Abstract
Black parents and civil rights lawyers in Virginia, Kansas, Washington, DC, South Carolina, and Delaware had challenged the legality of segregated public school systems during the early 1950s. By late 1952, all these cases had reached the Supreme Court. After a year and a half of hearings, the high court finally handed down a unanimous decision in what was popularly known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Court ruled that ‘we cannot turn the clock back… to 1896 when Plessy vs. Ferguson [the decision which validated the separate-but-equal principle] was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life’. Chief Justice Earl Warren and other justices were persuaded by the writings of black sociologists that racial segregation did irreparable damage to black schoolchildren both socially and psychologically. ‘In the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ Warren and his colleagues thus overturned the legal justification for one of the principal pillars of white supremacy.1
… a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing.… It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787
Racial integration, [is] a great myth which the ideologues of the system and the Liberal Establishment expound, but which they cannot deliver into reality.… The melting-pot has never included the Negro.
Harold Cruse
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Notes
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 146–7.
Ibid., p. 144; Carl N. Degler, Affluence and Anxiety, 1945-Present (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1968), p. 96.
Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1975), p. 67. Wallace’s metamorphosis as a racist demagogue merits serious examination, because it helps to explain the relationship between racism and American politics. When Wallace began his political career, he urged friends not to oppress local blacks. ‘You know, we just can’t keep the colored folks down like we been doin’ around here for years and years’, he argued in 1946. ‘We got to quit. We got to start treatin’ ‘em right. They just like everybody else.’ On economic issues, Wallace was a progressive populist, a supporter of extensive state programmes for public schools, medical clinics, and welfare. In 1958, Wallace’s opponent for governor accepted the public support of the Klan. Wallace promptly issued a denunciation of the Klan. After that, he won the support of ‘the substantial Jewish minority in Alabama [and] the NAACP’. Wallace’s defeat in 1958, losing by 65,000 votes, made him into the South’s most notorious bigot. In 1962, 1970 and 1974 Wallace was elected governor of Alabama on a racist programme. In 1982, as huge numbers of blacks were now voters, and a black man, Richard Arrington, served as mayor of Alabama’s largest city, Birmingham, Wallace ran successfully for governor for a fourth term — this time, as an economic liberal and racial moderate. In doing so, he managed to attract about one-third of the black voters in the state’s Democratic primary race.
See Marshall Frady, Wallace (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 126–7, 137, 141.
Richard Wright, ‘A Blueprint for Negro Writing’, New Challenge, 11 (1937), 53–65.
Richard Wright, The Outsider (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), p. 366.
Langston Hughes, ‘Un-American Investigators’, in Dudley Randall (ed.), The Black Poets (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 79–80.
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), pp. 267–84.
LeRoi Jones, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1970), pp. 21, 37–40, 56–57, 69–73.
Herbert Hill, ‘Race and Labor: The AFL-CIO and the Black Worker Twenty-Five Years After the Merger’, Journal of Inter group Relations, 10 (Spring 1982), 14.
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), pp. 314–15.
Gus Tyler, ‘Contemporary Labor’s Attitude Toward the Negro’, in Julius Jacobson (ed.), The Negro and the American Labor Movement (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1968), p. 367.
C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. x, 251.
Malcolm X and James Farmer, ‘Separation or Integration: A Debate’, Dialogue Magazine, 2 (May 1962), 14–18.
Robert F. Williams, ‘USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution’, The Crusader Monthly Newsletter, 5 (May–June) 1964), 1–7.
David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 59.
G. William Danhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 74–86.
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© 1984 Manning Marable
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Marable, M. (1984). The Demand for Reform, 1954–1960. In: Race, Reform and Rebellion. The Contemporary United States. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17657-1_3
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