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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Brown v. Board of Education, 50 Years Later; IGC President Killed; Same-Sex Marriages Become Legal in Massachusetts
Aired May 17, 2004 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again, everyone, from Topeka. We are at Monroe Elementary School. Today it stands as an official historic landmark. Fifty years ago, it served as a symbol of national shame.
In truth, it wasn't a bad school, and people here will tell you it had some of the best teachers in the city. Teaching was something blacks were allowed to do in those days. The same, of course, was that it was a segregated school. A child named Linda Brown and her family and a lot of other people changed that and changed the country along the way.
We came here today to celebrate that piece of history, to look at what happened, the people who made it happen, and the work still unfinished. And on that score, there is plenty.
But we ought not lose sight of what that case did. All nine justices looked into the Constitution, and into their souls, and said segregation, forever to that point a part of our history, must end. Schools first, then motels and buses and coffee shops and universities, and on it went.
Linda Brown and all those others started that, and tonight we spend much of the hour on her and her history, and on ours. Though it begins where we are in Topeka today, 50 years later, CNN's Dan Lothian made the journey with us, so Dan, a headline from you.
DAN LOTHIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, this has been an important day here in Topeka, remembering Brown vs. Board of Education, but 50 years later, how much has really changed? There's a new museum and there's a new mayor. We'll take a look at Topeka then and now.
Aaron?
BROWN: Dan, thank you. We'll get back to you in a bit. There are other items today. We must make note of two of the most important news stories of the day. Ben Wedeman in Iraq first. Two explosions, one the result of what might have been a weapon of mass destruction at one time. The other, more conventional, but in many ways more damaging.
So, Ben, the headline and the story tonight.
BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, another car bomb in Baghdad has shaken American efforts to put together an interim Iraqi government to run the country after the June 30 handover.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WEDEMAN (voice-over): A high-profile assassination, an attack that adds to the growing uncertainty over Iraq's future. Iraqi Governing Council rotating president Izzedine Salim was one of seven Iraqis killed in a suicide car bombing outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad. An unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, claimed responsibility for the assassination, but coalition officials suspect a familiar hand behind the attack.
BRIG. GEN. MARK KIMMITT, MILITARY SPOKESMAN: This is the classic hallmarks of what we've seen on Zarqawi attacks. Suicidal bomb, spectacular effect, tried to go after a large number of civilians, and also tried to go after a symbol.
WEDEMAN: Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been linked to a series of deadly attacks in Iraq, and most recently the beheading of U.S. national Nicholas Berg.
Presidency of the Governing Council has passed to Ghazi Ajil, a Sunni from the northern city of Mosul.
GHAZI AJIL, IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL PRESIDENT: This is a challenge, and we accepted this challenge. We are more determined than yesterday to go along with the process for regaining sovereignty.
WEDEMAN: Salim, a Shi'ite, was the second member of the council to be assassinated. The first was Aquila al-Hashimi, who died from wounds suffered in a shooting last year.
Salim's murder sparked accusations the coalition had failed to protect members of the Governing Council, accusations the coalition rejects.
DAN SENOR, COALITION SPOKESMAN: The security considerations that we provide, that we give to the Iraqi Governing Council members are second to none.
WEDEMAN: The latest attack throws into doubt preparations for the June 30 handover of sovereignty from the coalition to an interim Iraqi government.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WEDEMAN: And, Aaron, as if this weren't all enough, the coalition announced Monday that it had found an artillery shell rigged as a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve gas, a first in this conflict.
BROWN: Ben, thank you. Ben Wedeman, who is in Baghdad today.
On now to CNN's Maria Hinojosa, who is in Boston, Massachusetts. There, the story is all about a struggle with plenty of resonance tonight, especially to those in the center of it.
So, Maria, your headline and your story tonight.
MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, they lined up by the hundreds all across the state of Massachusetts to transform the institution of marriage as we know it, but their opponents were out in force as well.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HINOJOSA (voice-over): They made history just by filing paperwork.
Boston, Massachusetts' first legally recognized gay and lesbian couples got their marriage certificates and changed matrimony as we know it.
JULIE GOODRICH, GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: I feel as though our relationship is now not only very public and very secure and very legitimate and legal, and I never felt so safe in my life.
HINOJOSA: Not your typical wedding day for Julie and Hillary Goodrich and their daughter Annie, whose family name is on the landmark lawsuit that made Massachusetts the only state in the nation whose highest court has given final approval for gays to marry.
They said of their daughter ....
J. GOODRICH: That she's able to understand that we are now protected as a family and Hillary and I have a relationship with each other and we both have a relationship to her, and we have a legal relationship and they won't be able to separate us.
HINOJOSA: And just steps away in front of City Hall, crowds of demonstrators.
REV. PATRICK MAHONEY, ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: I am here today as a broken person. I fear for my country, my children and the future of this nation. So we're here to pray. Again, we're not here to rail or condemn, we're here to support.
HINOJOSA: But the marriages continued, even as President Bush renewed his call for a constitutional amendment banning them. David Wilson and Robert Compton, together nine years, and with eight children and grandchildren from previous marriages, wept as they exchanged vows.
DAVID WILSON, GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: Rob, I'm convinced I love you until death do us part.
HINOJOSA: The Goodrich family was all smiles and kisses as they sped off, newly wed and into the history books with the state of Massachusetts protecting their union.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HINOJOSA (on camera): Now, what these gay and lesbian couples get here in Massachusetts are several state rights, like custody issues, hospital visitation rights, inheritance. What they don't get are federal marriage rights that include Social Security.
Aaron?
BROWN: Maria, thank you.
Maria Hinojosa in Boston, and that's a quick look at two of the most important stories of today.
Now to the past that continues to shape the present. Fifty years ago today, the legal doctrine used for decades to justify public school segregation was shattered. Brown vs. the Board of Education has become a shorthand for this turning point in history. Tonight, we'll look behind the shorthand, a look at the people and the places central to the ruling, the struggles that followed.
We begin a half century ago, America before Brown, America in black and white.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): In the national looking glass, life a half century ago for millions of Americans seemed so uncomplicated and benign. For millions of black Americans, life was something else again.
STANLEY NELSON, FILMMAKER: Segregation was the law of the land, so it was OK. Before a black person could go in a store, they had to think about whether they would be welcomed, because the story only had a proven (ph) right to tell you get out any way they wanted to.
BROWN: What happened to a young lawyer named Robert Carter was commonplace. He was riding a bus in Georgia.
ROBERT CARTER, U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE: Some white men got off the bus and got on the bus and wanted me to move. And I said, I'm not moving. So the bus stopped, they pulled me off the bus. I have no idea why I was not roughed up.
BROWN: And in schoolrooms and towns and in neighborhoods across the land, most black Americans in the 1950s had one goal, getting by a day at a time.
RICHARD KLUGER, AUTHOR: Much of the black community was virtually destitute. More than half of the black population was living at or below the poverty line. Fifty-five percent was the number. Fewer than 14 percent of black kids were graduating from high school. And the black presence in mainstream America was virtually invisible. It wasn't there.
BROWN: To begin to change all that, an energetic and towering attorney named Thurgood Marshall convinced the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to look to a single place to start, the nation's segregated schools. His chief assistant, Robert Carter, that young man kicked off the Georgia bus.
CARTER: We were very much concerned with having Plessy vs. Ferguson, the separate but equal doctrine, overruled. And that of course was also one of my problems.
BROWN: For 67 years, the Supreme Court decision known as Plessy vs. Ferguson was the law of the land when it came to education. School districts across the country could, and many did, separate races at public expense. As long as the education was deemed equal, it was legal. But equal it was not.
NELSON: The schools built for black people were terrible. Black kids, they never got new books, all the books were hand-me-down, and a lot of times the white kids, knowing that these books would go to black kids, wrote curse words and N-word and other things in the book so that when the black kids opened them, this is what they'd see.
BROWN: It took four years, but Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter and their team filed lawsuits in four states and the District of Columbia. One of those states was Kansas, Brown vs. the Board of Education, named after a minister in Topeka named Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was forced to attend this black-only elementary school.
