The Daily - Friday, March 30, 2018

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

Behind the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education was a girl named Linda Brown, whose story led to states being ordered to desegregate schools, mostly against their will. Ms. Brown died on Sunday. Who was she, and what has changed in the 64 years since the case was decided? Guest: Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter covering race and civil rights for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, behind the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education was a little girl named Linda Brown, whose story led to states being ordered to desegregate, mostly against their will. Brown died this week.

Who was she? And what's changed in the 64 years since? It's Friday, March 30th. I probably look a little different to you tonight. I know probably you've seen me sometimes in your history books with that little coat on. But I look a little different now. I have some small grandchildren and they look at that picture and they say, Grandma, that can't be you. That's a little girl. But I want you to sit back and relax and think back with me some 50 years.

Nicole, tell me about Linda Brown as a kid. How would a typical school day start for her? So Linda Brown is an elementary school student in Topeka, Kansas, and her day starts like any other kid. She gets up, gets dressed, and has breakfast, and then she would have to leave her integrated neighborhood. I can still remember taking that bitter walk and the terrible cold that would cause my tears to freeze up on my face. Pass the white school five blocks away and go another 15 blocks to get to the all-black elementary school.

I could only make half of it some days because the cold would get too bitter for a small child to bear. Because Black and white children in elementary school there were not permitted to attend school together. Nicole Hannah-Jones covers race and civil rights for the Times magazine. Segregation is legal under the Constitution as long as separate is made equal. So as long as Black facilities and white facilities are equal, then that is actually legal. My father pondered, why? Why should we have to tell our children

that they cannot go to their school in their neighborhood because their skin is Black? So Linda Brown's father is Oliver Brown, and Oliver Brown is a war veteran. He is a welder and he is a pastor in Topeka. And he's also very active in the local NAACP. So he is very aware that the NAACP had been bringing legal challenges to segregation in colleges and in professional schools, and that they were now seeking to make a full frontal attack in K-12 education.

So they put a call out across the country for plaintiffs who are willing to challenge separate but equal in K-12. And that's how Oliver Brown decides that he is going to challenge that in Topeka. He, along with 12 other parents, met with the local NAACP and their lawyer to make plans for each family to try and enroll their child in the white school nearest their home during September 1950. And so Oliver Brown takes Linda Brown at the beginning of the school year and takes her to her neighborhood school, which is the white school, and attempts to enroll her in that school. And he is rejected. And then that leads to the filing of the lawsuit. And Brown becomes one of five cases that will ultimately make up Brown v. Board of Education. We lived in the calm of the hurricane's eye,

gazing out at the storm around us and wondering how it would all end. And is the argument here that the school she went to is worse than the white school? When the NAACP decides that it is going to challenge segregation in K-12, it is intentionally not making an argument of resources. It is making a much larger argument. And that is that it is the segregation in and of itself. It is the separation in and of itself that is unconstitutional. So they are actually very intentionally arguing

that it doesn't matter if the facilities are equal or not. It is the separation that stigmatizes black children. It is the separation that degrades black children and denies them their full citizenship. And so therefore, you cannot allow that under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. So the argument here is that regardless of resources, regardless of whether the school that Linda Brown went to was as good as the white school or nowhere near as good as the white school. went to was as good as the white school or nowhere near as good as the white school. The argument is that there is something fundamentally damaging about separating black and white children regardless. Absolutely. So I've recently just finished reading all of the oral arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. And the way that they decide to prove that is

through introducing a lot of sociology before the court. And probably the most well-known of the sociology that was introduced were these doll tests that were conducted by a psychologist's couple named Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Hello, Vernon. Show me a white doll. This one. Now show me a colored doll. That one. So the doll test goes on to become a very famous study that is depicted in pop culture.

And what the doll test entailed was getting groups of children, some black and some white, and then holding up before them a black doll and a white doll and asking them... Show me the doll that you like best. ...about distinct characteristics. Show me the doll that has a nice color. That one. Show me the doll that looks ugly. Which doll is the good doll? Which doll is the bad doll? Which doll is the smart doll? Which doll is the bad doll? Which doll is the smart doll?

