WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 8 (2005) WHERE DO BLACKS STAND AFTER BROWN?*

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr

In the essay titled “The Implementation of Desegregation Plans Since Brown,” William Gordon notes that in exhorting the individual states of the Union to implement Brown II(1955) decision “with all deliberate speed,” the United States Supreme Court set up a semantic paradox that virtually ensured that a speedy and practical solution to this egregious societal bane could not be promptly devised: “The phrase soon took on the mantel of black humor: Blacks, it was noted, wanted ‘speed,’ while whites wanted to be ‘deliberate’” (Gordon 310). Further, Gordon notes that in leaving local governments without any definitive guidelines as to how to proceed with educational desegregation, what ultimately resulted might be aptly termed as COMFORT-LEVEL DESEGREGATION: “Hence, many [school districts] proceeded with the notion that a few assigned or voluntary Black student transfers into formerly all-White schools satisfied the requirements of Brown” (Gordon 311).

Needless to say, today we continue to witness this chaotic state of affairs filter into the ranks of faculty hirings, particularly regarding the composition of departmental and college-wide Personnel and Budgetary Committees (P & B’s). Oftentimes, African-Americans and continental Africans, as well as African-Caribbeans, are completely shut out of active participation in the top regulatory instruments of the academy, even as inner-circle white bona fides hypocritically lament the apparent absence of these ethnic minorities on such steering committees. At the same time, “Honorary Minorities,” largely Asians, are accorded token, or proxy, representation in the dubious and specious name of all other ethnic and racial minorities, although it is to be significantly observed that in the battle to ethnically and racially desegregate American education, these Asiatic groups were either marginally represented or were virtually AWOL.

Of course, racial desegregation was about the civilized business of making America less pathologically racist. Three-hundred-plus years of continental African enslavement had left the well-meaning African with no illusions about the actual intentions of the so-called mainstream of American society. Still, paradoxically, the African continues to hope against hope that, somehow, this purported cauldron of racial harmony would ultimately live up to its sociopolitical creed of exemplary unification.

Alas, the erstwhile enslaved African, it turns out, was merely hoping against hope. For the devious policy of “Freedom of Choice,” adopted by local school authorities and politicians, simply refined de jure and de facto segregation into a subliminal art-form to ensure the perpetuation of racial segregation. To the preceding effect, Gordon observes at length:

Basically, these plans involved expanding attendance zones to include both Black and White schools. Each child was provided with the opportunity to select the school of his or her choice within the expanded zone. Freedom of choice plans had a ring of democracy because they allegedly gave families a choice of schools for their children. Generally, however, there were several caveats. First, in most instances the children living closest to a school had first choice to attend it. Second, children were assigned to their second or third choices as schools reached some arbitrarily determined building capacity. Third, and most important, school guidance personnel exercised substantial influence over the selection process. Thus, with freedom of choice, school authorities continued to control most of it, if not all, pupil assignments, and, in most cases, made little pretext that it was their desire to have schools remain unchanged. As a result, former Black schools remained all-Black and former White schools gained a few selected Black students. (Gordon 311)

All in all, it appears that the Republican Party leadership felt relatively less comfortable with judicial measures aimed at expeditiously desegregating the nation’s public schools. In Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970), for instance, then-President Richard M. Nixon vitriolically characterized a judicially sanctioned system of limited student busing as “unconscionable social engineering” (Gordon 313). This effort, it may be significantly observed, as was also the case with the larger issue across the country, aimed to meliorate the racial stigma and psychological trauma which institutionalized segregation implied for African-Americans and Chicanos, as well as members of other ethnic minority groups. And while ideologically and politically laudable, the policy of desegregation conversely affected ethnic minority educators; thus a situation that may be aptly characterized as “reverse racism” or “reverse discrimination” resulted, whereby considerable numbers of African-American teachers summarily lost their jobs to their White-American counterparts, often on rather arbitrary and “essentialistic” grounds of ethnic identity, rather than being on professional merit or the lack thereof (Gordon 314). For this preceding reason, in the Singleton v. Jackson (Mississippi) Municipal Separate School District (1968) case, for example, the Fifth Circuit appellate court of the United States decreed that “any reduction in professional staff must be based on objective and reasonable nondiscriminatory standards, and that no staff vacancies could be filled through recruitment of any person of a race, color, or national origin different from that of the individual dismissed or demoted” (Gordon 314). In effect, the Court was forced by invidious political circumstances and practices to decree and enforce a quota system. And while such measure definitely meliorated rank racism, it is quite doubtful whether such procedural inelasticity facilitated equity, or fairness, particularly where staffing balance tipped considerably in favor of one group or another.