Robert Carter tried the case on its first appeal, and lost.
CARTER: The three judges said, in effect, that they bought our argument, but they couldn't rule in our favor because the precedent was against us. So that was another moral victory.
BROWN: Moral victories, of course, were not enough. All of the cases that reached the Supreme Court were by virtue of the alphabet and because the justices wanted Kansas first. They all came under the heading of Brown. The chief justice at the time was a Californian, Earl Warren.
KLUGER: He knew from the beginning, from what he said to me when I interviewed him, that there was a moral imperative to -- that this was an evil, that this was repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, and an insult to common decency, to tell blacks, in effect, they weren't fit to mingle with.
BROWN: Fifty years ago, the justices rendered their unanimous decision -- legal segregation was at an end, one long battle was over. And another was just beginning.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN (on camera): And that's how we got there, 50 years later. There was a big celebration in Topeka today. A lot of important things were said. In a day of speeches, the most important words I heard, however, came from a child of seven or perhaps eight.
We chatted while waiting for another dignitary to say the things that dignitaries say. I asked her why she was here, and she said her mom had made her come. Why, I asked, her mom looking on, and this precious little child said, so I would know. I didn't know before, now I do.
She was in the back of the crowd. People with big titles and big jobs and those who want them were in the front. Here's CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Bush marked the 50th anniversary of the landmark decision that legally desegregated public schools, praising the progress of civil rights, but promising to do more.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The habits of racism in America have not all been broken. The habits of respect must be taught to every generation.
MALVEAUX: Mr. Bush stood with a member of the Brown family, in front of the once all-black elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, where 50 years ago the Brown family's fight to attend the all-white neighborhood school led to the historic Brown vs. Board decision.
At the grand opening of the national historic site, a picture- perfect moment for the president.
But just a few blocks away, several hours earlier, Senator John Kerry marked the occasion from the steps of the statehouse capital.
SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You cannot promise no child left behind and then pursue policies that leave millions of children behind every single day.
MALVEAUX: A not-so-subtle swipe at the White House, illustrating what has become one of the hottest domestic issues, education.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), MARYLAND: I am concerned about the terrorists, but ladies and gentlemen, the greatest threat to our national security is our failure to educate our children.
MALVEAUX: Controversial issues like affirmative action and Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act are taking center stage in the education debate. While Mr. Bush kept his remarks to the Brown decision, he has argued his policies hold public schools accountable for improving education, but his critics argue without the necessary resources.
MALVEAUX (on camera): As both sides battle for voter support, the latest Pew Research Center poll shows that 50 percent believe that Kerry would do a better job of improving education, as opposed to 35 percent for Mr. Bush.
Suzanne Malveaux, CNN, Topeka, Kansas.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, a look at our host city, Topeka. The capital a complicated place still defined in some ways by the court case 50 years old.
And later, Jeff Greenfield looks at what 50 years of change have meant for all of us.
From Topeka, this is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Brown is the name everyone associates with the historic desegregation ruling, even though Oliver Brown was just one of the plaintiffs named in the case. Linda Brown was not the only student in Topeka whose parents were willing to challenge the status quo. Fifty years ago this city in America's heartland looked much like the country, where opportunities depended on the color of your skin.
Here's CNN's Dan Lothian.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LOTHIAN (voice-over): Topeka, a city once divided by race, is not defined by a landmark ruling.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We don't know whether we should be proud of it or apologize for it.
LOTHIAN: Just three years after part of Topeka was hit by a devastating flood, another storm was brewing with Brown vs. Board of Education. Victoria Lawton was nine years old. Her sister, Carol was 12.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We were not intimidated. We were confident, self assured. We knew that there were struggles.
LOTHIAN: Black and white elementary students had long been segregated. For the Lawton sisters, that meant attending this school, even though an all-white was closer to home. Their mother joined the chorus of plaintiffs fighting for equality.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She believed we should have the right to go to that school.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a white school?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was a white school.
LOTHIAN: Outside the classroom, historians say racial tensions simmered, but rarely exploded as in the South.
DIANNE GOOD, HISTORIAN: There were places that African Americans were not allowed to be, restaurants where they couldn't eat, places where they couldn't stay. The theaters were segregated. But there were an awful lot of integrated activities going on as well.
LOTHIAN: Then and now. The skyline has changed, so have the cars, and so has the face of the city's top job.
Mayor James McClinton.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it hadn't been for Brown, would you be sitting where you are sitting today?
JAMES MCCLINTON (D), TOPEKA MAYOR: I honestly do not believe I would be.
LOTHIAN: McClinton is the city's first African American mayor, appointed by council members after his predecessor stepped down last year. He faces an election next year, some believe a true test of how far Topeka has come.
MCCLINTON: We've come some ways, but we still have a long way to go.
LOTHIAN: Topeka is a city of about 122,000 people, 78 percent white, 12 percent African American, 9 percent Hispanic.
While some of the founding fathers buried here might not have approved of Topeka as it is today, Carol Lawton Nutter, playing the African American anthem, says even now the past is still present.
CAROL LAWTON NUTTER, TOPEKA RESIDENT: There is still some of the old ways. There are still people that have the old ...
VICTORIA LAWTON, TOPEKA RESIDENT: Not a perfect place, but we can move on.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LOTHIAN (on camera): The Lawton sisters are proud to be an important part of history, but they are concerned about their local public schools. They say that even under segregation, they received a solid education. And they're fearful now, Aaron, that African American students are being left behind.
BROWN: Dan, thank you. You've had a long and good week here.
LOTHIAN: Yes, it has.
BROWN: Thank you, Dan Lothian.
But Brown did not really did not, of course, transform education overnight, because it didn't spell out how to desegregate America's schools and it did not set a deadline. The deadline would come a year later, sort of, in a Supreme Court ruling known to some as Brown two.
Legal scholar Charles Ogletree was not even two years old when the first Brown ruling came down. Today, he's a professor at Harvard Law School, a leading authority on civil rights, and his new book takes the name from Brown two, "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown vs. the Board of Education." We're pleased to have Professor Ogletree join us tonight. He's in Washington.
CHARLES OGLETREE, AUTHOR: Good to see you, Aaron.
BROWN: Do you think it would all be different, significantly different or not different at all if the court had said immediately? OGLETREE: I think it would have been very different. I think the court would say law matters, the rule of law matters and people have to follow the law.
When it said all deliberate speed, governors, members of Congress and even the president felt no obligation to really enforce the idea of equality education right away. And I think it was a tragic mistake to add all deliberate speed, because it gave into those who would resist integration.
We've had rulings on abortion. We had rulings like Bush vs. Gore a few years ago. The court didn't delay its ruling because of the public reaction. They should not have delayed the ruling on integration because of the fear of public reaction. They in a sense fed into it. In all deliberate speed has meant no speed at all.
BROWN: Let me ask -- this may sound heresy, but let me ask anyway. What if the court had said that separate and equal are OK if equal is literally equal, equal to the dollar, equal to the textbook, equal to the teacher, equal to the building, equal. Is it conceivable that African American kids would be better off today if that had happened?
OGLETREE: Well, it's conceivable, but it's not realistic. Indeed, there are many African Americans today -- and at times I had that same thought, maybe we should just go back to separate versus equal and try to get the right resources.
The reality is that it would never happen. It has never happened, and, indeed, we can't go back. What the court dismantled was whites-only fountains, restaurants, hotels, schools, the right to vote, the right to travel. It was a terrible time in America, and I don't think we should go back and have a sense of romantic views about the past. It was a horrible time.
You know I talked about Tulsa and Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921 ...
BROWN: Absolutely.
OGLETREE: We had a separate but equal community that had hotels, theaters, a wonderful success, and that was destroyed by racism in 1921. So I don't want to go back to that. I want to move forward and say, let's have an integrated society. Let's have true education. Let's move beyond the rhyme of leave no child behind and really try to make sure all our children leave (ph) forward. That's what all deliberate speed's about. That's what I try to address in the book.
BROWN: And in a half a minute, which is a bit unfair, but in a half a minute, how do we deal with what is ultimately a complicated financial problem and a problem of individual choice that families make and all sorts of other things?
