Reflections
U of L remembers Brown v. Board of Education
Throughout 2004, nearly every college and school at the University of Louisville participated in events commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ended public school segregation in the United States.
The year-long tribute was kicked off in February with a visit from two women who were at the heart of the case. Linda Brown Thompson and Cheryl Brown Henderson are two of the three children of the late Rev. Oliver L. Brown, who was one of the original litigants.
“We lived in the center of a hurricane’s eye looking out at the storm around us,” Thompson told a packed auditorium on Belknap Campus. The older of the two sisters, she chronicled the history of their family’s participation in the court battle.
Henderson then spoke about the case’s impact on education and the civil rights movement. “Those of us who became activists on the heels of Brown v. Board of Education knew that Brown was only the beginning,” she said. “It did not end anything, and it was going to take being politically active and taking to the streets to really get this country to live up to its Constitutional promise.”
The sisters’ compelling presentation was followed throughout the year by a variety of guest speakers, lectures, panel discussions, student projects, films and other scholarly events centered on the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. There was even an original play inspired by the case.
School Play, created by theater arts chair Russell Vandenbroucke and a 12-student cast, dramatizes the experiences of schoolchildren as told through personal stories, interviews and glimpses into the everyday lives of a group of high school freshmen. The play, which ran in early December, asks several tough questions about the Brown case such as, “Did it really end school segregation?
U of L’s Brown v. Board of Education activities were spearheaded by a committee that included Mordean Taylor-Archer, associate vice provost of diversity; Laura Rothstein, dean of the Brandeis School of Law; and Larry Palmer, an endowed chair in the medical school. The culmination of the university’s “commemorative year” is the exhibit titled “Faculty Reflections: An Exhibition Featuring the Triumphs, Achievements, and Lessons Learned by Faculty of Color.”
Sponsored by the university’s Faculty Affairs Committee of the Black Faculty and Staff Association, the exhibit opened in mid-November and will tour the campus and some Jefferson County Public Schools during the rest of the school year. It features—through papers, pictures and poems—the personal reflections of African American professors at U of L on the impact the Brown decision had on them. Most of the contributors were in school at the time the Supreme Court handed down the decision.
The following are excerpts from some of the reflections presented in the exhibit. The Black Faculty and Staff Association eventually will produce a printed document of the entire exhibit. The following commentary represents a small portion of the exhibition.
J. Blaine Hudson
Acting Dean
College of Arts
and Sciences
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The Brown decision was pronounced a few months before young J. Blaine Hudson would start kindergarten in Louisville. Hudson notes that although he was far too young to understand the Brown decision and this sense of “forward movement,” he does remember the “profound sense of optimism and possibility in my parents, their friends, my teachers and my contemporaries.” In their minds, times were changing for the better and “they believed that they would see the end of segregation and the achievement of full equality in their lifetimes.”
Today, Hudson reflects on his early experiences as a “good time—and a good community—in which to be a child, and a life-lesson learned of inestimable value.” At the same time, he is “painfully aware that the sense of optimism and possibility that illuminated my childhood did not survive the early 1970s,” he says.
Even though the African American community was ready for change, “white America was only willing to change so much,” leaving the nation to live with “the troubling and complex legacy of a half-finished revolution for more than a generation.” Those days as a young African American in an era of social reform shaped his values and choices as an adult, he says, leaving with him “a commitment to justice and multiracial democracy; a determination to pursue what is right, not necessarily what is popular or profitable; and the conviction, rooted in knowledge and experience, that we can make a difference.”
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Larry I. Palmer
Endowed Chair in Urban
Health Policy, Family and Geriatric Medicine
School of Medicine Institute
for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law
"Checkerboard Segregation in the 1950s"
(Edited excerpt from Voices of Brown Generation: Memories and Reflections of Law Professors, forthcoming)
Palmer credits elementary and junior high teacher George H. Hyram, an African American Fulbright Scholar and Ph.D. candidate who studied in Paris, for taking a personal interest in his scholastic abilities and making a difference in his life.
“I remember some adults such as my parents … preparing their children for the post-Brown v. Board of Education world where there would be no legal racial segregation. But most adults in St. Louis, both black and white, were probably trying to hold on to something they thought of as precious in the pre-Brown world through a combination of private inclusion and exclusion as manifested in housing and social patterns. I think often about how my two-and-a-half year tutelage under Hyram changed the course of my life by providing the path to Exeter. Hyram was more like my teachers at Exeter—highly educated, demanding and passionate about learning, but he also carried the burden of being black in an educational system designed to destroy young black minds and deprive a brilliant black teacher of his passion for learning. … But in the confusing pattern of racial exclusion and inclusion of my childhood, I always try to remember that not everyone, black or white, was as protected from emotional and spiritual bruises of racial segregation as I was by the combination of the examples of Hyram’s zest for teaching and learning, my older siblings’ example of academic achievement and the calm demeanor of my parents as I ventured into the white world after Brown.”
