John Lewis and the Enduring Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education

The struggle for civil rights in America is a complex and multifaceted narrative, with landmark legal decisions serving as both milestones of progress and stark reminders of the long road towards true equality. Among the key figures in this struggle was John Lewis, a civil rights icon whose life and work were deeply intertwined with the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. This article explores the profound impact of the Brown decision on Lewis's activism, his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing relevance of these historical events in contemporary America.

The Spark of Inspiration: Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, a young John Lewis, growing up in Troy, Alabama, experienced a pivotal moment when he learned of the United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. This landmark ruling declared state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson. For Lewis, this was a moment of excitement, a sign of potential change in a deeply segregated society.

However, his initial enthusiasm soon turned to frustration as it became clear that the Alabama state government had no intention of implementing the Supreme Court's decision. This realization ignited a fire in Lewis, fueling his determination to fight for racial justice and equality.

Early Activism and the Influence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Inspired by the Brown decision, Lewis's path towards activism began to take shape. In 1955, he first heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio and was instantly attracted to his social gospel of not only living a Christian life to eventually reach the Promised Land in the hereafter but to heed real-life issues such as the racial injustices occurring in their own communities. King's message resonated deeply with Lewis, who was drawn to his philosophy of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to addressing racial injustices in the present.

While attending the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, Lewis eagerly learned the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, St. Augustine, and Hegel. Demonstrating his early commitment to racial equality, Lewis attempted to start an on-campus chapter of the NAACP but was rebuffed by the school administration. Further illustrating his resolve, Lewis sent an application to transfer to the all-white Troy State University, wanting to become the first black student to attend classes there. When his application was ignored, Lewis wrote a letter to Dr. King about his desire to integrate Troy University. Eventually, Lewis met with Dr. King in person. During the meeting, Dr. King and his advisers asked how committed Lewis was to his cause, and warned of the real dangers that Lewis and his family would face. Although this protest did not materialize, Lewis quickly became involved in the civil rights movement in other ways.

The Freedom Rides: Testing the Limits of the Law

Lewis's activism intensified as he became involved in various civil rights initiatives. He helped organize peaceful sit-ins at lunch counters in the Nashville area, challenging segregation in public accommodations. He then became an original Freedom Rider traveling by bus through the South to bring attention to the Supreme Court decision that segregated facilities for interstate passengers were illegal.

In 1961, Lewis joined an interracial group traveling through the South by bus to test the recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate travel. These were the Freedom Riders-more than 400 Black and white volunteers who risked their lives and freedom 60 years ago to face down segregation in the Deep South. The original group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began with 13 riders who left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, with plans to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. During that ride and the 60 others that followed that summer and fall, John Lewis and many others were beaten, brutalized, and arrested. Buses were firebombed and destroyed. But at every step, brave and determined new volunteers traveled to meet the riders and take their places.

Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South, Lewis felt good, happy, and liberated, like a soldier in a nonviolent army. During these nonviolent protests, Lewis was brutally beaten and arrested multiple times.

Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement

Lewis's commitment to nonviolent activism and his unwavering dedication to racial equality propelled him to leadership positions within the Civil Rights Movement. He helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually being elected chairman from 1961 to 1966. Through his leadership with this influential organization, Lewis, along with Dr. King, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney Young, became known as the “Big Six”, or the six men who helped guide the civil rights movements in the 1960s.

John Lewis helped organize the March on Washington that took place on August 28, 1963.

Selma to Montgomery: A Turning Point

John Lewis was also directly involved in one of the most iconic events of the civil rights movement, when on March 7, 1965, he participated in a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama to bring attention to voting rights. As the marchers began crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, dozens of Alabama state troopers waited on the other side. After a brief standoff, when the marchers began to kneel and pray, the officers attacked the marchers, beating the marchers with nightsticks, using tear gas and other weapons. The officers continued to attack the marchers all the way back to a church at the starting point of their march. John Lewis suffered a fractured skull and concussion during the attack.

From Activism to Politics: A Continued Fight for Justice

In 1966 Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman of the SNCC, representing the emerging Black Power direction of the movement. Lewis, disappointed by the direction of the SNCC, worked for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. During the 1970s, Lewis worked on voter education campaigns and economic recovery programs. In 1982, he began his political career by being elected to the Atlanta City Council. From 1986 until his death, Lewis served as Congressional representative of Georgia’s Fifth District.

During his time in Congress, he sponsored legislation that created the first national historic park in Georgia, named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Also, Lewis introduced the legislation that established the National Museum of African American History and Culture within the Smithsonian. He was also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and served on important Congressional committees.

Lewis received many awards, honorary degrees, and commendations throughout his life. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to civilians. Lewis also won the Martin Luther King Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, the Profile in Courage Lifetime Achievement Award from the John F. After his death, Lewis became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the United States Capitol Rotunda.

