The Enduring Legacy: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Impact on Brown v. Board of Education
Martin Luther King Jr.'s influence on the Civil Rights Movement is undeniable, and his impact extends significantly to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. This article explores the intricate connection between King's powerful rhetoric, the struggle for educational equality, and the dismantling of segregation in America. Employing the rhetorical phraseology of a “promissory note,” dramatized in the public address of Martin Luther King Jr., during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this article historically postulates Black Americans as constitutional beggars until Reconstruction. The white framers of our Republic legislated the dehumanization and constitutional disregard of Black Americans who continuously find themselves fighting for rights and privileges granted through American citizenship. Illuminating the paradoxical implications of blackness, substantiated in anti-black policies and practices that beset educational institutions, unravels the connectedness between King’s public address and educational inequalities.
The Promissory Note: King's Rhetorical Framework
King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, stands as a testament to his profound understanding of the American Constitution and its promises. King elucidated the moral and constitutional hypocrisy of White Americans. By employing the metaphor of a "promissory note," King highlighted the unfulfilled promises of equality and justice for Black Americans.
He stated: "When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned."
King's words underscored the disillusionment felt by Black Americans who were denied the very rights enshrined in the nation's founding documents. He challenged the nation to make good on its promise of equality, demanding that the "bank of justice" not be "bankrupt" and that there be "sufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity" for all Americans.
Blackness and Whiteness: A Constitutional Paradox
The article posits that whiteness has constitutional groundings and blackness is a constitutional omission, which in the end, creates the need for Black Americans to assert themselves in the Constitution or what this article recognizes as constitutional beggars. King's address also grapples with the complex interplay between "blackness" and "whiteness" in American society. Blackness has paradoxical implications. There are empirical variations, cultural distinctions, and diverse interpretations of what it means to be black in America, and how to negotiate one’s blackness in white spaces. The term Black America, as referenced periodically, illuminates the collective consciousness of diasporic Africans living under the tyranny of American racism. By using a capital B, this article acknowledges the inherent worth of Africans in the diaspora and the impact of race and racialization in America. As Victor Anderson (1995) posits, “blackness is a covering term that connotes categorical, essentialist, and representational language depicting black and experience” (p. 11). For the sake of this article, blackness is posteriori, contextually confined to the United States or hereafter referred to as America, and ultimately gives voice to the myriad of ways blackness manifests itself amid marginalization and exploitation. As posteriori, blackness comes through the birthing canal of whiteness and whiteness derives from American racism.
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Teresa J. Guess (2006) characterizes whiteness as an ideological, sociological, economic, and political stance that normalizes racial hierarchies in America. Whiteness is a systemic set of beliefs, behaviors, and habits, institutionalized and individualized, that repress cultural and political differences between European and African ancestry. Goodman, Moses, and Jones (2012) affirms, “definitions and boundaries of whiteness have changed throughout American history, expanding strategically from time to time usually as scientists, policymakers, and others attempted to balance nativist and anti-immigrant prejudices with the labor needs of a growing nation” (p. 44). Goodman et al. (2012) continue, “whiteness defined through European ancestry was a calculated racial solution developed by colonial leaders to the economic and physical threat of laboring-class solidarity” (p. 44). Blackness and whiteness are sociological constructs that yield legal, political, and economic benefits, or the lack thereof.
He exposed the constitutional disregard of blackness in white spaces. King takes the white normative discourse, enshrined in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation, and interjects black subjectivity to illuminate the multiple manifestations of whiteness. Simply put, King exposes the moral hypocrisy of White Americans and the paradoxical implication of blackness in America.
Intersectionality and Educational Inequalities
While much attention focuses on the historical significance of King’s public address and his rhetorical cadence, scholars have said little on the intersectionality between critical race theory and educational inequalities. Intersectionality is a multidimensional framework that mitigates the theoretical and ideological collision between blackness and schooling. The term schooling references the socialization process that occurs in educational institutions where students become versed in the values, expectations, and behaviorism that sustains whiteness in public and private schools. Schools are social institutions that harbor anti-black policies and practices, as whiteness breathes on social institution’s ability to “school” students on acceptable social standards and practices. Such standards become synonymous with the prejudicial outlook needed to preserve the sanctity of whiteness and the exclusion of blackness in educational institutions. Educational inequalities channeled “through ideological and material manifestations of whiteness” (Goodman et al., 2012, p. 47), illustrate the suppression and exclusion of educational resources based on race. The March on Washington gave voice to the social, political, and educational realities of Black America and provided the rhetorical, moral, and constitutional space for King to illuminate the moral collision between whiteness and blackness. Accentuating a sociological analysis of schooling, converging with the theory of intersectionality, promulgates the complexity of American apartheid and how this article conceptualizes King’s public address with educational inequalities.