For his part, Kluger eloquently casts the bizarre humanistic history of the United States vis-à-vis the African-American in the following Jeffersonian terms:

Of the ideals that animated the American nation at its beginning, none was more radiant or honored than the inherent equality of mankind. There was dignity in all human flesh, Americans proclaimed, and all must have its chance to strive and excel. All men were protected alike from the threat of rapacious neighbors and from the prying or coercive state. If it is a sin to aspire to conduct of a higher order than one may at the moment be capable of, then Americans surely sinned in professing that all men [and women, for that matter] are created equal – and then acting otherwise. Nor did time close the gap between that profession and the widespread practice of racism in the land. The nation prospered mightily nonetheless, and few were willing to raise their voices to suggest what might once have been forgiven as the excesses of a buoyant national youth had widened into systematic and undiminishing cruelty. (Harris 141)

And, of course, the paradox is drastically heightened by the fact that up until the mid-1860s, the education of enslaved Africans was prohibited; and as Harris grimly observes further, even “free persons of color” were prohibited from enrolling their children in any type of school, private or public (145-6). In effect, the systematic inferiorization of the African-American has a historiography that is coeval with the foundation of the modern American polity. Consequently, the Brown decision, not surprisingly, caused an apocalyptic reaction among the ranks of many a Southern White community. And neither were most Northern Whites overly enthusiastic either. And so it is a little wonder that a half-century after the United States Supreme Court ordered the integration of African-Americans into the country’s public educational system, many powerful Whites, including Republican president George Bush II, continue to vehemently inveigh against the fundamentally corrective policy of Affirmative Action, in effect, even going to the extent of tagging it as invidiously anti-White. And so it comes as only bizarrely logical that an academic guerrilla war should rage through the august hallways of our proverbial ivory towers seeking to tactically reverse the 1954 Browndecision under the specious guise of unalloyed merit.

In the process, economically underprivileged students, disproportionately represented among ethnic minority groups, are being winnowed from the salutary reception of qualitative education by being massively shunted into Special Education programs, even as the children of the relatively more powerful and privileged are conveniently packed into “Gifted” educational programs (Ford and Webb 358). Nationally, like the proverbial prison-industrial complex, minorities represent a phenomenal 50-percent of all students enrolled in Special Education programs. Ford and Webb intimate that this already dismal state of affairs may be even bleaker in the more conservative school districts of the nation (358). These critics further cite a Carnegie Corporation and College Board report which highlighted the grim fact that: “African American males in particular were three times more liable than White males to be [enrolled] in classes for the mentally retarded, yet only one-half as likely to be [enrolled] in gifted programs (359). The veteran academic critics further observe that while the United States Department of Education (USDE) liberally defines the criteria for determining the characteristics of a gifted student, no mandate, such as Brown, exists to rigidly enforce it, and so, here again, as during the pre-Brown era, the effective administration of the program is often left in the hands of educators who believe in the status quo ante (359-60).

A further complication, observe Ford and Webb, is the rigidly mechanical and Eurocentric criteria used to determine giftedness, largely IQ test scores (360). These critics claim, not without reason, that not only is this paper-and-pencil evaluative methodology quite deficient, but that it also reflects the rather restrictive traditional duality of “logical-mathematical and linguistic” approach. And in applying the latter process, such equally valid “intelligencies” as “interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily kinesthetic, spatial and musical intelligencies” are practically ignored (360).