OGLETREE: Well, in a quick answer, one thing is that Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. has talked about a constitutional amendment to make education a fundamental right, something we have not done in 30 years. And the second thing, we need people who move to the suburbs to think about bringing their children back, building their resources back and making the community equally available to all.
I think we can do that. I think America can come together as we've never done before. I'm very hopeful that we will look at Brown not just in celebration, but opportunity to redo our work.
BROWN: This is kind of a chicken and egg, but those families are not going to move back into the city unless they -- I've seen this in Cleveland -- unless they believe the schools in the city work.
OGLETREE: But you know what, those families with power, political power, economic power and social power, if they come back, the schools will work. They'll bring their children back. They'll bring their political activism back, they'll bring their dollars back.
Because there were successful schools, even with few resources, before segregation. They just weren't widespread. I think America has to have the capacity to say that we're going to make sure that no child, black, white, rich or poor is left behind.
It's not just black children. I'm talking about Appalachia, I'm talking about South Dakota, I'm talking about Montana. And that's the whole issue. Make all children have an opportunity. That's what all deliberate speed is about. It didn't address those issues effectively.
Now is the time to really do something, not with all deliberate speed, but with the dispatch to save our most valuable resource, our children.
BROWN: Good to see you, sir, thanks for joining us.
OGLETREE: Good to see you, Aaron.
BROWN: It's an important day. We're glad to talk to you. Thank you.
OGLETREE: Always a pleasure.
BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, as white parents fight back, a small Virginia town finds that social change does not come easy, not now and certainly not 50 years ago. We'll tell that story from Topeka.
This is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Museum, part of this old schoolhouse here in Topeka. It is a walk through the American civil rights movement, 50 years ago and today. And if you're in the area, it is worth a visit.
The reaction 50 years ago to Brown, while it was celebrated by many and ignored by most, it was outright defied by some. When faced with a law that said schools must integrate, a 100 Southern members of Congress called for the impeachment of the entire U.S. Supreme Court.
In Farmville, Virginia, they did something else. They shut down the schools.
Here's CNN's Jason Carroll.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They called this the heart of Virginia. Raising cows, rolling hills, farm country, no surprise there is a town called Farmville -- no, not just for its beauty, but for an ugly past, when the world was seen in black and white.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I guess the sadness is when ...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's the part of remembering.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I really didn't understand too well then about the blacks and the whites.
CARROLL: Back in 1959, Joyce Atkins and Barbara Reed were children in a town where blacks made their voices known. High school students had walked out in 1951 protesting substandard conditions.
Their lawsuit was one of several that became Brown vs. Board of Education. But it would be years before children here would benefit from the Supreme Court's ruling. Prince Edward County had its own plan, close public schools rather than integrate.
JOYCE NASH ATKINS, FORMER PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY STUDENT: Here they come and shut the schools down. And I mean, it was -- it was like...
CARROLL: Farmville natives like Robert Taylor supported the decision not to integrate.
ROBERT TAYLOR, PRINCE EDWARD ACADEMY: It wouldn't work. You couldn't put them in the same classes anyway. And I was not willing my children to be victims of big social programs for change.
CARROLL: Taylor helped form a private school for white children. Blacks were on their own for longer than many expected.
THOMAS MAYFIELD, FORMER EDUCATOR, PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY: They figured, well, they would be closed for a year and maybe next year they'll reopen or the next year they'll reopen. But it never happened.
CARROLL: Schools closed for five years. Black children like Joyce and Barbara ended up in unaccredited church training centers.
(on camera): Did you feel like that was the only way of getting some sort of education?
BARBARA REED, FORMER PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY STUDENT: I did. That's the only hope we had.
CARROLL (voice-over): The conditions were poor, an out-house, water spigot, fireplace, a few books, until the Supreme Court forced the county to reopen schools in 1964. Blacks were sent back to school into grades they would have been in had they never left. Joyce hadn't started school, but was put in the third grade. Barbara went from first grade to fourth.
REED: We felt like that we didn't belong at that particular time in that particular classroom.
CARROLL: Unable to keep up, Joyce left in seventh grade. Barbara's sophomore year, she was made a senior.
REED: So during the time of graduation, that's when I decided I didn't want to be in Prince Edward County anymore.
CARROLL (on camera): I know that this is still very emotional for you. Where does that come from? Does that come from you feeling cheated, I would assume.
REED: Cheated out my education.
CARROLL (voice-over): Now the county is trying to make amends.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Joyce Nash Atkins.
CARROLL: Granting high school diplomas for hundreds of people like Joyce who at 51 works as a housekeeper.
ATKINS: It just makes me feel that -- like I was the person that I was lost, but now I'm found. And it is a blessing. It is truly a blessing.
CARROLL: The only blessing Barbara sees is her own determination. She scrubbed floors to help pay for summer school. Now 50, she's a mental health case manager living in Farmville again, where she says many still see things in black and white.
Jason Carroll, CNN, Farmville, Virginia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Now two worlds separated by a conjunction that might as well be the Grand Canyon, except it isn't. A lot of then stays mixed up in the now. It is easy to see race in America as simply black and white, good or bad. In fact, race, even race, is shades of gray.
Some perspective tonight from our senior analyst, Jeff Greenfield.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): If you really want to measure the impact of the Supreme Court's decision, just look at the full title of the case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, not Topeka, Mississippi or Topeka, Alabama, but Kansas, the heart of the American heartland, where 50 years ago black and white schoolchildren were segregated by law.
It was the same back then in Washington, D.C., legally mandated segregation in the nation's capital. And only six years before the Brown decision, it took a presidential order to end racial segregation in the armed forces of the United States.
(on camera): So it wasn't just schools and it wasn't just the South, though it was worse there. But across the United States 50 years ago, the citizens of this first nation conceived in liberty were living our own version of apartheid.
(voice-over): In most Southern states, the most basic of civil rights, the right to vote, existed in name only for most blacks. In Alabama, for example, barely one-tenth of black voters were even registered. And many if not most of those never showed up at the polls for fear of economic or even physical reprisals.
In dozens of Southern counties back then, not a single black showed up to vote. In the House, only two out of 435 members were black. Not a single African-American sat in the U.S. Senate. That happens to be true today, by the way. No black had ever been in the Cabinet or ever sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, across the nation, only 36 blacks sat in the state legislatures.
The job market was similar. Apart from a handful of doctors and lawyers who served minority neighborhoods, those professions were all but closed. And perhaps there is no more dramatic measure of second class-status than the roles African-Americans filled in movies and on TV, maids, servants, childlike stock comic stereotypes.
But when change did happen, it happened quickly by historical standards, and not just in the schools. Little more than 10 years after Brown, President Lyndon Johnson fully embraced the civil rights revolution as he made the right to vote a reality.
LYNDON JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And we shall overcome.
GREENFIELD (on camera): For all the numbers that paint a bleak picture, the collapse of the two-parent black family, the absence of so many African-American men from the job market, here are figures that give you some measure of what has changed in this country since Brown. The two states with the highest percentage of black elected officials are Mississippi and Alabama.
Jeff Greenfield, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, the story of a revolutionary armed with law books and determination, Thurgood Marshall.
From Topeka, Kansas, this is a NEWSNIGHT special.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Years after the two Brown decisions, Thurgood Marshall, by then a Supreme Court justice, liked to say: I have finally figured out what the phrase all deliberate speed means. It means slow.
The man could turn a phrase. He could be biting and bitingly funny and a whole lot of other things, too. But having won the day in Brown, he could never again be patient. And he never was. Perhaps it took a lifetime of patience just getting to that point.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL, U.S. SUPREME COURT: My dad told me way back that you can't use race.
BROWN (voice-over): If Americans today remember Thurgood Marshall at all, this is what they remember, a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court standing resolutely by his principles. But Thurgood Marshall was much more than that.
RICHARD KLUGER, AUTHOR, "SIMPLE JUSTICE": The man was enormously courageous, risking his life in jurisdictions where he was not wanted and told to get out of town by nightfall if he wanted to save his skin. He was smart. He was a political animal in the best sense of the term. He was able to rally the black community, to get plaintiffs to stand up and risk their own necks.
