This week (May 17) in 1954 America recovered some of her promise when the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous opinion in Brown vs. the Board of Education.  In its wake, the legally sanctioned principle of “separate but equal” treatment of whites and blacks in the nation’s public schools became a thing of the past.

The ruling that had sanctioned “separate but equal” treatment was Plessy vs. Ferguson, which held that segregating the races was not discriminatory provided each race had access to “equal” facilities. Legally, the ruling was specious. Practically, it was a joke, especially in the South where white schools were equipped with modern teaching tools, while “equal” black schools were lucky to have blackboards and chalk.

In Topeka, Kansas, this disparity was not lost on Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was forced to pass by a spiffy whites-only school to attend a run-down black school farther away.  Nor was it lost on Thurgood Marshall, the black head lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  Marshall had been looking for a test case to overturn Plessy, in particular a case in a border state where racism was less ingrained than in the Deep South.  Smartly, Marshall attacked segregation at its edges and then used those victories as stepping-stones toward his ultimate goal of abolishing it nationwide.  Thus when Brown sued the Kansas school system, Marshall took his case, intending to bring it to the Supreme Court.

When it got there, recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren quickly saw Brown as a way to end this “separate but equal” segregation charade, but he felt that on an issue this divisive only a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court would have the legal and moral force to compel acquiescence, if not total acceptance.

That would be no small feat, because his fellow justices included several monumental egotists, one skeptical southerner, a “go-it-alone” maverick and a die-hard segregationist.  It took Warren’s considerable negotiating skills to do it, but he finally got everyone to agree that Linda Brown’s 14^th Amendment rights to equal treatment were being violated.

Warren read the court’s unanimous decision from the bench, with this ending: “We conclude that … the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The decision stunned the nation, and although it was only the beginning of the journey toward a new integrated America, it definitely marked the end of the old era in which segregation based on race, creed or color was sanctioned by law.

In that sense, although it wasn’t a “trial” per se, one could argue that for African-Americans, Brown vs. the Board of Education was the “Trial of the Century.”

This week (May 4) in 1961, in Washington, D.C., in what would later be called “Freedom Summer,” black and white college students boarded buses to begin their historic freedom ride through the most segregated areas of America’s Deep South.  Their intent was to purposely violate state laws that prohibited whites and blacks from sitting in the same bus seats on interstate highways, or using the same bathrooms in the bus depots along the way.

To advance their cause, which they hoped would garner national attention, the students were prepared for beatings, arrests and jailings. They got all of that and more, including the firebombing of their buses.

But of all the indignities visited upon these freedom riders, perhaps the most memorable happened to a young black man named Frederick Leonard after he and his fellow freedom riders were jailed in Jackson, Mississippi — Mississippi being at the time the most racist state in America.

Allowed only one possession, the Bible, the young inmates began praying and singing, which so angered the prison guards that they removed the mattresses in their prison cells, forcing the students to sleep on the cold floor that night.

The next day the mattresses were returned, but when the freedom riders resumed their praying and singing, the guards ordered the mattresses removed again.

“So they came to take our mattresses, and by ‘they’ I mean the black inmates doing hard time,” Leonard recalled. “They did all the guards’ dirty work.”

Except that Leonard decided he was not going to give up his mattress, and so, holding on to it for dear life, Leonard was dragged out of his cell.

“So they had this one inmate named Pee Wee,” Leonard said, “And he was hard, man.  He was this short, black, muscular guy. And the guards pointed to me and said, ‘Get him, Pee Wee!’  So Pee Wee came down on my head … BAM! BAM! He hit me hard.

“But here’s the strange thing … Pee Wee was crying!  I mean tears were rolling down his cheeks!   And I remembered all those times when my parents would say to me, ‘Son, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.’   Well, it hurt Pee Wee a lot more than it hurt me.”

No doubt.  After all, in Leonard, Pee Wee saw a young black with more strength in one scrawny finger than he, Pee Wee, had in his entire muscle-bound body.  Pee Wee also must have seen, and been saddened by, a vision of a future he knew he would never be a part of — a future that would include, as one result of Leonard’s strength and courage, this past February’s annual celebration of Black History Month.       

This week (April 16) in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., sat in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, having been arrested for violating a trumped-up court order that prohibited him and his followers from conducting various protest activities, most of which you can read about in the First Amendment.

At first King was allowed no outside contact, but by the 16th he saw visitors and read publications such as the New York Times and local Birmingham papers — all of which criticized him for his actions.

But what really bothered King was the criticism by the local white clergy, which he read in the local papers.  Calling King’s demonstrations “untimely,” these church leaders also said that King’s actions, by inciting hatred and violence, were not faithful to religious tradition. (Jesus, who incited hatred and violence at the cost of his life, would have been puzzled).

King decided to reply, but lacking paper he began to scribble furiously along the margins of the few newspapers he had.  He kept at it for days, writing until he ran out of space on one newspaper and then drawing arrows and diagrams indicating the continuance of his letter on another. Finally he was able to smuggle this smorgasbord of scribblings to an aide, who typed them out on real paper. This 20-page missive became the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

It is an amazing document, worth reading in its entirety, but I will simply re-print an excerpt that goes to the heart of King’s anger — his reply to the familiar refrain that blacks should “wait” until conditions were more favorable.

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