For Orlando Taylor, it quite appears that in their radical search for academic and professional justice within the proverbial American mainstream, in the heady wake of the Brown decision, the Black revolutionaries did not adequately take the hermetically Eurocentric structure and content of the public educational curriculum into consideration. Thus by 1970, a full sixteen years after Brown, African-American faculty and students at Indiana University, Bloomington, would write a memorandum to that flagship institution’s faculty council vehemently demanding the introduction of “a comprehensive Afro-American [Studies] program” (Taylor 101). In the aforementioned memorandum, it is significant to recall, the Black students and faculty also asserted in no uncertain terms that: “Black people are no longer prepared to be educated as black Anglo-Saxons who might ultimately be given token membership in the ranks of the American business-professional elite and assist it in exploiting the poor and uneducated (Taylor 102). Indeed, according to Taylor, perhaps the greatest bottleneck to the effective integration of African-Americans into the mainstream American academy is the at once pathetic and invidious inability of many powerful Whites to envisage Blacks as other than “plantation niggers.” Citing Grier and Cobbs, co-authors of the epochal study titled Black Rage (1968), Taylor mordantly notes that for the average White-American in an academic institutional setting: “There [is] something orderly and proper about blacks laboring in cotton fields and [White-] America is loath to relinquish this [noxious] idea” (Taylor 104).

Newby and Tyack appear to squarely concur with Taylor’s perspective on educational desegregation. Quoting distinguished Black educator Horace Mann Bond, the former note that the mere desegregation of public educational facilities was far less significant than the necessary and commensurate empowerment which the diligent acquisition of good education conferred on the subject:

Of one thing, at least, we can be sure: that is the unsoundness of relying upon the school as a cure-all for our ills. . . . Better schools cannot of themselves save a population which is condemned by economic pressure to remain in a half-starved, poverty-stricken environment. No amount of health education in the classroom can overcome the [pernicious] effect of poor housing and lack of space in congested cities. . . . Schools for Negro children can perform the older function of the school; but even more they can venture beyond the frontier and plan for a new order in those aspects that affect the race. To do this, however, they must function as coordinate elements of a unified system, and not in utter isolation from the world of action and social change. (Newby and Tyack 192)

In sum, whereas in the past segregated and relatively inferior educational facilities, as well as exclusion from the mainstream of economic and political activities rendered African-American education counter-productive, in the post-Civil Rights and Affirmative Action eras, the deft construction of the proverbial “Glass Ceiling” has worked to ensure a virtual stasis in the substantive areas of sociopolitical and economic progress for African-Americans. This is because the judicial enactment of desegregation measures met with vigorous and insidious White-American resentment that continues to make life in America a veritable hell for most African-Americans. And here, it may be plausibly noted that nearly all the most prominent African-American scholars and intellectuals employed by elite mainstream American academic and professional institutions continue to be tactically herded into such marginal disciplinary and administrative areas of endeavor as Ethnic Studies and Community Relations. In essence, White-America has yet to find a mutually comfortable space for the African-American.

The preceding has always constituted the challenge of Brown; and the diametrically mixed responses to Affirmative Action by the dominant White-American community, coupled with the preemptive historical reality of Affirmative Action as a gender-oriented remedy for White women, almost squarely implies that the Brown I (1954) Supreme Court decision was largely a moral and political façade, albeit an auspicious one of sorts. This assessment may not come off as charitable by the American mainstream, nonetheless, it can equally not be gainsaid that the general perception of many an African-American on this score is equally valid and unimpeachable. Indeed, the entire process of educational desegregation, uncoupled by intellectual and psychological liberation of the American (White) mainstream, appears to have worsened the performative chances for a decent livelihood on the part of the African-American. For, needless to say, access to good education is also about competition for survival. And to be certain, it was this grim reality which prompted distinguished Black sociologist, educator and thinker W. E. B. DuBois to caustically observe, inter alia, that: “racist teachers in desegregated classrooms so crucified Afro-American children that separate schools might be better for his people” (Newby and Tyack 193).