BROWN: That was his role for 30 years as the chief legal counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
MARK V. TUSHNET, MARSHALL BIOGRAPHER: For Marshall, the days were extremely long because he was doing what needed to be done in court and then after the courts closed in the evening, he would go out and give talks to the community to make sure that the community was in favor of the litigation they were pursuing to get new members for the NAACP and things like that.
BROWN: And you get a glimpse of his presence and his passion from this rare footage on that day a half century ago when he won his biggest legal victory.
MARSHALL: In fact, it was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language, which should set for rest once and for all the problem as to whether or not second-class citizenship, segregation, could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.
BROWN: Legal segregation was outlawed, of course. And today, this is the normal picture in many American public schools, black and white kids learning together. It seems like no big deal now.
But it has taken more than two generations to get there and many African-Americans now believe that Marshall's enormous accomplishment when it comes to educating black children is largely hollow.
(END VIDEOTAPE) BROWN: Late in life in the heat of combat with the court and a country he believes was going astray, Thurgood Marshall told a reporter: "I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die," he said, "at age 110" shot by a jealous husband. He died instead at 84, retired from the court having outlived many of his contemporaries.
Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we look back over the past 50 years. When we come back, we'll take a look ahead where blacks and whites are today and perhaps a bit of the road ahead and more.
A break first, though. From Topeka, this is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: The ruling known simply as Brown posed a fundamental change to the country's social fabric and in doing so exposed how rigid that fabric could be; 50 years later, the decision that became a landmark raises a profound question about social inequality: Can this nation's courts produce social reform on their own?
The answer, as history has shown, is, no, not completely, not by a long stretch, at least not yet, not even the highest court in the land. There are many lessons to be learned from Brown. And this clearly is one of them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Smile.
BROWN (voice-over): There have been smiles and snapshots all over official Washington, formal proclamations as well.
JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court stood up courageously for every child in America by upholding the principle of equal protection under the law.
BROWN: But many African-Americans say that, in today's world, the improvement in black education arising from Brown vs. the Board of Education has in the end been small.
TED SHAW, DIRECTOR, NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE FUND: I think it's certainly an irony and a hollowness in this commemoration of Brown. As a nation, we have not been able to commit ourselves to what it takes to sustain the promise of Brown. We haven't found a way of doing that yet.
ROBERT MCFRAZIER, FORMER TOPEKA SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT: If you take a look factually at what has happened in terms of achievement and you get into test scores and those kinds of things, it is a very dreary picture.
BROWN: Robert McFrazier has spent more than three decades as a teacher and a principal and a superintendent in Topeka, Kansas.
MCFRAZIER: African-American students now lag considerably behind counterparts in terms of achievement. This, I believe, has been fostered by the lack of the support system.
BROWN: And now many black intellectuals go even further. Education for African-American children today, they argue, may not measure up to the teaching of a half century ago.
DERRICK BELL, AUTHOR, "SILENT COVENANTS": Very poor. Very poor. Probably, overall -- there's no statistics on this -- probably worse, because more important than going to school with whites is going to school with teachers and administrators who really think you can learn and insist that you learn.
BROWN: The premise of Brown, he says, was flawed.
BELL: We thought that if you put black kids where white kids were, the black kids would get what the white kids get. It is crazy. If there was so much hostility to having the black kids there in the first place, it wasn't going to suddenly dissipate. Sometimes it did, but in the general, it didn't.
BROWN: What Brown did, says Judge Robert Carter, who helped Thurgood Marshall argue the case before the Supreme Court, was important.
JUDGE ROBERT CARTER, U.S. DISTRICT COURT: What this meant was that blacks were no longer going to submit as they had before to discrimination, that they were going to chafe under and fight it and so forth, because they couldn't submit under it, because it says, you're equal under the law.
BROWN: No mean accomplishment, that. And in Topeka, today, that was the underlying cause for the celebrations and reason enough to both look back and to look ahead.
WADE HENDERSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LEADER CONFERENCE ON CIVIL RIGHTS: I think this commemorative anniversary, the 50th anniversary of Brown, is really yet again an opportunity to remind the nation of the duty that we have to all students to provide equality public education and to address the real challenges that hold us back as a nation from fulfilling the goal of forging one nation for all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: It was -- for whatever imperfections or work still to be done, it was a very nice day to be in Topeka and remember all the distance we have come in 50 years. And to reinforce that, we'll take a lack at 50-year-old morning papers after the break.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
REP. JOHN LEWIS (D), GEORGIA: When that decision came down, I was so moved, so happy. I thought the next school year that I would attending a desegregated school, a wonderful school, wouldn't be so overcrowded, would have new books, a new bus. But it didn't happen for me. But it did inspire me to study harder, to work harder.
VERNON JORDAN, ATTORNEY: The Brown decision (INAUDIBLE) was, for black people and white people, a second Magna Carta. Brown was a benchmark. It was a watershed decision because it emancipated people.
REV. JESSE JACKSON, FOUNDER, RAINBOW/PUSH COALITION: The lesson to be learned, we must make education a national priority for all children, whether you're in Topeka, Kansas, Virginia, Alabama, or New York. We must revisit the need equal high quality public education for all children. We'll all benefit when that happens.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(ROOSTER CROWING)
BROWN: Well, that thing looks like it was done 50 years ago today, doesn't it?
Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world as they were 50 years ago.
But we'll start with one that hit the streets here in Topeka this afternoon, an extra by "The Topeka Capital-Journal." Hope you can see this. Let me hold it up. "Dream Realized." "It is an amazing day to be a U.S. citizen, an amazing day to be a Kansan. I'm so proud," Cheryl Brown, who is that woman there, who was one of the named plaintiffs in the case that bears her family's name. "Dream Realized."
OK, now, this is cool here. Here are three newspapers that were published the day after. OK, they hit the doorstep on the 18th. Actually, this is the afternoon of the 17th, "The State Journal," "The Topeka State Journal." "School Segregation Banned" is the headline in the local paper. "Supreme Court Refutes Doctrine of Separate But Equal Education." I'm not sure how well you can see that. But we're doing the best -- the thing I noticed in looking at these papers, honestly, is, 50 years ago, they put a lot of stuff on the front page. There must be 25 stories on the front page of the paper.
"Supreme Court Refutes Doctrine of Separate But Equal Education." "High Tribunal Fails to Specify When Practice of Dual Schools Must Be Dropped By States. "Segregation already ending here, say school officials." So that's how it led locally.
Now, a couple of other papers here, while we still have time. "The New York Times" the next day, the 18th of May: "High Court Bans School segregation 9-0. Decision Grants Time to Comply." "The Times" got it exactly right. But if you can see the subheadline there, there was another big story that day. "McCarthy Hearing Off For a Week as Eisenhower Bars Report." The president ordered his aides, particularly those in the Army or connected to the Army, to stop cooperating in the Army-McCarthy hearings. So that shared a front- page ruling.
Back to the ruling, "1896 Ruling Upset." That's Plessy vs. Ferguson, which had been the law of the land. "Separate But Equal Doctrine Held Out of Place in Education," the beginning of the end. All right, one other story on this, if I can. "Ruling to Figure in '54 Campaign." "The Times" went to Southern congressman and senators. And one of them -- I think it was James O. Eastland, the senator from Mississippi -- said "The South will not abide by or obey this legislation by political court." Right. And, quickly, "The School Segregation Banned" and "Nation High Court Defers Final Edict to Fall." That's "The Washington Post" and "Times-Herald."
That's the way the news was reported 50 years ago, when I was but a boy.
We'll wrap it up for the day from Topeka in just a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Just briefly, this was a wonderful day for us and for the program here in Topeka.
As we wandered around the outskirts of the celebration here, we talked to people. We talked to them about race. We talked about achievement scores and housing and income and opportunities and the rest. It often -- we have often said that race, we think, is the most intractable American problem. Surely, we won't solve it unless we've talked about it. In Topeka today, and I suspect in lots of American cities, we did.