King's dream of a society where people not judged by race can be accomplished and the promise of Brown will be fulfilled by celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. King believed the promise of Brown was more than an end to legal segregation.
Brown v. Board of Education: A Turning Point
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954, declared state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The significance of Brown v. Board of Education can be understood by examining the past, the present, and its implications for the future. Citing a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the groundbreaking decision was widely regarded as one of America's most consequential legal judgments of the 20th century, setting the stage for a strong and lasting US Civil Rights Movement. The Supreme Court ruled that segregation in Washington D.C. public schools was unconstitutional based on the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, instead of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
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The Court determined that the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal” had no place in education and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases appear in every constitutional law textbook and their names announce the death of a racial order that disgraced this nation.
The Brown decision reverberated for decades. The promise of Brown v. Board of Education was an end to legal segregation in public schools. According to King, the promise of Brown v.
The Architects of Brown v. Board of Education
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education was the product of the hard work and diligence of the nation’s best attorneys, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles and John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.C. Hayes.
Known colloquially and affectionately as “Mr. Civil Rights,” Thurgood Marshall was the leading architect of the strategy that ended state-sponsored segregation. Marshall was the key strategist in the effort to end racial segregation, in particular meticulously challenging Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court-sanctioned legal doctrine that called for “separate but equal” structures. Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, finally overturning “separate but equal” and acknowledging that segregation greatly diminished students’ self-esteem. Among other major victories, he successfully challenged whites-only primary elections in Texas in addition to a case in which the Supreme Court declared that restrictive covenants that barred Black people from buying or renting homes could not be enforced in state courts.
Jack Greenberg succeeded Thurgood Marshall as LDF’s second Director-Counsel from 1961-84. Greenberg first joined LDF in 1949 as a 24-year-old Columbia Law School graduate. At the time, Marshall was looking for an assistant to help fight Jim Crow. At LDF, Greenberg served as an assistant counsel from 1949-61 under the aegis of Thurgood Marshall. He litigated the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine. In total, he argued some 40 cases before the Supreme Court, including Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education which mandated segregated school systems to desegregate “at once” and Griggs v.
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Constance Baker Motley, who became the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge, earned her reputation as the chief courtroom strategist of the civil rights movement. Motley directed the legal campaign that resulted in the admission of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962. She argued 10 cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine of them.
Robert Carter served as lead attorney in the Topeka school desegregation case, one of the five cases which were consolidated to form Brown. In addition, Carter served as one of the lead attorneys on Sweatt v. Painter and Brown, as well as many other cases. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Carter, who died in 2012, held adjunct faculty positions at the University of Michigan and New York University Law Schools, as well as in Yale University’s graduate school. The cases appear in every constitutional law textbook and their names announce the death of a racial order that disgraced this nation.
Oliver Hill allegedly filed more civil rights lawsuits in that state than the total filed in all other Southern states during the Jim Crow era. Additionally, The Washington Post estimated that Hill’s team was responsible for winning more than $50 million for African American students and teachers in higher salaries, new buses and better schools. In 1940, Hill secured his first civil rights victory in Alston v. School Board of Norfolk, Va. that mandated equal pay for African American and white teachers. In 1948, Hill and Spottswood Robinson filed dozens of cases against school districts throughout the state, with as many as 75 pending at one time. Hill also argued Davis v. School Board of Prince Edward County a lawsuit on behalf of students protesting terrible conditions at their segregated high school.
Charles Hamilton Houston played an invaluable role in dismantling segregation and mentoring the crop of civil rights lawyers who would ultimately litigate and win Brown v Board of Education. At Howard Law School, he served as Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and his eventual employer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Houston was involved in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and 1954. He is credited with designing the strategy that ultimately ended Jim Crow. Starting by attacking segregation in law schools by forcing states to either create costly parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones, he chipped away at the facade of Jim Crow.
