Observers around the world viewed the Peekskill riots as a portent. As the Cold War deepened, the United States was lurching to the right, and the most regressive social elements felt emboldened. Seeing Peekskill as a call to arms, jingoists nationwide soon adopted a chilling new slogan: “Wake up, America! Peekskill did!”
A future generation, in retrospect, might have recognized the symptoms of creeping fascism that marked the Peekskill affair: hatred wrapped in the banner of patriotism; collusion of business interests, nativists, and racists; incitement by high officials and the media; and exaltation of violence as a redemptive force. African Americans remembered Peekskill as the acceleration of the powerful currents of tyranny that they would have to confront even more assiduously in years to come.
1949–1954
THE ROAD TO BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION
Sherrilyn Ifill
In 1948 U.S. officials vigorously prosecuted German war criminals in Nuremberg for enforcing anti-Semitic policies, practices, and laws that advanced a theory of ethnic and religious inferiority of Jews. At the same time, state officials across the American South were enforcing segregationist policies, practices, and laws that advanced a theory of white supremacy and the racial inferiority of African Americans, undisturbed by the federal government.
In the small town of Hearne, Texas, starting in the fall of 1947, the contrast between the U.S. fight against Nazism abroad and its embrace of a rigid racial caste system at home was dramatized in a battle over segregated schools. The standoff between African American parents in Hearne and the local white school superintendent drew the attention of Thurgood Marshall. Just eight years earlier the brilliant and determined young African American lawyer from Baltimore had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). Marshall became the LDF’s first president and its director-counsel in 1940. Seventy-three years later, I became the LDF’s seventh president and director-counsel.
The story of LDF’s brilliant strategy to successfully challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation has been documented and chronicled in multiple books and articles. The strategy culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, a monumental 1954 landmark legal decision that literally changed the course of twentieth-century America. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, decided that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and deprive Black children of the constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. The decision cracked the load-bearing wall of legal segregation. Within ten years, the principles vindicated in Brown were successfully deployed to challenge segregation laws in the United States.
The rather unknown story that unfolded in Hearne, Texas, captures the historical significance of Brown. Black parents were powerfully affected by the contrast between the U.S. stance against Nazis on the global stage and the embrace of Jim Crow at home. Their postwar ambitions for their children ran headlong into the determination of Southern whites to reinforce segregation. In communities around the South, Black parents sought and received the assistance of local NAACP lawyers to challenge the absence of school facilities for their children, or substandard educational facilities and investment in Black schools.
In Hearne the challenge was initiated by C. G. Jennings, the stepfather of thirteen-year-old twins, Doris Raye and Doris Faye Jennings. In August 1947, he tried to register his daughters at the white high school. His request was refused, and he engaged local counsel.
A few weeks later, in September 1947, African American parents initiated a mass boycott. Maceo Smith, who led the NAACP in Dallas, contacted Marshall about the situation in Hearne.
A year earlier, the Blackshear School, the high school designated for Black students, had burned down. No one expected the Black students to now attend the nearby white school due to a Texas law segregating students. The school superintendent announced that $300,000 would be devoted to the construction of a new school for Black students, and a $70,000 bond issue was placed on the ballot. Although Black children outnumbered white students in Hearne, the physical plant of the existing high school for white students was estimated to have a value of $3.5 million. The building that would be haphazardly renovated into the “new” Black high school was, in fact, the dilapidated barracks that had just recently housed German soldiers during the war.
When Black parents learned about the city’s plans, they felt compelled to take matters into their own hands. According to reports in the local African American newspaper, “these buildings were sawed in half, dragged to the school location, and joined together with no apparent regard for physical beauty or concealing their prison camp appearance.” The complaint later filed by parents in Jennings v. Hearne Independent School District further described the school as “a fire hazard,” “overcrowded and…unfurnished with modern equipment,” and with “inadequate lighting.” All in all, the Black parents deemed the building “unsafe for occupancy,” and the indignity of educating their children in a prisoner of war barracks was an insult too ugly to be borne.
White officials and local newspapers disparaged the parents’ school boycott and the Jennings suit as an attempt by the NAACP to “stir up trouble.” On September 28, Thurgood Marshall—who recognized the importance of challenging media distortions to his litigation efforts—fired back at the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News with a lengthy letter.
As African American parents in Hearne kept their children home from school, one hundred miles away in Houston, Black schoolteacher Henry Eman Doyle was the sole law student registered at Texas State University for Negroes, a hastily organized three-room “school” created by the State of Texas after Marshall won a case brought on behalf of Heman Sweatt, a Black student who had been barred from registering at the University of Texas Law School. The three-room school, located in the basement of the state capitol, was the state’s attempt to comply with the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine that required states to provide a public law school for Black students if they excluded Black students from flagship public law schools.
Marshall took his challenge to federal court, and in 1950 the Supreme Court would find that Texas’s crude attempts were in vain, and that at least in the area of law education, separate could not be equal. Sweatt is widely regarded as the final case that set the successful stage for the frontal attack on segregation that became Brown v. Board of Education.
Meanwhile, some federal judges found the courage to defy Southern mores and uphold the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. In South Carolina, federal court judge Julius Waties Waring, the scion of a respected Charleston family with deep Confederate roots, issued a series of decisions in cases tried by Marshall that suggested that federal judges might play a role in protecting civil rights. Waring’s searing, powerful dissent in Briggs v. Elliot, the South Carolina Brown case, became the template for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Here Judge Waring first articulated the concept that “segregation is per se inequality”—a full-on rebuke of Plessy v. Ferguson that Chief Justice Warren later paraphrased in Brown.