Which doll is the stupid doll? And what they found was that both white and black children gave all of the bad characteristics to black dolls and all of the good characteristics to white dolls. And even more kind of devastating was that... Which doll is most like you? When they would ask black children, which doll are you? Some Black children would say

that they were the Black doll, which means that they clearly felt that they embodied all of these negative things. And some would refuse to say that they were the Black doll because they did not want to be associated

with what they considered to be negative and inferior. What seems so heartbreaking about that study is that whether a Black child identifies with the Black doll or refuses to identify with a Black doll, it's the embodiment of kind of like wounded or low self-esteem. The court was very, very moved by that study

and actually in the ruling mentions that study in a footnote. And that leads the court to decide in probably the most famous phrase from that ruling, which is that separate is inherently unequal. In other words, it cannot be made equal in and of itself. It is unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a unanimous decision, the nine Supreme Court justices ruled racial segregation in publicly supported schools to be unconstitutional, declaring that it denied equal opportunity. It is an astounding ruling. Even though the NAACP had been working towards this, no one really expected that the court would unanimously overturn 60 years of legal precedent. And overnight, the Supreme Court changes the entire way that the country must think of and interact with Black children. And so I think we sometimes forget how radical and revolutionary that ruling was, and that Chief Justice Earl Warren very, very intentionally worked and worked and worked until

he could get a nine to zero ruling and opinion from the court, because he understood that any sense that the court was divided on this issue would delegitimize such a revolutionary opinion. on this issue would delegitimize such a revolutionary opinion. All the people of the South are in favor of segregation and Supreme Court or no Supreme Court. We are going to maintain segregated schools down in Dixon. Brown v. Board of Education actually changes the entire country. And the reaction of the South to Brown v. Board makes it clear that white Southerners understand that this will change the entire country

and the way of life that had been the American way of life for as long as we've been a country. So you have governors, I mean, governor in Alabama, the governor in Arkansas, the governor in Mississippi, who are threatening to shut down public schools altogether. Wow. So they are actually willing to deny public school education to white children in order to keep black children from attending white schools. It's early morning here in Little Rock, and a new school day is dawning. The white population are determined to prevent colored students from going to the school their own children attend. The units of the National Guard have been and are now being mobilized with the mission to maintain or restore the peace and good order of this community.

We just got a report here on this end that the students are here. That's right, That's right. You can see from here some of the action occurring down there. There's this photo of this white mob of mothers, white women, who every day would come outside the elementary school that Ruby Bridges, who at the age of six, had to have U.S. Marshals bring her into a white elementary school. And they craft a casket and they put a brown baby doll in that casket and they parade that casket in front of Ruby Bridges every day as she's trying to enter into the school to tell her that if they got their hands on her, this is what they would do to her. So this is what the resistance...

Yes, they would rather kill this child than allow her to enter into the schools. ...of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth. I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. I'm so struck by the fact that governors were taking actions that openly attempt to hurt Black students. It doesn't even seem remotely subtle. Oh, no. I mean, schools are the most intimate space.

They are more intimate even than where you live. You can move next to me, but I don't have to invite you into my house. I don't have to share dinners with you. I don't have to sit you into my house. I don't have to share dinners with you. I don't have to sit in a classroom with you. And my children in my neighborhood are under my watchful eye. But in a classroom, the parent is not there. You have children who are sitting side by side, who are learning together, who are having conversations together, who are eating together. And that is a level not just of intimacy, but also where parents don't have control.

You know, there's this great story where Eisenhower meets with Earl Warren when the court is deliberating in Brown v. Board. The oral arguments have already occurred. And what he says is, you know, white Southerners aren't bad. They just don't want their little girl sitting in classrooms with these big black bucks. That is the fear. The fear is a fear of miscegenation. It is a fear that Black children will taint white children, that they will seduce young white girls. And this is the fear that drives the South. And so they are actually willing to shut down at times entire public school systems