Indeed, the very premise upon which African-American public education was predicated was one of racial inferiority in the White, mainstream psyche. As Newby and Tyack grimly observe:

Unlike the early band of abolitionists, the great philanthropists and their agents [of the latter half of the nineteenth century] tended to accept the position to which the South had assigned the ex-slave. Some of the early foundations, like the Peabody Fund, gave assistance only to segregated schools and only on terms the native whites would accept. (“Historical Perspectives” 196)

In the process, the education of African-Americans came to be envisaged almost wholly in utilitarian terms of how African-Americans could be exploited to the maximum benefit of White industrialists. Indeed, Booker T. Washington’s mentor, General S. C. Armstrong, of the Hampton Institute, led the charge in the preceding direction (196). Further, Newby and Tyack observe:

In this whole movement a few Blacks stood to gain as brokers of power, but only if they accepted the white rules of the game. Some, like Washington, either believed that industrial education was indeed the key to racial advance, or at least accepted paternalism as the least of many evils in an era of racist repression.But the great majority of Afro-Americans stood bereft of power in a society that justified its suppression by a social fiction of inferiority. (“Historical Perspectives” 196)

Osborne notes that the 1954 Brown decision, which catalyzed the hitherto protracted struggle for racial integration, was not the first of its kind. There had been, for instance, the 1947 President’s Committee on Civil Rights and the 1948 National Committee on Segregation, both of which eloquently documented the dismal extent of white apartheid and set the logical stage for the proactive Pandora’s Box that was Brown I (Osborne 273). And by 1953, in the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court ordered all public restaurants to open their doors to African-Americans. Interestingly, observes Osborne, the 1953 Supreme Court edict was merely echoing an 1873 law which prohibited institutional exclusion on racial grounds (273). Of course, the latter period coincided with the Reconstruction Era (1866-1877), during which brief period the civic and human rights of a hitherto largely disenfranchised African-American community was accorded statutory recognition. While Osborne does not overtly assert it, it appears that racial desegregation in the District of Columbia was largely dictated by the City’s international status and, in particular, the embarrassing unease of America being envisaged as a veritable backwoods of the proverbial civilized world.

To this effect, the Washington representative of the American Friends Service Committee writes:

Complex social, economic, and political forces have given impetus to change toward integration. Washington is a city with high turnover of population fluidity in residential pattern, and rapid expansion of population and services. Its international functions give it a cosmopolitan character. Its urban nature lends qualities of the secular and rational. Segregation, as a cultural form designed to maintain the traditional and non-rational structure of provincial communities, appear more and more anomalous and meaningless in the worldly setting of the nation’s capital. (Osborne 274)

Actually, provincial segregation finds unmistakable rationality in ethnocentrism, thus its provinciality. Rather, it is the cosmopolis, with its inordinate penchant for imperial and capitalist expansion, that is less rational. Osborne obliquely affirms this observation when she writes:

As the United States grew into a position of world leadership among nations, American racial practices became a threat to its integrity in the eyes of peoples both curious and critical. The challenge of the sceptical around the world acted as a powerful motivation to make the words of democracy ring true. (Osborne 276)

For some African-American educators and critics, educational desegregation created far more complex problems than those which this policy sought to resolve. David Carter, for example, notes that among the unforeseen problems of desegregation wont to be encountered by the second generation of African-Americans to attend racially integrated schools included “inequality in the discipline administered to minority students, disparity in placement of minority students in special schools, the tendency to group minority students in lower ability tracks, and (ironically) the displacement of minority teachers and administrators during desegregation” (175). The critic further observes that desegregation implied the elimination of dual school systems and thus a reduction of academic staffs; for where there had been two principals, now there was only one, and the one who retained his or her job was almost invariably the White principal (180). The Black principal, who might have been the more experienced and competent administrator, was often demoted. And so, in effect, educational integration simply served to entrench the socioeconomic and political status quo ante (180).