James Nabrit Jr. taught law at Howard University Law School and was credited with creating the first formal civil rights course in any law school in the country. Among many other accomplishments, Nabrit’s most substantial legal victory was Bolling v.
Spottswood Robinson was involved in Brown litigation, and Chance v. After complaining about inadequate facilities, Black students at R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia went on strike in 1951. Robinson informed the students that if a critical mass of parents would join a lawsuit, LDF would file the case. Many of the parents ultimately lost their jobs, bank loans, or farms as a result of joining the lawsuit. Robinson became Dean of Howard University School of Law and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights from 1961 to 1963. In 1964, Robinson was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and was elevated two years later by President Johnson to the D.C. Circuit Court. He eventually became chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court.
Resistance and Continued Struggle
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, desegregation faced fierce resistance, particularly in the South. Determined resistance by whites in the South thwarted the goal of school integration for years. Even though the court ruled that states should move with “all deliberate speed,” that standard was simply too vague for real action.
In Little Rock, Arkansas in September of 1957, Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students from entering the all-White Little Rock Central High School. In 1968, in Green v. county was operating a dual system of schools, and that is must convert to one system. In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld busing as a tool for integrating public schools and correcting racial imbalances.
President Eisenhower didn't fully support of the Brown decision. The president didn't like dealing with racial issues and failed to speak out in favor of the court's ruling. Although the president usually avoided comment on court decisions, his silence in this case may have encouraged resistance. In many parts of the South, white citizens' councils organized to prevent compliance. Despite his reticence, Eisenhower did acknowledge his constitutional responsibility to uphold the Supreme Court’s rulings. In 1957, when mobs prevented the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus saw political advantages in using the National Guard to block the entry of African American students to Central High. After meeting with Eisenhower, Faubus promised to allow the students to enroll-but then withdrew the National Guard, allowing a violent mob to surround the school. In explaining his action, however, Eisenhower did not declare that desegregating public schools was the right thing to do. But in September 1958, Faubus closed public schools to prevent their integration. Eisenhower expressed his “regret” over the challenge to the right of all Americans to a public education but took no further action, despite what he had done the year before. There was no violence this time, and Eisenhower believed that he had a constitutional obligation to preserve public order, not to speed school desegregation. Eisenhower urged advocates of desegregation to go slowly. believing that integration required a change in people's hearts and minds. On only one occasion during his presidency-in June 1958-did Eisenhower meet with African American leaders. The president became irritated when he heard appeals for more aggressive federal action to advance civil rights and failed to heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice that he use the bully pulpit of the presidency to build popular support for racial integration.
King recognized the need for continued activism and legal challenges to dismantle segregation in all its forms. He emphasized the importance of federal government intervention to enforce the law of the land and criticized the silence of the executive and legislative branches on civil rights issues.
King's Vision: Beyond Desegregation
For King, the promise of Brown v. Board of Education extended beyond the mere desegregation of schools. King believed the promise of Brown was more than an end to legal segregation. He envisioned a society where Black Americans were not only integrated into white spaces but also valued and respected for their humanity.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with America about the future of American race relations. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King announced his hope that “…my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The dream King hoped for was a society that fulfilled the promise of Brown. The technique used by King to help achieve his dream was nonviolence. King explained how nonviolence worked by “refus[ing] to hit back will cause the oppressors to become ashamed of their own methods and we will be able to transform enemies into friends.” Nonviolence can be used in the absence of violence too.
King's commitment to nonviolent resistance, his powerful oratory, and his unwavering belief in the promise of American democracy inspired a generation to fight for equality. His work amplified the significance of Brown v. Board of Education and propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward.
King's Reflection on Brown v. Board of Education
While speaking at an annual luncheon of the National Committee for Rural Schools on 15 December 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected on the importance of Brown v. Board of Education: “To all men of good will, this decision came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity." The Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown decision, handed down on 17 May 1954, determined that the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal” had no place in education and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Initial excitement over the Brown victory dwindled, however, when desegregation of schools was not mandated as quickly as had been hoped.
In his December 15, 1956, speech, King called the Brown decision, “…one of the most momentous decisions ever rendered in the history of this nation…” and it was a “…reaffirmation on the good old American doctrine of freedom and equality for all men.” However, he also stated that “…segregation is already legally dead, but it is factually alive.”
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