We'll see you tomorrow. Good night for all of us.
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Aired May 17, 2004 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again, everyone, from Topeka. We are at Monroe Elementary School. Today it stands as an official historic landmark. Fifty years ago, it served as a symbol of national shame.
In truth, it wasn't a bad school, and people here will tell you it had some of the best teachers in the city. Teaching was something blacks were allowed to do in those days. The same, of course, was that it was a segregated school. A child named Linda Brown and her family and a lot of other people changed that and changed the country along the way.
We came here today to celebrate that piece of history, to look at what happened, the people who made it happen, and the work still unfinished. And on that score, there is plenty.
But we ought not lose sight of what that case did. All nine justices looked into the Constitution, and into their souls, and said segregation, forever to that point a part of our history, must end. Schools first, then motels and buses and coffee shops and universities, and on it went.
Linda Brown and all those others started that, and tonight we spend much of the hour on her and her history, and on ours. Though it begins where we are in Topeka today, 50 years later, CNN's Dan Lothian made the journey with us, so Dan, a headline from you.
DAN LOTHIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, this has been an important day here in Topeka, remembering Brown vs. Board of Education, but 50 years later, how much has really changed? There's a new museum and there's a new mayor. We'll take a look at Topeka then and now.
Aaron?
BROWN: Dan, thank you. We'll get back to you in a bit. There are other items today. We must make note of two of the most important news stories of the day. Ben Wedeman in Iraq first. Two explosions, one the result of what might have been a weapon of mass destruction at one time. The other, more conventional, but in many ways more damaging.
So, Ben, the headline and the story tonight.
BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, another car bomb in Baghdad has shaken American efforts to put together an interim Iraqi government to run the country after the June 30 handover.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WEDEMAN (voice-over): A high-profile assassination, an attack that adds to the growing uncertainty over Iraq's future. Iraqi Governing Council rotating president Izzedine Salim was one of seven Iraqis killed in a suicide car bombing outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad. An unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, claimed responsibility for the assassination, but coalition officials suspect a familiar hand behind the attack.
BRIG. GEN. MARK KIMMITT, MILITARY SPOKESMAN: This is the classic hallmarks of what we've seen on Zarqawi attacks. Suicidal bomb, spectacular effect, tried to go after a large number of civilians, and also tried to go after a symbol.
WEDEMAN: Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been linked to a series of deadly attacks in Iraq, and most recently the beheading of U.S. national Nicholas Berg.
Presidency of the Governing Council has passed to Ghazi Ajil, a Sunni from the northern city of Mosul.
GHAZI AJIL, IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL PRESIDENT: This is a challenge, and we accepted this challenge. We are more determined than yesterday to go along with the process for regaining sovereignty.
WEDEMAN: Salim, a Shi'ite, was the second member of the council to be assassinated. The first was Aquila al-Hashimi, who died from wounds suffered in a shooting last year.
Salim's murder sparked accusations the coalition had failed to protect members of the Governing Council, accusations the coalition rejects.
DAN SENOR, COALITION SPOKESMAN: The security considerations that we provide, that we give to the Iraqi Governing Council members are second to none.
WEDEMAN: The latest attack throws into doubt preparations for the June 30 handover of sovereignty from the coalition to an interim Iraqi government.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WEDEMAN: And, Aaron, as if this weren't all enough, the coalition announced Monday that it had found an artillery shell rigged as a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve gas, a first in this conflict.
BROWN: Ben, thank you. Ben Wedeman, who is in Baghdad today.
On now to CNN's Maria Hinojosa, who is in Boston, Massachusetts. There, the story is all about a struggle with plenty of resonance tonight, especially to those in the center of it.
So, Maria, your headline and your story tonight.
MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, they lined up by the hundreds all across the state of Massachusetts to transform the institution of marriage as we know it, but their opponents were out in force as well.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HINOJOSA (voice-over): They made history just by filing paperwork.
Boston, Massachusetts' first legally recognized gay and lesbian couples got their marriage certificates and changed matrimony as we know it.
JULIE GOODRICH, GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: I feel as though our relationship is now not only very public and very secure and very legitimate and legal, and I never felt so safe in my life.
HINOJOSA: Not your typical wedding day for Julie and Hillary Goodrich and their daughter Annie, whose family name is on the landmark lawsuit that made Massachusetts the only state in the nation whose highest court has given final approval for gays to marry.
They said of their daughter ....
J. GOODRICH: That she's able to understand that we are now protected as a family and Hillary and I have a relationship with each other and we both have a relationship to her, and we have a legal relationship and they won't be able to separate us.
HINOJOSA: And just steps away in front of City Hall, crowds of demonstrators.
REV. PATRICK MAHONEY, ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: I am here today as a broken person. I fear for my country, my children and the future of this nation. So we're here to pray. Again, we're not here to rail or condemn, we're here to support.
HINOJOSA: But the marriages continued, even as President Bush renewed his call for a constitutional amendment banning them. David Wilson and Robert Compton, together nine years, and with eight children and grandchildren from previous marriages, wept as they exchanged vows.
DAVID WILSON, GAY MARRIAGE ACTIVIST: Rob, I'm convinced I love you until death do us part.
HINOJOSA: The Goodrich family was all smiles and kisses as they sped off, newly wed and into the history books with the state of Massachusetts protecting their union.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HINOJOSA (on camera): Now, what these gay and lesbian couples get here in Massachusetts are several state rights, like custody issues, hospital visitation rights, inheritance. What they don't get are federal marriage rights that include Social Security.
Aaron?
BROWN: Maria, thank you.
Maria Hinojosa in Boston, and that's a quick look at two of the most important stories of today.
Now to the past that continues to shape the present. Fifty years ago today, the legal doctrine used for decades to justify public school segregation was shattered. Brown vs. the Board of Education has become a shorthand for this turning point in history. Tonight, we'll look behind the shorthand, a look at the people and the places central to the ruling, the struggles that followed.
We begin a half century ago, America before Brown, America in black and white.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): In the national looking glass, life a half century ago for millions of Americans seemed so uncomplicated and benign. For millions of black Americans, life was something else again.
STANLEY NELSON, FILMMAKER: Segregation was the law of the land, so it was OK. Before a black person could go in a store, they had to think about whether they would be welcomed, because the story only had a proven (ph) right to tell you get out any way they wanted to.
BROWN: What happened to a young lawyer named Robert Carter was commonplace. He was riding a bus in Georgia.
ROBERT CARTER, U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE: Some white men got off the bus and got on the bus and wanted me to move. And I said, I'm not moving. So the bus stopped, they pulled me off the bus. I have no idea why I was not roughed up.
BROWN: And in schoolrooms and towns and in neighborhoods across the land, most black Americans in the 1950s had one goal, getting by a day at a time.
RICHARD KLUGER, AUTHOR: Much of the black community was virtually destitute. More than half of the black population was living at or below the poverty line. Fifty-five percent was the number. Fewer than 14 percent of black kids were graduating from high school. And the black presence in mainstream America was virtually invisible. It wasn't there.
BROWN: To begin to change all that, an energetic and towering attorney named Thurgood Marshall convinced the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to look to a single place to start, the nation's segregated schools. His chief assistant, Robert Carter, that young man kicked off the Georgia bus.
CARTER: We were very much concerned with having Plessy vs. Ferguson, the separate but equal doctrine, overruled. And that of course was also one of my problems.
BROWN: For 67 years, the Supreme Court decision known as Plessy vs. Ferguson was the law of the land when it came to education. School districts across the country could, and many did, separate races at public expense. As long as the education was deemed equal, it was legal. But equal it was not.
NELSON: The schools built for black people were terrible. Black kids, they never got new books, all the books were hand-me-down, and a lot of times the white kids, knowing that these books would go to black kids, wrote curse words and N-word and other things in the book so that when the black kids opened them, this is what they'd see.
BROWN: It took four years, but Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter and their team filed lawsuits in four states and the District of Columbia. One of those states was Kansas, Brown vs. the Board of Education, named after a minister in Topeka named Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was forced to attend this black-only elementary school.
Robert Carter tried the case on its first appeal, and lost.