But what facilitated this drastic draw-down in the proportional representation of Black teachers, vis-à-vis their White counterparts, was the grim fact that critical staffing decisions of the new unitary system of education was unwisely placed in the hands of yesteryear’s ardent and arch-segregationists (Carter 181-2). It was, in short, almost as if the entire project of school desegregation had been deliberately engineered for failure–an “accident” according to meticulous planning. What has also complicated school desegregation is the fact that systematic and protracted under-funding of African-American public schools for at least five generations meant that, logically, Black students would generally not be able to favorably compete against their White counterparts. White educators who felt frustrated by this morally dispiriting reality devised a tracking system which, in effect, created a counter-productive system of internal segregation (Carter 184-7).

Conclusions

There appears to be a consensus among many African-American educators and scholars that a half-century after the Brown decision, the Black person in America has yet to achieve academic parity with his or her White-American compatriot. In some instances, Blacks have been observed to have even fared worse academically in the post-Brown era than before. And regarding the latter decision, Ware notes that: “When the Supreme Court spoke in Brown, many blacks heard the ringing of a freedom bell. They rejoiced and recalled the words of the African-American spiritual, ‘How I Got Over.’ Many Whites, on the other hand, heard a battle cry and set out not only to sabotage the Court’s decision but to [also] destroy the noble alliance that had forged it” (324).

It may also be significantly recalled that since its inception in 1909, the NAACP, the chief architectural master-mind of Brown, has never been popular among White segregationists, who unreservedly deem the foremost African-American human rights organization in nihilistic terms of a breacher of the sacred and inviolable status quo. During the turbulent course of history, the NAACP has been denied non-profit status and forced to establish a separate Legal Defense Fund, which would then be played off against the latter’s parent establishment (Ware 325-6). The NAACP, for instance, would be required to disclose the names and addresses of its membership and contributors, in order to facilitate systematic harassment by the states’ rights champions of White apartheid. And it was not until 1958, when the United States Supreme Court upheld that “NAACP members’ right to freedom of association outweighed the [individual] states’ need for records disclosing members’ and agents’ names and addresses, and that compulsory production of the records would amount to a denial of due process of law,” that local registrars would let the organization alone (Ware 326). Earlier, Mississippi and Arkansas had criminalized any attempt by any organization to file desegregation suits (Ware 326).

Notes and References

Works Cited

Carter, David G. “Second-Generation School Integration Problems for Blacks.” Journal of Black Studies 13.2 (1982): 175-188.

Ford, Donna Y. and Karen S. Webb. “Desegregation of Gifted Educational Programs: The Impact of Brown on Underachieving Children of Color.” Journal of Negro Education 63.3 (Summer 1994): 358-75.

Gordon, William M. “The Implementation of Desegregation Plans Since Brown.” Journal of Negro Education 63.3 (Summer 1994): 310-22.

Harris, J. John. “Education, Society and the Brown Decision: Historical Principles Versus Legal Mandates.” Journal of Black Studies 13, 2(1982): 141-154.

Newby, Robert G. and David B. Tyack. “Victims Without ‘Crimes’: Some Historical Perspectives on Black Education.” Journal of Negro Education 40.3 (Summer 1971): 192-206.

Osborne, Irene. “Toward Racial Integration in the District of Columbia.” Journal of Negro Education 23.3 (Summer 1954): 273-81.

Taylor, Orlando L. “New Directions for American Education: A Black Perspective.” Journal of Black Studies 1.1 (1970): 101-111.

Ware, Gilbert. “The NAACP-Inc. Fund Alliance: Its Strategy, Power, and Destruction.” Journal of Negro Education (Summer 1994): 323-35.

Citation Format:

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. “Where Do Blacks Stand After Brwon?,” West Africa Review: Issue 8, 2005.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.