T oday, we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954 unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that racial segregation in schools is illegal. In theory and by law, the Brown decision should have provided Black and Brown children with access to the same educational opportunities as white children. The reality is, however, starkly different. Seventy years later, de facto segregation still exists.
Now, to survive legal challenges, the new frontier in the effort to segregate schools is wealth discrimination. In a major step back from Brown, in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no requirement that minority and white school districts be funded equally.Just last month, the Louisiana Supreme Court allowed wealthy white residents to carve out a section of Baton Rouge and incorporate it as the new city of St. George for the primary purpose of creating a separate school district from the largely Black East Baton Rouge Parish schools. As we witness in real time what Justice Thurgood Marshall called “a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity,” we must ask ourselves: “What does democracy really mean?” Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative posited that were Brown v. Board of Education decided by today’s Supreme Court, we would have a different outcome. Is Stevenson right?
The art we feature this month explores economic and racial stratification, and the myth of equality in America that undermines the foundations of democracy.
Art
ROMARE BEARDEN
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is regarded as one of America’s master painters and collagists and one of the century’s most inventive printmakers.
The Lamp is a color lithograph of a collage portrait depicting a Black mother and her young child reading from a green book beside a glowing oil lamp. In 1984, the NAACP used the image on a commemorative poster marking the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the landmark case: Brown v. Board of Education. The image was also included in the U.S. Postal Service 2004 stamp collection, “To Form A More Perfect Union,” on the Civil Rights Movement.
Artist with Painting and Model (1981) is a recognizable self-portrait, part of artist Romare Bearden’s autobiographical Profile series.
The Lamp by Romare Bearden (1984). Color lithograph with foil stamping on wove paper.
Music
SAM COOKE
Illustration/animation by creative agency, Cognitive, in collaboration with Soul Music, a BBC Radio 4 program that explores the emotional impact of music and songs.
Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come was inspired by personal events in the singer’s life, notably being excluded from a ‘whites-only’ motel in Louisiana. The song, synonymous with the American Civil Rights Movement, is a brooding but bright civil rights anthem that moves from bigotry and bloodshed to hope and beauty in barely three minutes.
FILM
Charles Hamilton Houston, the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review, dean of Howard University Law School, and chief counsel to the NAACP, was the architect of the strategy to target segregated education that led to Brown and was the key to undermining the entire Jim Crow system.
The Road to Brown (1990) tells the story of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as the culmination of a brilliant legal assault on segregation that launched the Civil Rights Movement. It is also a moving and long overdue tribute to a visionary but little-known African American lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, “the man who killed Jim Crow.” The film’s depiction of the interplay between race, law, and history opens up a discussion of the true significance of the Brown v. Board decision on the path toward racial equity. Directed by William Elwood. Zinn Education Project
Featured Writing
ISABEL WILKERSON
In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of the unseen caste phenomenon in America. Through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, she explores how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, she has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval. Listen to her Ted Talk on The Great Migration and the Power of a Single Decision
“It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.”