CARTER: The three judges said, in effect, that they bought our argument, but they couldn't rule in our favor because the precedent was against us. So that was another moral victory.
BROWN: Moral victories, of course, were not enough. All of the cases that reached the Supreme Court were by virtue of the alphabet and because the justices wanted Kansas first. They all came under the heading of Brown. The chief justice at the time was a Californian, Earl Warren.
KLUGER: He knew from the beginning, from what he said to me when I interviewed him, that there was a moral imperative to -- that this was an evil, that this was repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, and an insult to common decency, to tell blacks, in effect, they weren't fit to mingle with.
BROWN: Fifty years ago, the justices rendered their unanimous decision -- legal segregation was at an end, one long battle was over. And another was just beginning.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN (on camera): And that's how we got there, 50 years later. There was a big celebration in Topeka today. A lot of important things were said. In a day of speeches, the most important words I heard, however, came from a child of seven or perhaps eight.
We chatted while waiting for another dignitary to say the things that dignitaries say. I asked her why she was here, and she said her mom had made her come. Why, I asked, her mom looking on, and this precious little child said, so I would know. I didn't know before, now I do.
She was in the back of the crowd. People with big titles and big jobs and those who want them were in the front. Here's CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Bush marked the 50th anniversary of the landmark decision that legally desegregated public schools, praising the progress of civil rights, but promising to do more.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The habits of racism in America have not all been broken. The habits of respect must be taught to every generation.
MALVEAUX: Mr. Bush stood with a member of the Brown family, in front of the once all-black elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, where 50 years ago the Brown family's fight to attend the all-white neighborhood school led to the historic Brown vs. Board decision.
At the grand opening of the national historic site, a picture- perfect moment for the president.
But just a few blocks away, several hours earlier, Senator John Kerry marked the occasion from the steps of the statehouse capital.
SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You cannot promise no child left behind and then pursue policies that leave millions of children behind every single day.
MALVEAUX: A not-so-subtle swipe at the White House, illustrating what has become one of the hottest domestic issues, education.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), MARYLAND: I am concerned about the terrorists, but ladies and gentlemen, the greatest threat to our national security is our failure to educate our children.
MALVEAUX: Controversial issues like affirmative action and Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act are taking center stage in the education debate. While Mr. Bush kept his remarks to the Brown decision, he has argued his policies hold public schools accountable for improving education, but his critics argue without the necessary resources.
MALVEAUX (on camera): As both sides battle for voter support, the latest Pew Research Center poll shows that 50 percent believe that Kerry would do a better job of improving education, as opposed to 35 percent for Mr. Bush.
Suzanne Malveaux, CNN, Topeka, Kansas.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, a look at our host city, Topeka. The capital a complicated place still defined in some ways by the court case 50 years old.
And later, Jeff Greenfield looks at what 50 years of change have meant for all of us.
From Topeka, this is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Brown is the name everyone associates with the historic desegregation ruling, even though Oliver Brown was just one of the plaintiffs named in the case. Linda Brown was not the only student in Topeka whose parents were willing to challenge the status quo. Fifty years ago this city in America's heartland looked much like the country, where opportunities depended on the color of your skin.
Here's CNN's Dan Lothian.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LOTHIAN (voice-over): Topeka, a city once divided by race, is not defined by a landmark ruling.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We don't know whether we should be proud of it or apologize for it.
LOTHIAN: Just three years after part of Topeka was hit by a devastating flood, another storm was brewing with Brown vs. Board of Education. Victoria Lawton was nine years old. Her sister, Carol was 12.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We were not intimidated. We were confident, self assured. We knew that there were struggles.
LOTHIAN: Black and white elementary students had long been segregated. For the Lawton sisters, that meant attending this school, even though an all-white was closer to home. Their mother joined the chorus of plaintiffs fighting for equality.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She believed we should have the right to go to that school.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a white school?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was a white school.
LOTHIAN: Outside the classroom, historians say racial tensions simmered, but rarely exploded as in the South.
DIANNE GOOD, HISTORIAN: There were places that African Americans were not allowed to be, restaurants where they couldn't eat, places where they couldn't stay. The theaters were segregated. But there were an awful lot of integrated activities going on as well.
LOTHIAN: Then and now. The skyline has changed, so have the cars, and so has the face of the city's top job.
Mayor James McClinton.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it hadn't been for Brown, would you be sitting where you are sitting today?
JAMES MCCLINTON (D), TOPEKA MAYOR: I honestly do not believe I would be.
LOTHIAN: McClinton is the city's first African American mayor, appointed by council members after his predecessor stepped down last year. He faces an election next year, some believe a true test of how far Topeka has come.
MCCLINTON: We've come some ways, but we still have a long way to go.
LOTHIAN: Topeka is a city of about 122,000 people, 78 percent white, 12 percent African American, 9 percent Hispanic.
While some of the founding fathers buried here might not have approved of Topeka as it is today, Carol Lawton Nutter, playing the African American anthem, says even now the past is still present.
CAROL LAWTON NUTTER, TOPEKA RESIDENT: There is still some of the old ways. There are still people that have the old ...
VICTORIA LAWTON, TOPEKA RESIDENT: Not a perfect place, but we can move on.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LOTHIAN (on camera): The Lawton sisters are proud to be an important part of history, but they are concerned about their local public schools. They say that even under segregation, they received a solid education. And they're fearful now, Aaron, that African American students are being left behind.
BROWN: Dan, thank you. You've had a long and good week here.
LOTHIAN: Yes, it has.
BROWN: Thank you, Dan Lothian.
But Brown did not really did not, of course, transform education overnight, because it didn't spell out how to desegregate America's schools and it did not set a deadline. The deadline would come a year later, sort of, in a Supreme Court ruling known to some as Brown two.
Legal scholar Charles Ogletree was not even two years old when the first Brown ruling came down. Today, he's a professor at Harvard Law School, a leading authority on civil rights, and his new book takes the name from Brown two, "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown vs. the Board of Education." We're pleased to have Professor Ogletree join us tonight. He's in Washington.
CHARLES OGLETREE, AUTHOR: Good to see you, Aaron.
BROWN: Do you think it would all be different, significantly different or not different at all if the court had said immediately? OGLETREE: I think it would have been very different. I think the court would say law matters, the rule of law matters and people have to follow the law.
When it said all deliberate speed, governors, members of Congress and even the president felt no obligation to really enforce the idea of equality education right away. And I think it was a tragic mistake to add all deliberate speed, because it gave into those who would resist integration.
We've had rulings on abortion. We had rulings like Bush vs. Gore a few years ago. The court didn't delay its ruling because of the public reaction. They should not have delayed the ruling on integration because of the fear of public reaction. They in a sense fed into it. In all deliberate speed has meant no speed at all.
BROWN: Let me ask -- this may sound heresy, but let me ask anyway. What if the court had said that separate and equal are OK if equal is literally equal, equal to the dollar, equal to the textbook, equal to the teacher, equal to the building, equal. Is it conceivable that African American kids would be better off today if that had happened?
OGLETREE: Well, it's conceivable, but it's not realistic. Indeed, there are many African Americans today -- and at times I had that same thought, maybe we should just go back to separate versus equal and try to get the right resources.
The reality is that it would never happen. It has never happened, and, indeed, we can't go back. What the court dismantled was whites-only fountains, restaurants, hotels, schools, the right to vote, the right to travel. It was a terrible time in America, and I don't think we should go back and have a sense of romantic views about the past. It was a horrible time.
You know I talked about Tulsa and Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921 ...
BROWN: Absolutely.
OGLETREE: We had a separate but equal community that had hotels, theaters, a wonderful success, and that was destroyed by racism in 1921. So I don't want to go back to that. I want to move forward and say, let's have an integrated society. Let's have true education. Let's move beyond the rhyme of leave no child behind and really try to make sure all our children leave (ph) forward. That's what all deliberate speed's about. That's what I try to address in the book.
BROWN: And in a half a minute, which is a bit unfair, but in a half a minute, how do we deal with what is ultimately a complicated financial problem and a problem of individual choice that families make and all sorts of other things?
