empowered by their parents and by leaders of the NAACP. Change comes when one gains agency and the capability to actively shape their lives, rather than be passively influenced by outside forces.
Which brings us to what lies ahead.
Much of this past was recounted at a recent commemoration of the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling. Organized by former Republican Governor Bob McDonnell and co-chaired by Democratic Delegate Delores McQuinn, it brought together seven former or current Governors, Republican and Democrat, to reflect not only on how far Virginia and the nation has come but also on how much further we have to go.
Delegate McQuinn confidently declared “education is a civil rights issue,” insisting “We shall never again take life-altering opportunity off the table.” Former Governor, now Senator, Mark Warner noted that “Access to education still depends on the zip code you live in…”
Both were accurate but stopped well short of what is necessary to reach the promise of Brown v. Board: Equalizing opportunity to all children, regardless of their background.
Commentators rarely note that part of Brown’s determination was that children learn best when they learn together. The Court noted that “Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to (retard) the educational and mental development” of a child who does not have access to the full range of opportunities and “deprive them of the benefits they would receive…”
And while that decision applies only to public schools, if it is in the public interest to create an educated citizenry does that not also mean finding ways to level the playing field?
Dr. Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee School Superintendent who first gained recognition as a community organizer for the Urban League and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), believes it demands redefining what it takes to get the job done.
“Say that you have on the corner a school that everyone knows has never educated anybody’s kids, but it’s a “public” school,” Fuller says. “You’ve got another school four blocks away that is able, for whatever reason, to educate the children that can’t be educated at the other one, but that school is, oh my God, a religious school. I would argue that it is in the public’s interest to put the children where they can be educated.”
Opponents of supporting parental alternatives insist public education will be destroyed. They deploy hyperbole redolent of the language used against integration, in an effort to scare taxpayers, not unlike South Carolina Governor James Byrnes, a New Deal Democrat and former U.S. Secretary of State, who told white teachers in 1954 that “The mixing of races in the schools will mark the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.”
Fuller doesn’t buy the “destruction of public education” mantra: “People have no problem with students taking Pell Grants to religious schools People have no problems with G.I. Bill money being taken to private schools. Nobody said that was destroying public education.”
What makes the “school choice” issue particularly challenging in Virginia is the state’s status as the epicenter of “Massive Resistance” to integration.
As former Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson points out in Educational Freedom in America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century, using choice as a weapon began in the South as a backlash against Brown v. Board: “Southern states abused the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ to circumvent integration efforts by using sham ‘school choice’ programs and threats of violence to preserve Jim Crow,” Robinson says.
But that is not the choice being discussed now, he says, noting, “The freedom-based choice movement began in the Midwest during the 1990s in opposition to academic mediocrity …. Freedom-based choice programs sought to remedy the disparities between rich and poor students by providing vouchers to children from low-income families of all races to attend better schools.”
It is a line progressives – who were once defined by their willingness to fight bureaucracies – won’t cross.
At the conference Senator Tim Kaine, another former Governor, acknowledged “My Jesuit High School made me who I am.” But he would deny the same opportunity to those at, say, Richmond’s Cristo Rey High School, which exists only because of a school choice scholarship providing every student with a scholarship – the kind of program Mr. Kaine derides as the “privatization of education”.
Like others, Mr. Kaine declares his support for private schools, religious schools and “even home schooling.” Just so long as those opportunities are reserved only for those who can already afford them. For him, tax credits are a wonderful thing – just not if it allows parents to find a better education for their child.
The wealthy already have “school choice”: They can, and do, send their children to private schools, hire tutors, move to a different school boundary. The poor and working-class are denied those choices. That this has had a negative consequence on low-income children is undeniable.
It has been 71 years since the first step to equalize opportunity was taken by a 16-year-old. The time is overdue for the next generation of Barbara Johnses to step up, call out the hypocrisy, and say “no more.”
Chris Braunlich is Senior Advisor and former President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. He is a former president of the Virginia State Board of Education and may be reached at [email protected].