to avoid this from happening. It's parents acknowledging a certain loss of control. And when that gets commingled with racism, it's a complete loss of any authority over the situation. someone on a personal level, then maybe you gain an attraction with them. And then suddenly all of the racial fears of the South, which have always been wrapped up in fears of sexuality of Black people, they all come down to this intimacy in the classroom that white parents absolutely were going to do whatever they could to avoid. So with all of that in mind, what does it actually take to get schools in the South to desegregate? Well, it wasn't because white people in the South repented. It was because they were forced to comply with the law. The Supreme Court finally gets fed up with the slow pace and the resistance. And by the late 1960s, it makes a series of rulings that say you actually have to integrate schools. The courts

blanketed the South with these desegregation orders. You had judges that because of the Supreme Court were having to take it seriously. And you had a federal government that at least for a brief time was strongly enforcing the law. That is the only reason why the South goes from complete apartheid to the most integrated part of the country, which it actually still remains. The North would play out very differently. Right. So it sounds like what you're saying is that white people integrate only when they are forced to. So what's happening in that regard in the North? Yeah, bingo.

The only time we've ever had real desegregation in this country is when it has been forced. It has never happened voluntarily. So the North responds to Brown v. Board largely by believing it does not apply outside of the South. So at the beginning, Northerners are very happy about Brown because, you know, they think the South is backwards and they can't believe the South has all these laws that force segregation. And they think that Brown is a good ruling. But then NAACP understands that Black children in the North are just as segregated in the South, even though the North doesn't require it by law. And the way that segregation in the North was accomplished was through housing. that segregation in the North was accomplished was through housing. As millions of Black people begin to migrate out of the South into the industrial North, those communities and those

cities react by pinning Black people into ghettos. And so you don't have to have laws that require segregated schools. If all the Black people live in segregated neighborhoods, then their neighborhood schools are all segregated. And white people's all white neighborhoods have all white schools. So in the North, it's housing that is enforcing segregation and perhaps it's decisions that are made about housing after Brown versus Board education. Absolutely. So what you see and what the NAACP is able to show in the North is that federal, state, and local officials conspired to create segregated housing. They would gerrymander attendance zones. So they would do something very similar to what Linda Brown faced in Topeka, where the attendance zone for Black kids would go past the closest white school to all Black schools. And white children would be zoned to all white schools.

Or they would build schools only deeply into segregated black neighborhoods or segregated white neighborhoods, that they would close down a school if it was getting ready to integrate and open a school in a segregated neighborhood to avoid integration. So a lot of the tactics that you saw in the South, the North was doing, but it just wasn't explicit about it. It didn't say we're doing this to maintain segregation, even though that's what it was doing. So the NAACP begins to challenge segregation in the North, and then all of a sudden the North no longer is very happy about Brown v. Board of Education. So in the beginning, few white people in the North think that they have this problem. They think that segregation is really a Southern problem. But once the NAACP turns its attention to the North, the white people in the North start

to respond, it sounds like, in almost the exact same way as those in the South. Absolutely. And actually, Southern politicians very gleefully pointed this out, that all of the white Northerners were looking very hypocritical because they were fine with Brown until Brown came to their backyards. And then they realized that the entire country was the South. So it sounds like the fight for integration and this recurring resistance from white America stretches on for decades. When would you say, Nicole, that desegregation hit its peak? So if you're looking at when do we have the most Black kids in school with white kids, we peak in 1988. The peak of desegregation is 1988. After 1988, start to see more and more

Black children attending segregated schools. This is largely because there's never been real desegregation in the North. And many of the court orders that drove desegregation in the South have been closed out. And as soon as those orders are closed, school officials can do virtually anything they want to resegregate schools, as long as they don't explicitly say that they're doing it to be discriminatory. And so we've seen a wave of resegregation across the South and just continuing segregation in the North. And where we are right now is Black children are attending schools that are about as segregated as they were in 1972. need to. The reason we're talking about school segregation is because Linda Brown just passed away earlier this week. And it seems like this reality that she and her father fought for

in Brown versus Board of Education, from everything you're saying, it never actually came to be. In the days since Linda Brown died, there's been a lot written about her. She's been on the news again. We have brought up again this woman who most of us haven't talked about in decades. And we report on her as if her life stopped once the Supreme Court ruled in Brown. You know, but Linda Brown grew up. She had her own children. And when she had her own children, she was still living in Topeka and she was still battling school segregation. It was no longer

school segregation required by law, but it looked just like the school segregation in 1953. And she actually reopens Brown, and she argues that Topeka is not complying. Black kids are still attending segregated schools, and she wins. When you say that she reopened Brown, do you mean she literally sued again as her father sued on her behalf? She did for her children. Yes. Her father was a plaintiff for her, and she became the plaintiff for her own children. You know, Topeka at that point hadn't required segregation at schools for 25 years. Despite that, she was able to prove that the segregation there was still unconstitutional. That's what we need to talk about, because that's the type of segregation that Black children continue to face, and one I think that we have largely accepted.

