Show A decision handed down May 17 1954 set in motion the modern civil rights movement Now 50 years later a preeminent social historian reflects on where we've been and how far we have to go ncan FIRST item listed on the docket for the US if l isi ih I 5 Supreme Court’? Oc- tober 1953 term it Ostensibly was about the right of a black girl to attend a newer ' school only seven blocks The Brown case was filed in in 1951 then made its way to the Supreme Court (Actually the Supreme Court case was a combi- - j Kansas all-whi- te from her home instead of an school more than a older all-bla- mile away But Brown v Board ofEd--' ucation as the 'case came to be known was always about much more than that At its core was ' whether state governments could claim the right to sustain “separate but equal” schools and other public facilities sejgriegating black Americans into a world of far less opportunity and denying themfull participation in American life Nearly 100 years after the end of the Civil War Brown loomed as nothing less than a great legal test of whether we were going to continue as a house divided against ourselves—as two Americas one black aiid one white standing ' side by side unequally and in perpetuity with law in most of the South completely and unalterably on the side of the whites Or were- HOW : - finally going to begin the long difficult journey toward becoming one country? It also was a great moral test At stake was the right of the states to tell millions of Americans that they were inferior to others by the nature oftheir birth and the color of their skin that they were not worthy of the educational and economic opportunities that America had to offer and citizens must remain second-clas- s COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY CASS GtLBERTBETTMANNCORBIS 1 I u I V We as a nation have made remarkable progress in Myaars Yet the fight for true' equaSty is far from over New generations continue the struggle WAS THE We III ' it b6Q8IL The Brown in the case was Oliver L Brown a resident of Topeka Kan In 1950 Brown tried to register his daughter Linda at a new school daser to their home Her application was rejected At the time the National Association for the' ' Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was recruiting black parents iti Topeka for a class-th- e action lawsuit against the local school board For theNAACP—then the organizer of a num-- : ber of parallel cases around the country-Oliv- er L Brown was the perfect lead appellant for the lawsuit He was a boxcar welder in the Santa Fe Railroad yards a'part-rim- e minister and had a solid family with three children What’s more Linda Brown was a good student - nation of rive cases with more than 200 plaintiffs from four states and the District of Columbia) More than three years later on May 17 1954 the Court hainded down its ruling: School segregation was by its very nature unequaL It imposed a feeling of inferiority on black Americans and thus represented a violation of their rights There was no such thing as “separate but equal” Most remarkable in a case that involved such i j j j i j : an explosive issue the Court ruled mously 0 For that much credit must go to Chief Justice Earl Warren a former govemorof Unani-- : 9-- ' California who used his very real political skills to unify a badly divided court A different country Looking biack the America of 1954 was so different from that of-today that it is sometimes hard for me to believe it existed in my lifetime In all too many parts of the South blacks could not register to vote could not serve on juries and thus were deprived of the 'most basic justice Black children went to neglected poverty-strickeelementary and high schools—whose schedules wete often arranged so that they would not interfere with cotton picking— and could not ' n PAGE 4 APRIL 18t 2004 PARADE ' |