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Sharon E. Moore
Associate Professor
Raymond A. Kent School of Social
Work
“ ‘B’ Students Can Be Doctors Too”
While we remember [the Brown decision], and those who struggled against great difficulties so that others could enjoy privileges that they could not, we should also remember that African American history is evolutionary and that it is being made daily.
Throughout the Diaspora our people are making wonderful strides towards social and economic justice and are making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. … I believe that in every person lies a potential for greatness that is divinely unique. Many people do not reach their potential for greatness because they have not been encouraged to do so. … Life is about making use of self for the good of others. As a result of my credentials [and world travels] I have helped other young people to do special things as well. [I’ve been] able to work with the young people in my community and expose them to opportunities that they otherwise may not have had. More importantly, I have encouraged them to know that ‘B’ students can be doctors too.
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Dewey Clayton
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
“Brown, Person County and Me”
It had been more than a decade since the 1954 Brown decision, and the public schools in Dewey M. Clayton’s hometown were still segregated. Clayton recalls being an 8-year-old second- grader at the all-black Roxboro Elementary School, located in the southern end of Roxboro, N.C. His parents, along with others, had to sue the local school district to integrate the public school system. His mother told him how Julius Chambers, the noted civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, visited their home to discuss the strategy for filing the lawsuit. The case was Dewey Clayton v. Person County Board of Education in which the federal district court ruled that the local school board must admit blacks to previously all white schools.
Clayton is firmly committed to the cause of diversity today. But he observes that those early days of achieving diversity were not an easy time. He credits his parents for being active leaders in integrating the public schools. Their support and commitment to the cause of social justice and equal educational opportunities made them his “first civil rights heroes,” Clayton says, because “in looking back, they had tremendous courage and foresight.”
Lundeana M. Thomas
Associate Professor
Department of Theatre Arts
Director
of the African American Theatre Program
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“ The Amount of Human Cost to Obtain These Victories ...”
Although Lundeana Thomas was “quite young” when the Brown decision was made, she recounts how her mother “dramatically read the newspaper to father, grandmother and uncles and whomever else was around …” She recalls relishing the rare opportunity to sit on the linoleum floor “under the grown folks while they were talking,” with “the best part listening to Mother read the remarks and stories between the newspaper readings, which either supported or contested what was written in the newspaper.” She remembers the conversation:
Mama said, “White folks are going to be mad, now.”
And Dad said, “You know what that means …”
Mama said, “Somebody’s going to get killed.”
And my grandmother responded, “You know who it is …”
And they all said, “Us!”
In retrospect, Thomas states, “My parents believed they were right because after the Brown decision, black folks were ridiculed, beaten and killed [all over the United States]. My father did not see victory in any cause or action that brought about pain, suffering, and [more] death. In the ensuing months and years as the civil rights movement progressed, rather than looking at the victories he counted the dead, the wounded and the incarcerated. Both of my parents felt that this was a white world, [whites] owned it and the best way for us to stay alive was to let them have it. … They have since come to see the importance of Brown … and all of the victories of the civil rights movement. But they still wonder about the amount of human cost to obtain these victories.”
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Michael J. Cuyjet
Associate Dean, Graduate School
Associate Professor, College
of Education and Human Development
“Business as Usual”
Although the Brown decision had little or no impact on Michael Cuyjet’s education or day-to-day life, he says, the racial composition affected by the changing demographics of the white neighborhood where his school was located did. Being raised in a black, middle-class neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago in the late 1940s to 1950s, Cuyjet’s childhood community was surrounded by exclusively white neighborhoods.
Such neighborhoods became the stages for “block-busting”—when a black family would integrate an all-white block—and for “white flight”—the inevitable departure of most, if not all, white families to the suburbs. This racial transference first became noticeable, Cuyjet says, in his eighth-grade class at St. Joachim. The majority of his classmates were now black as opposed to white.
“This transition in the early 1950s was awkward but relatively peaceful in the neighborhood surrounding my school,” he adds. “This pleasantly contrasted with the violence that characterized some other neighborhoods at that time and became more pronounced in the later 1950s and 1960s when greater numbers of blacks tried to buy homes in other communities, particularly some deeply ethnic Polish and Irish neighborhoods and suburbs.”