The Unfinished Revolution: Voting Rights and Systemic Racism

For young people today, the fight against segregated buses and train cars might feel like a triumphant victory that is now ancient history. But the dangerous and systemic assaults on voting rights happening across our nation right now are a stark reminder that even though we won that battle and many others, the war is still not over. Systemic racism, white supremacy, and inequality did not end with either Emancipation or the Civil Rights Movement. The same forces that used poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and violent intimidation against earlier generations of citizens are continuing to use every voter suppression tool at their disposal to try to cling to power right now, and in many places “election integrity” has become the latest new name for a very old snake.

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In June, Black Voters Matter held a Freedom Rides for Voting Rights bus tour from Mississippi to Washington, D.C. This week, President Biden and Vice President Harris held a White House meeting with key civil rights leaders, who stressed the urgent need for taking more forceful action immediately during what must become a “summer of activism.” The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is one of several legislative battlegrounds. In a White House proclamation on the Freedom Rides anniversary, President Biden said: “Across his lifetime of service in and out of Government, John Lewis was the moral compass of our Nation - though he absorbed the force of human nature’s cruelty, he emanated dignity and grace.

The Supreme Court and Racial Policy

The Supreme Court has read the Constitution to impose limits on the ways in which the United States can remedy its persistent problem of racial discrimination-a problem that has existed since before the country was founded. Many of the Court’s limits constrain the nation’s ability to adopt racial affirmative-action programs, often in the context of educational diversity. As the Court’s pertinent jurisprudence has evolved, its tolerance for affirmative action has fluctuated in ways that reflect the influence of its liberal or conservative voting blocs at particular points in time.

The affirmative-action debate has always been contentious. Proponents view affirmative action as necessary both to compensate for past inequalities and to promote the prospective diversity needed to facilitate the proper functioning of our increasingly multicultural society. Opponents view affirmative action as itself a form of racial discrimination that punishes Whites who are not themselves guilty of past discrimination in order to benefit minorities who were not themselves the victims of that discrimination, thereby undermining the society’s prospective commitment to the merit-based allocation of resources.

In the past, I have tried to offer a detailed account of how the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action jurisprudence has evolved, and I have tried to address the major arguments and counterarguments that tend to arise in the affirmative-action debate. In its 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision, a badly divided Supreme Court invalidated a race-conscious affirmative-action program that the University of California at Davis Medical School adopted to increase minority student enrollment. Justice Lewis Powell, speaking only for himself, wrote what ended up being the controlling opinion. Although he voted to invalidate the Davis program, he thought that some racial affirmative-action programs might be constitutional. He identified several factors that have come to be significant in assessing the constitutionality of affirmative action. He believed that strict scrutiny should be applied to the racial classifications inherent in affirmative action, meaning that plans could be constitutional only if they embodied narrowly tailored efforts to advance a compelling governmental interest. The two compelling interests he recognized were the retrospective provision of remedies for past discrimination, and the prospective promotion of future educational diversity.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected the individual rights of innocent Whites who might be burdened by affirmative action, so racial quotas were impermissible, as they deprived each applicant of the ability to compete for each available seat. Justice William Brennan disagreed, arguing that intermediate scrutiny ought to be used for benign affirmative-action classifications, rather than the strict scrutiny that applies to invidious racial discrimination, so that a program should be upheld if it was substantially related to an important governmental interest. He stressed that Whites did not suffer a history of racial discrimination sufficient to make them a suspect class triggering strict scrutiny. He also believed that the goal of providing remedies for general societal discrimination was a constitutionally sufficient governmental interest, and that the need for racial quotas could be used as a factor in assessing the constitutionality of affirmative action. Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion added that, in light of the nation’s long history of racial discrimination, race was a factor that now must be taken into account in order to achieve ultimate racial equality. Blackmun then stated famously that “[i]n order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.

Although the outcomes in early affirmative-action cases were dramatically inconsistent, the 1995 Adarand Constructors v. Peña decision concerning a federal minority construction set-aside held that the typically fatal strict scrutiny standard used for invidious discrimination would also apply to benign affirmative action. The Court’s more recent affirmative-action cases have involved programs designed to increase student racial diversity in educational contexts. On the same day in 2003, the Court decided two cases involving affirmative-action programs at the University of Michigan. Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the Michigan Law School plan under strict scrutiny, finding it to be narrowly tailored to the compelling interest in promoting student diversity. Citing Bakke, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 5-4 majority opinion noted that the plan did not utilize racial quotas to promote racial balance-something that would be “patently unconstitutional.” Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Anthony Kennedy dissented on the grounds that the plan was a veiled racial quota and was not narrowly tailored. In addition, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas asserted that diversity was not a compelling governmental interest, and Justice Thomas argued that affirmative action was merely about preserving the status of elite educational institutions. Then, in Gratz v. Bollinger, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a majority opinion invalidating the Michigan undergraduate affirmative-action program on the ground that it was not narrowly tailored.

After Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito replaced Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O’Connor in 2005 and 2006, it appeared that there might be five votes on the Court to overrule Grutter and end most forms of affirmative action. Bolstering that view, Chief Justice Roberts wrote a majority opinion in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, invalidating race-conscious primary and secondary school student assignment programs in Seattle and Louisville that had been adopted to prevent resegregation of the schools caused by residential population shifts. Chief Justice Roberts held that the diversity interest recognized as compelling in Grutter applied only to higher education, and there was no lingering past de jure discrimination to remedy. In a plurality portion of the opinion, Chief Justice Roberts reasserted that the goal of racial balancing was patently unconstitutional, and he invoked Brown v.

When the Court considered Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin-first in 2013 (Fisher I), and again after remand in 2016 (Fisher II)-opponents of affirmative action hoped that the Court would use the case as an opportunity to overrule Grutter. However, in Fisher II, Justice Kennedy-who had dissented in Grutter-upheld the Texas plan, finding it to be narrowly tailored. Justice Alito dissented, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas. Although the Supreme Court did not use Fisher II as an opportunity to overrule Grutter, since the case was decided in 2016, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have replaced Justices Scalia and Kennedy. And this week, Amy Coney Barrett succeeded Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who also voted with the majority in Fisher II. In addition, the Court has made a number of striking assertions: the use of quotas in the pursuit of racial balance is patently unconstitutional; the Equal Protection Clause does not permit the culture to use race-conscious efforts to eliminate general societal discrimination; Brown v.

Moreover, the Court’s actions do not inspire confidence in the judicial process, because: the Court’s views on the constitutionality of affirmative action correlate very highly with the political and ideological preferences of the Justices; the outcomes in affirmative-action cases are largely determined by which Justices happen to be sitting on the Court when a particular case is decided; the meaning of the Constitution as it applies to affirmative action is often determined by the views of a single “swing” Justice; the current law of affirmative action is so unstable that it could be changed dramatically by the replacement of one Justice; and like its predecessors, the current Supreme Court does not seem to like racial minorities very much. There seem to be at least three possible explanations for the Supreme Court’s hostility to affirmative action. First, the mere ideological preferences of the Court’s conservative majority might be the cause of the Court’s anti-affirmative-action views. If so, racial equality cannot be secured until the Court’s controlling ideology or membership is changed. Second, it might be that the Supreme Court is an institution tacitly committed to preserving White privilege, regardless of its membership or stated ideology. If so, racial equality cannot be obtained without changing the role that judicial review plays in our constitutional culture. Third, the Supreme Court may be accurately reflecting the racial preferences of the culture at large when it invalidates remedial affirmative action. If so, racial equality cannot be achieved without a fundamental change in the culture’s views on race itself. The Court’s personnel, ideology and institutional commitments seem unlikely to change on their own.

The Role of Black Educators

Consider the Civil Rights Movement activists, who after the Brown decision, were spurred to dismantle Jim Crow. Black students have had to contend with white architects’ framing of Black education. And while teaching in segregated schools, Black educators were subject to white surveillance of their praxis. In his book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Dr. The work of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history, was particularly instrumental. Black teachers utilized these resources in opposition to resources that framed Black people as stereotypes and caricatures. They empowered Black teachers to affirm, empower, and inspire Black students-students who would become Civil Rights Movement activists like former Rep.

Well before his political career, Lewis was the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 and marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The efforts of his Black educators helped put Lewis on the road to activism when, at 16 years old, he attempted to register for a library card in Troy, Alabama. Another example of an activist inspired by her teachers is Angela Davis. This is because Black teachers benefit Black students by inspiring Black resistance through their social justice, truth-telling, and identity-affirming pedagogy.

Affirmative Action and the Evolution of Racial Equality

To date, the culture has acquiesced in Supreme Court resolution of the competing arguments. And the Court has become more hostile to affirmative action as its dominant voting bloc has become more conservative-a trend that seems likely to continue. When the Court invalidates an affirmative-action program, it is behaving in a countermajoritarian manner, even though it is difficult to find anything in the Constitution that justifies the judicial usurpation of racial policymaking power from the representative branches of government.

During what has been termed an “American Spring of Reckoning,” the distressingly cavalier murder of a Black man named George Floyd by a White Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin prompted an unexpectedly prominent and sustained public outcry against the persistence of racism in the United States. Race-based statistical disparities concerning everything from police shootings of unarmed civilians to infection and death rates from the COVID-19 pandemic have come to alarm even White members of the American public. However, the Supreme Court reads the Constitution to prohibit only narrowly defined forms of intentional discrimination, thereby rendering largely irrelevant evidence of racially disparate impact-the term used to describe discriminatory effects. The question is whether the culture’s new-found concern for racial justice will last. If the culture’s current passion for racial equality is on the precipice of evolving into meaningful social change, rather than degenerate into mere transient rhetoric, the culture will have to retrieve its social policymaking power from the Supreme Court. The surest way for American culture, and its politically accountable representatives, to recapture political policymaking power is to insist that the Supreme Court defer to popular demands for racial equality.

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