Divided we Fail (8 page)

The strategy was bold: The teachers didn't ask nicely, making a request through labor arbitration hearings—they sued for equal pay in court. It was a risky tactic. The jobs of black teachers were at the mercy of white school boards. But the movement built on both the economic desperation of blacks and a growing restlessness with the American racial order. The Great Migration and the two world wars had introduced new horizons and new possibilities, and increasingly, blacks were willing to demand their fair share. By the 1930s, the black teaching force had become overwhelmingly female, and the wages reflected the low status of both their race and their gender. (After the Great Migration, many black men had moved into better-paying factory jobs.) In 1930, black teachers earned 45 percent of what white teachers earned in the South, a percentage that had actually declined for black teachers from 60 percent at the turn of the century, when more men were in the profession.
⁵

The teacher-pay movement fit into a wider effort by the NAACP to challenge Jim Crow that had begun in the 1930s. A black sociologist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, had founded the organization in 1909. Du Bois was, in the words of journalist Richard Kluger, “a lonely, terribly proud black man.”
⁶
He grew up sheltered in a mostly white New England town, attended Fisk, the elite black university in Nashville, as an undergraduate, and Harvard for a PhD in history, and made his name attacking the accommodationist strategy of Booker T. Washington. With his pointed beard, pale skin, and white gloves, Du Bois cut a sharp physical contrast to his Southern adversary, who had been born into slavery in a plantation kitchen. Reflecting his own experience along with his observations as a sociologist, Du Bois argued that education, not hard labor, was the best strategy for extricating blacks from their lowly position in American society. On Lincoln's birthday in 1909, he helped to launch the NAACP with the help of a group of like-minded white liberals.

Du Bois busied himself writing the NAACP's mouthpiece, the
Crisis
, a sharp-tongued publication dedicated to boosting black pride and pushing the cause of black equality. Within two years, the organization had turned its focus to fighting for blacks in the courts. The NAACP's first Supreme Court victory was won against the City of Louisville, Kentucky,
overturning the housing law banning blacks and whites from sharing the same neighborhoods.
⁷

The organization took on all kinds of cases as the membership and its experience in the courts grew. Its lawyers, led by Charles Houston and his protégé, Thurgood Marshall, fought for black criminal defendants accused in rape and murder cases across the country. But by the 1930s, Houston and his colleagues were shaping a strategy to attack segregation in schools, where the discrepancies between blacks and whites were the starkest—and the most potentially damaging for the future of the black community. They hoped equalizing education would topple the other pillars of racial discrimination in the South.
⁸

They targeted graduate schools and then moved gradually down to public elementary and high schools, reasoning that the legal argument to desegregate graduate schools was easier: If a black student was barred from attending the state law school, there was usually no alternative option, or a very poor one. It was also more likely to be politically and emotionally palatable to white judges. Mixing young adult students was less emotional for whites. Racial prejudice was largely rooted in and justified by deeply held, irrational sexual stereotypes about blacks, and they knew convincing the South to send little white girls to school with blacks would be a difficult battle.
⁹

At first, the NAACP's strategy was not to challenge directly the Supreme Court's 1896 decision,
Plessy v. Ferguson
, which required that schools and other public services be separate but equal. Instead, they would push states to make good on
Plessy's
promise that black schools and students be given the same quality of books, facilities, teachers, and other resources as white schools. Actually maintaining a dual system of equal schools would be expensive, and the lawyers assumed financial pressure would be more likely to persuade school boards to integrate than a moral argument against segregation.

After a victory in the equal pay campaign in Louisville, Lyman Johnson volunteered to be a plaintiff in this new strategy. In March 1948, Lyman, represented by the lawyers of the NAACP, sued the graduate school of the University of Kentucky, the state's flagship school.
¹⁰
The story made the front page of Louisville's afternoon paper, the
Louisville Times
. The
Times
, owned by the same family as the more stately morning broadsheet, the
Courier-Journal
, was relatively liberal on race, as was its sister paper. But the
front-page treatment was rare; the reporter on the story, a rookie education reporter named Anne Braden, had pushed her editors for a top billing and won.
¹¹

Anne, born in 1924, was the daughter of one of Kentucky's oldest families. She was thin and elegant, with deep, sad eyes offset by a fringe of short, jaunty bangs. Her grandmother had been a proud slave owner. But in her work as a journalist, Anne began to question her family's heritage. As she covered criminal justice and education in Alabama, she was shocked at the mistreatment of blacks in Southern courtrooms and schools. When the Louisville paper offered her a job, she headed north, thinking she would soon be settled in a more reasonable, tolerant city.
¹²

Lyman's case horrified and fascinated her. To avoid legal trouble, the state paid for blacks in Kentucky who wanted a graduate education to leave the state and go elsewhere.
¹³
For the story, Anne visited Central to meet with Lyman. After the meeting she became more immersed in the troubles of the black community in Louisville. Later that year, Anne married Carl Braden, a labor reporter, and not long after the two quit their newspaper jobs to become full-time activists. Anne joined the Civil Rights Congress, traveling to Mississippi to get arrested in support of a black defendant who had been accused of raping a white woman.
¹⁴
But it was a seemingly innocuous gesture that thrust the Bradens into the spotlight and made them local symbols of the decade's racial turbulence.

In March of 1954, a young, black World War II veteran, Andrew Wade, approached Anne and Carl Braden to ask a favor. The couple lived in a compact brick bungalow on a quiet residential street in the West End. The neighborhood was still all white and largely hostile to blacks, but Wade knew about the Bradens' work and he was desperate.
¹⁵
He was looking for a house for his wife and baby daughter. After serving his country and saving money from his job as an electrical contractor, he believed he had earned a nice, roomy home the suburbs. The Bradens were sympathetic. Wade explained that he had almost closed on four houses, but each time, once the real estate brokers realized his family was black, they pulled out of the deal.
¹⁶
The Bradens agreed to act as dummy buyers. They would sign for a house, and then pass the mortgage over to the Wades.