OGLETREE: Well, in a quick answer, one thing is that Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. has talked about a constitutional amendment to make education a fundamental right, something we have not done in 30 years. And the second thing, we need people who move to the suburbs to think about bringing their children back, building their resources back and making the community equally available to all.
I think we can do that. I think America can come together as we've never done before. I'm very hopeful that we will look at Brown not just in celebration, but opportunity to redo our work.
BROWN: This is kind of a chicken and egg, but those families are not going to move back into the city unless they -- I've seen this in Cleveland -- unless they believe the schools in the city work.
OGLETREE: But you know what, those families with power, political power, economic power and social power, if they come back, the schools will work. They'll bring their children back. They'll bring their political activism back, they'll bring their dollars back.
Because there were successful schools, even with few resources, before segregation. They just weren't widespread. I think America has to have the capacity to say that we're going to make sure that no child, black, white, rich or poor is left behind.
It's not just black children. I'm talking about Appalachia, I'm talking about South Dakota, I'm talking about Montana. And that's the whole issue. Make all children have an opportunity. That's what all deliberate speed is about. It didn't address those issues effectively.
Now is the time to really do something, not with all deliberate speed, but with the dispatch to save our most valuable resource, our children.
BROWN: Good to see you, sir, thanks for joining us.
OGLETREE: Good to see you, Aaron.
BROWN: It's an important day. We're glad to talk to you. Thank you.
OGLETREE: Always a pleasure.
BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, as white parents fight back, a small Virginia town finds that social change does not come easy, not now and certainly not 50 years ago. We'll tell that story from Topeka.
This is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Museum, part of this old schoolhouse here in Topeka. It is a walk through the American civil rights movement, 50 years ago and today. And if you're in the area, it is worth a visit.
The reaction 50 years ago to Brown, while it was celebrated by many and ignored by most, it was outright defied by some. When faced with a law that said schools must integrate, a 100 Southern members of Congress called for the impeachment of the entire U.S. Supreme Court.
In Farmville, Virginia, they did something else. They shut down the schools.
Here's CNN's Jason Carroll.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They called this the heart of Virginia. Raising cows, rolling hills, farm country, no surprise there is a town called Farmville -- no, not just for its beauty, but for an ugly past, when the world was seen in black and white.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I guess the sadness is when ...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's the part of remembering.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I really didn't understand too well then about the blacks and the whites.
CARROLL: Back in 1959, Joyce Atkins and Barbara Reed were children in a town where blacks made their voices known. High school students had walked out in 1951 protesting substandard conditions.
Their lawsuit was one of several that became Brown vs. Board of Education. But it would be years before children here would benefit from the Supreme Court's ruling. Prince Edward County had its own plan, close public schools rather than integrate.
JOYCE NASH ATKINS, FORMER PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY STUDENT: Here they come and shut the schools down. And I mean, it was -- it was like...
CARROLL: Farmville natives like Robert Taylor supported the decision not to integrate.
ROBERT TAYLOR, PRINCE EDWARD ACADEMY: It wouldn't work. You couldn't put them in the same classes anyway. And I was not willing my children to be victims of big social programs for change.
CARROLL: Taylor helped form a private school for white children. Blacks were on their own for longer than many expected.
THOMAS MAYFIELD, FORMER EDUCATOR, PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY: They figured, well, they would be closed for a year and maybe next year they'll reopen or the next year they'll reopen. But it never happened.
CARROLL: Schools closed for five years. Black children like Joyce and Barbara ended up in unaccredited church training centers.
(on camera): Did you feel like that was the only way of getting some sort of education?
BARBARA REED, FORMER PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY STUDENT: I did. That's the only hope we had.
CARROLL (voice-over): The conditions were poor, an out-house, water spigot, fireplace, a few books, until the Supreme Court forced the county to reopen schools in 1964. Blacks were sent back to school into grades they would have been in had they never left. Joyce hadn't started school, but was put in the third grade. Barbara went from first grade to fourth.
REED: We felt like that we didn't belong at that particular time in that particular classroom.
CARROLL: Unable to keep up, Joyce left in seventh grade. Barbara's sophomore year, she was made a senior.
REED: So during the time of graduation, that's when I decided I didn't want to be in Prince Edward County anymore.
CARROLL (on camera): I know that this is still very emotional for you. Where does that come from? Does that come from you feeling cheated, I would assume.
REED: Cheated out my education.
CARROLL (voice-over): Now the county is trying to make amends.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Joyce Nash Atkins.
CARROLL: Granting high school diplomas for hundreds of people like Joyce who at 51 works as a housekeeper.
ATKINS: It just makes me feel that -- like I was the person that I was lost, but now I'm found. And it is a blessing. It is truly a blessing.
CARROLL: The only blessing Barbara sees is her own determination. She scrubbed floors to help pay for summer school. Now 50, she's a mental health case manager living in Farmville again, where she says many still see things in black and white.
Jason Carroll, CNN, Farmville, Virginia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Now two worlds separated by a conjunction that might as well be the Grand Canyon, except it isn't. A lot of then stays mixed up in the now. It is easy to see race in America as simply black and white, good or bad. In fact, race, even race, is shades of gray.
Some perspective tonight from our senior analyst, Jeff Greenfield.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): If you really want to measure the impact of the Supreme Court's decision, just look at the full title of the case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, not Topeka, Mississippi or Topeka, Alabama, but Kansas, the heart of the American heartland, where 50 years ago black and white schoolchildren were segregated by law.
It was the same back then in Washington, D.C., legally mandated segregation in the nation's capital. And only six years before the Brown decision, it took a presidential order to end racial segregation in the armed forces of the United States.
(on camera): So it wasn't just schools and it wasn't just the South, though it was worse there. But across the United States 50 years ago, the citizens of this first nation conceived in liberty were living our own version of apartheid.
(voice-over): In most Southern states, the most basic of civil rights, the right to vote, existed in name only for most blacks. In Alabama, for example, barely one-tenth of black voters were even registered. And many if not most of those never showed up at the polls for fear of economic or even physical reprisals.
In dozens of Southern counties back then, not a single black showed up to vote. In the House, only two out of 435 members were black. Not a single African-American sat in the U.S. Senate. That happens to be true today, by the way. No black had ever been in the Cabinet or ever sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, across the nation, only 36 blacks sat in the state legislatures.
The job market was similar. Apart from a handful of doctors and lawyers who served minority neighborhoods, those professions were all but closed. And perhaps there is no more dramatic measure of second class-status than the roles African-Americans filled in movies and on TV, maids, servants, childlike stock comic stereotypes.
But when change did happen, it happened quickly by historical standards, and not just in the schools. Little more than 10 years after Brown, President Lyndon Johnson fully embraced the civil rights revolution as he made the right to vote a reality.
LYNDON JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And we shall overcome.
GREENFIELD (on camera): For all the numbers that paint a bleak picture, the collapse of the two-parent black family, the absence of so many African-American men from the job market, here are figures that give you some measure of what has changed in this country since Brown. The two states with the highest percentage of black elected officials are Mississippi and Alabama.
Jeff Greenfield, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, the story of a revolutionary armed with law books and determination, Thurgood Marshall.
From Topeka, Kansas, this is a NEWSNIGHT special.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Years after the two Brown decisions, Thurgood Marshall, by then a Supreme Court justice, liked to say: I have finally figured out what the phrase all deliberate speed means. It means slow.
The man could turn a phrase. He could be biting and bitingly funny and a whole lot of other things, too. But having won the day in Brown, he could never again be patient. And he never was. Perhaps it took a lifetime of patience just getting to that point.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL, U.S. SUPREME COURT: My dad told me way back that you can't use race.
BROWN (voice-over): If Americans today remember Thurgood Marshall at all, this is what they remember, a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court standing resolutely by his principles. But Thurgood Marshall was much more than that.
RICHARD KLUGER, AUTHOR, "SIMPLE JUSTICE": The man was enormously courageous, risking his life in jurisdictions where he was not wanted and told to get out of town by nightfall if he wanted to save his skin. He was smart. He was a political animal in the best sense of the term. He was able to rally the black community, to get plaintiffs to stand up and risk their own necks.