To the degree you know, how did Linda feel about everything that we're talking about here toward the end of her life? One, I should preface this by saying there's not a lot written about her. There's not a lot on the record. I think she was a very reluctant heroine. And at some time she felt very burdened by this legacy. fought for desegregation, came to have somewhat of a sense of ambivalence about it. Because there is something demeaning about constantly trying to chase white people in order to get equality when they clearly don't want to be around your kids. And I think that clearly there's an understanding that segregation is wrong and that it's harmful. an understanding that segregation is wrong and that it's harmful. But at what point do you stop trying to force white Americans to do what they clearly don't want to do? At what point do you

just accept that this is not to be and that you simply should try to fight to get Black kids everything that you can within their own schools? And I think that's a conversation that Black communities and civil rights advocates have been having for a while now. I think just the understanding that this battle is never going to be won and that you're always going to have to keep fighting it. And at one point, is it no longer worth the fight? Nicole, listening to you talk about how Linda Brown felt about all this, it brings to mind this Dahl study that was so influential in the Brown versus Board ruling. I wonder if what has changed in this country in the decades since is that Black children might do better on this test. They might not reject the Black doll. But that the problem and the reason segregation has been so intractable is because it's really the white

children we should be focused on changing, how they're doing on the doll test. And it sounds like not very well. It's definitely the white adults. Children learn this, and we know that. It's the parents who have the problem. And it's white parents specifically who are raised in a country that tells them that the more Black kids in a school, the more dangerous that school will be and the less quality that school will be, and who have 400 years of racial fears involved in their decision making. To those who say desegregation didn't work and that we were probably better off in segregated schools, how do you respond? Desegregation doesn't work because we haven't tried it. We haven't really reorganized our schools.

Kenneth Clark, who performed the doll test that we've been talking about three decades later, reached very similar conclusions to you, Michael. What relevance do you see to the doll study today? Well, what I see now is that we have to help white children, as well as black children, to develop a positive, healthy sense of their own being, the self-respect. Racism, as I see it, is indicative of lack of self-respect above all the groups.

You don't hate other human beings if you have a positive sense of your own being. That's where the problem lies. And I'm not actually sure how we address that. Except what the research shows is that white children who go to integrated schools have less racial animus, are more likely to have cross-racial relationships, to live in integrated neighborhoods themselves, and to send their children to integrated schools. I found, by the way, that in our studies, we did have some children who had parents

or other adults who helped them in this, and they did not reject the brown doll. It can be done. You can teach children to respect themselves as a basis for respecting their fellow human beings. because that intimacy that white Southerners at the time of Brown feared breeds friendship and understanding, and maybe that is what they feared most of all. Nicole, thank you very much for taking the time. Always a pleasure. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Russia said it would expel 60 U.S. diplomats from Russia in retaliation for the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats by the U.S. I want to remind you that there is no justification for the Russian response. Our actions were motivated purely by the attack on the United Kingdom, the attack on a British citizen and his daughter. The U.S. had announced its expulsions in response to Russia's alleged poisoning of a former spy living in Britain, Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The fallout from that incident has driven tensions between Russia and the West to their worst point in decades.

Remember, this is the first time that a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, has been used outside of war on allied soil. And the Times reports that the Trump administration is preparing to roll back strict fuel economy standards put in place by President Obama to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The plan is a major victory for the auto industry, which has lobbied for the changes, but could set up a fierce battle with California, which has vowed to stick with the stricter rules, even if the Trump administration loosens the federal standards. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills,

Ike Sreeskanarajah, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, and Michael Simon-Johnson, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, and David Krakals. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you Monday.