The Wades found a house they liked—a one-story ranch made of limestone—in the small, incorporated city of Shively, just south of the Louisville city line along the border of the West End.
¹⁷
The little city had started
as a village of farming estates, but by the 1950s, the city was attracting new sorts of residents. Large tracts of land had been converted into two- and three-bedroom bungalows after the war, and a flood of young families filled the neighborhoods fast. Some came from the city, but many came from the country in search of jobs and the suburban lifestyle that had become the new American dream. This dream did not include blacks, but the Wades ignored the taboo.

So did the Bradens. Anne had thrown herself into fighting the state's school segregation edict, known as the Day Law. It was less than a month before the Supreme Court would hand down its decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
. And so, distracted, the Bradens went through the motions of buying the house—a tour, a visit to the bank, a signing—and then handed it over to the Wades. A few days after the Wades moved in that May, a mob of local whites gathered on the lawn of their next-door neighbor.
¹⁸
After several hours, they left, driving to the Bradens' house, where they found Carl alone with the couple's two children. “You better watch out,” they warned. The Bradens and the Wades ignored the threat. They couldn't predict the waves of anger and violence that the Supreme Court was about to unleash.

Chapter 7

In 1949, Lyman Johnson won the case against the University of Kentucky that Anne Braden had first written about in the
Louisville Times
.
¹
He was admitted to the school but attended only a class or two.
²
He looked down on the university as inferior compared to out-of-state places he had studied. Nationally, the NAACP's schools strategy had been moving along in fits and starts for more than a decade. By 1950, Thurgood Marshall was prepared to take a risky new step: attack
Plessy v. Ferguson
head-on.
³
The lawyers found five segregated school districts across the country and five willing plaintiffs, among them Linda Brown of Topeka, Kansas.
⁴

On December 9, 1952, standing in front of the nine justices, Marshall was cautious in making his case: “The only thing that we ask for is that the state-imposed racial segregation be taken off, and to leave the county school board, the county people, the district people, to work out their own solution on the problem to assign children on any reasonable basis they want to assign them on.”
⁵

The NAACP lawyers hoped for a slim majority in
Brown v. Board
. The judges themselves seemed reluctant to make a decision in the case. They stalled, ordering the lawyers to come back in 1953 to reargue the case.
⁶
Then, in September, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died.
⁷

Dwight D. Eisenhower, newly elected as president, made an unexpected choice for his replacement: the governor of California, Earl Warren. In 1947, Warren had repealed school segregation in his state in response to a
state court decision,
Mendez v. Westminster
, brought by Mexican American plaintiffs.
⁸
Warren, a talented politician, corralled the cantankerous group of justices into a unanimous opinion in
Brown
. In particular, Warren had to contend with an elderly justice with old-fashioned ideas about race, Stanley Reed, another Kentuckian. But in the end, Warren prevailed. On May 17, 1954, he convened the press to read a decision signed by all nine justices.
⁹

The ruling was short and mostly to the point, but Warren had been forced to compromise. There was no time frame for schools to implement desegregation.
¹⁰
The ruling gave no instructions to school districts about how to go about dismantling school segregation. Warren barely addressed the 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling.
¹¹
The
Brown
decision simply concluded that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal' has no place.” In a subtle but important omission, the decision also didn't mention the lone dissent in
Plessy
, written by a judge from eastern Kentucky, Justice John Harlan.

In 1896, Harlan had made two arguments that would later become critical points of tension in the country's struggle over racial equality in schools.
¹²
He wrote that the Constitution could not abide the subordination of one group of people to another, but also that it was intolerant of classifying people by race. One of his phrases came to have as much weight in civil rights law as
Brown
itself: “In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
¹³
These two ideas would later come into sharp conflict: how could the government uproot the effects of systematic subordination of blacks without identifying them as black and carving out special treatment for them?
¹⁴

Although the
Brown
decision didn't mention Harlan's dissent, this idea of color blindness was foundational to the reasoning behind it: The schools must not classify children by race, because doing so created a caste system in which one race would inherently occupy a superior place over the other. But to undo this caste system, it would be necessary to identify those who had been harmed by it, to make sure that the dual system didn't continue. As Warren constructed his opinion, he either could not foresee these complications, or he chose to ignore them.

He also left out any hint of the mechanisms that the Court would approve for taking apart the segregated school system, perhaps in part a
recognition of the cherished American notion of local control of schools. And possibly, Warren understood that in order for
Brown
to be a decisive turning point in American history, it had to be vague on many points.
¹⁵
He got across the main idea, “Separate but educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and left the other details—the how, when, and where—to be hashed out later.

As Warren was getting ready to announce the
Brown
decision on the afternoon of May 15, 1954, a group of men gathered next door to the Wades' house in Shively to burn a cross. That night, a gunshot shattered one of the windows in the house.
¹⁶
The next day,
Brown
was trumpeted across the country as a new, clean slate for America. The reality, of course, was much different. On the streets of Louisville, the decision came down amid a wave of racial hatred. The
Courier-Journal
blamed the Bradens for stirring up trouble. The local Shively paper, the
Shively Newsweek
, launched a campaign arguing that the Bradens were a part of a Communist conspiracy to provoke racial conflict. They were flooded with hate mail and threatening phone calls. Police set up a guard at the Wades' house, which was augmented by friends of both couples.