BROWN: That was his role for 30 years as the chief legal counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
MARK V. TUSHNET, MARSHALL BIOGRAPHER: For Marshall, the days were extremely long because he was doing what needed to be done in court and then after the courts closed in the evening, he would go out and give talks to the community to make sure that the community was in favor of the litigation they were pursuing to get new members for the NAACP and things like that.
BROWN: And you get a glimpse of his presence and his passion from this rare footage on that day a half century ago when he won his biggest legal victory.
MARSHALL: In fact, it was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language, which should set for rest once and for all the problem as to whether or not second-class citizenship, segregation, could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.
BROWN: Legal segregation was outlawed, of course. And today, this is the normal picture in many American public schools, black and white kids learning together. It seems like no big deal now.
But it has taken more than two generations to get there and many African-Americans now believe that Marshall's enormous accomplishment when it comes to educating black children is largely hollow.
(END VIDEOTAPE) BROWN: Late in life in the heat of combat with the court and a country he believes was going astray, Thurgood Marshall told a reporter: "I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die," he said, "at age 110" shot by a jealous husband. He died instead at 84, retired from the court having outlived many of his contemporaries.
Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we look back over the past 50 years. When we come back, we'll take a look ahead where blacks and whites are today and perhaps a bit of the road ahead and more.
A break first, though. From Topeka, this is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: The ruling known simply as Brown posed a fundamental change to the country's social fabric and in doing so exposed how rigid that fabric could be; 50 years later, the decision that became a landmark raises a profound question about social inequality: Can this nation's courts produce social reform on their own?
The answer, as history has shown, is, no, not completely, not by a long stretch, at least not yet, not even the highest court in the land. There are many lessons to be learned from Brown. And this clearly is one of them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Smile.
BROWN (voice-over): There have been smiles and snapshots all over official Washington, formal proclamations as well.
JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court stood up courageously for every child in America by upholding the principle of equal protection under the law.
BROWN: But many African-Americans say that, in today's world, the improvement in black education arising from Brown vs. the Board of Education has in the end been small.
TED SHAW, DIRECTOR, NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE FUND: I think it's certainly an irony and a hollowness in this commemoration of Brown. As a nation, we have not been able to commit ourselves to what it takes to sustain the promise of Brown. We haven't found a way of doing that yet.
ROBERT MCFRAZIER, FORMER TOPEKA SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT: If you take a look factually at what has happened in terms of achievement and you get into test scores and those kinds of things, it is a very dreary picture.
BROWN: Robert McFrazier has spent more than three decades as a teacher and a principal and a superintendent in Topeka, Kansas.
MCFRAZIER: African-American students now lag considerably behind counterparts in terms of achievement. This, I believe, has been fostered by the lack of the support system.
BROWN: And now many black intellectuals go even further. Education for African-American children today, they argue, may not measure up to the teaching of a half century ago.
DERRICK BELL, AUTHOR, "SILENT COVENANTS": Very poor. Very poor. Probably, overall -- there's no statistics on this -- probably worse, because more important than going to school with whites is going to school with teachers and administrators who really think you can learn and insist that you learn.
BROWN: The premise of Brown, he says, was flawed.
BELL: We thought that if you put black kids where white kids were, the black kids would get what the white kids get. It is crazy. If there was so much hostility to having the black kids there in the first place, it wasn't going to suddenly dissipate. Sometimes it did, but in the general, it didn't.
BROWN: What Brown did, says Judge Robert Carter, who helped Thurgood Marshall argue the case before the Supreme Court, was important.
JUDGE ROBERT CARTER, U.S. DISTRICT COURT: What this meant was that blacks were no longer going to submit as they had before to discrimination, that they were going to chafe under and fight it and so forth, because they couldn't submit under it, because it says, you're equal under the law.
BROWN: No mean accomplishment, that. And in Topeka, today, that was the underlying cause for the celebrations and reason enough to both look back and to look ahead.
WADE HENDERSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LEADER CONFERENCE ON CIVIL RIGHTS: I think this commemorative anniversary, the 50th anniversary of Brown, is really yet again an opportunity to remind the nation of the duty that we have to all students to provide equality public education and to address the real challenges that hold us back as a nation from fulfilling the goal of forging one nation for all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: It was -- for whatever imperfections or work still to be done, it was a very nice day to be in Topeka and remember all the distance we have come in 50 years. And to reinforce that, we'll take a lack at 50-year-old morning papers after the break.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
REP. JOHN LEWIS (D), GEORGIA: When that decision came down, I was so moved, so happy. I thought the next school year that I would attending a desegregated school, a wonderful school, wouldn't be so overcrowded, would have new books, a new bus. But it didn't happen for me. But it did inspire me to study harder, to work harder.
VERNON JORDAN, ATTORNEY: The Brown decision (INAUDIBLE) was, for black people and white people, a second Magna Carta. Brown was a benchmark. It was a watershed decision because it emancipated people.
REV. JESSE JACKSON, FOUNDER, RAINBOW/PUSH COALITION: The lesson to be learned, we must make education a national priority for all children, whether you're in Topeka, Kansas, Virginia, Alabama, or New York. We must revisit the need equal high quality public education for all children. We'll all benefit when that happens.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(ROOSTER CROWING)
BROWN: Well, that thing looks like it was done 50 years ago today, doesn't it?
Time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world as they were 50 years ago.
But we'll start with one that hit the streets here in Topeka this afternoon, an extra by "The Topeka Capital-Journal." Hope you can see this. Let me hold it up. "Dream Realized." "It is an amazing day to be a U.S. citizen, an amazing day to be a Kansan. I'm so proud," Cheryl Brown, who is that woman there, who was one of the named plaintiffs in the case that bears her family's name. "Dream Realized."
OK, now, this is cool here. Here are three newspapers that were published the day after. OK, they hit the doorstep on the 18th. Actually, this is the afternoon of the 17th, "The State Journal," "The Topeka State Journal." "School Segregation Banned" is the headline in the local paper. "Supreme Court Refutes Doctrine of Separate But Equal Education." I'm not sure how well you can see that. But we're doing the best -- the thing I noticed in looking at these papers, honestly, is, 50 years ago, they put a lot of stuff on the front page. There must be 25 stories on the front page of the paper.
"Supreme Court Refutes Doctrine of Separate But Equal Education." "High Tribunal Fails to Specify When Practice of Dual Schools Must Be Dropped By States. "Segregation already ending here, say school officials." So that's how it led locally.
Now, a couple of other papers here, while we still have time. "The New York Times" the next day, the 18th of May: "High Court Bans School segregation 9-0. Decision Grants Time to Comply." "The Times" got it exactly right. But if you can see the subheadline there, there was another big story that day. "McCarthy Hearing Off For a Week as Eisenhower Bars Report." The president ordered his aides, particularly those in the Army or connected to the Army, to stop cooperating in the Army-McCarthy hearings. So that shared a front- page ruling.
Back to the ruling, "1896 Ruling Upset." That's Plessy vs. Ferguson, which had been the law of the land. "Separate But Equal Doctrine Held Out of Place in Education," the beginning of the end. All right, one other story on this, if I can. "Ruling to Figure in '54 Campaign." "The Times" went to Southern congressman and senators. And one of them -- I think it was James O. Eastland, the senator from Mississippi -- said "The South will not abide by or obey this legislation by political court." Right. And, quickly, "The School Segregation Banned" and "Nation High Court Defers Final Edict to Fall." That's "The Washington Post" and "Times-Herald."
That's the way the news was reported 50 years ago, when I was but a boy.
We'll wrap it up for the day from Topeka in just a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Just briefly, this was a wonderful day for us and for the program here in Topeka.
As we wandered around the outskirts of the celebration here, we talked to people. We talked to them about race. We talked about achievement scores and housing and income and opportunities and the rest. It often -- we have often said that race, we think, is the most intractable American problem. Surely, we won't solve it unless we've talked about it. In Topeka today, and I suspect in lots of American cities, we did.
We'll see you tomorrow. Good night for all of us.
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