Best ruling ever about to turn 70

Mar. 12—For me, the most important judicial decision in U.S. history is easy to pinpoint.

Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was the great equalizer, a ruling that ever so slowly lessened the chasm between two separate Americas — one white and well-fed, the other Black and starving.

This spring marks the 70th anniversary of Brown. Many people associate the famous Supreme Court case with the Deep South, where segregated schools were as much a part of the landscape as fields of tobacco and cotton.

The practice of herding Black kids into cramped schools without labs, gyms or periodicals for the library was not confined to the Deep South. Influenced by transplants from Texas, legislators in New Mexico codified segregated schools with related measures in 1923 and 1925.

Those laws empowered municipal and county school boards to approve segregation when it is "for the best advantage and interest of the school that separate rooms be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent."

Who defined the term "best advantage?" A delegation of five or 10 white people might have been enough to establish separate and unequal schools.

Soon after the state segregation law was updated in 1925, the Berino district near Las Cruces allocated $7,000 to build a school for Black children.

Other segregated schools sprang up, mostly in New Mexico's farm belt and oil patch. Alamogordo, Artesia, Carlsbad, Roswell, Hobbs, Clovis, Tucumcari and Las Cruces operated schools based on skin color.

Jim Crow laws to separate Black from white were entrenched and expanding. In turn, the NAACP and other organizations continued trying to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme decision that allowed states to mandate segregation.

Five lawsuits challenging Plessy were rolled into one case bound for the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1950s. The complaints were from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Brown v. Topeka Board of Education received top billing on the case. Many observers said it was the court's way of letting Southerners know they weren't being singled out by beltway jurists.

As the lawsuit slogged along, something remarkable happened in New Mexico. Most communities with segregated schools voluntarily ended the practice.

Carlsbad decided to desegregate its schools for the most dominant of all reasons — money. Its board of education grew weary of maintaining white campuses and also operating the rundown Carver School for Negroes, which housed 110 kids in grades 1-12.

Desegregation initially sent seven Black kids from Carver to Carlsbad High School. Two of the newcomers, John Wooten and Joe Kelly, helped Carlsbad High win two state championships in basketball.

A town that had embraced segregation cheered its mixed-race athletic teams.

Wooten became famous as a lineman for the Cleveland Browns. He cleared paths for all-world running back Jim Brown. Kelly, also a back, played professional football in Canada.

Wooten once told me football scouts never would have discovered him if not for Carlsbad's unforced decision to desegregate. The Carver School didn't have enough kids to field a football team.

Carlsbad's story was exceptional only for its star power. Except for Hobbs and Clovis, all towns in New Mexico desegregated their schools before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

Southern schools stalled for years, leaning on the court's vague directive to end segregation with all deliberate speed.

Clovis and Hobbs moved quickly enough. Both desegregated in 1954, soon after the Brown decision.

Protests followed. Andrews High School in Texas voided its contract to play Hobbs in football. Andrews' administrators stuck to the old line that Black kids didn't belong on the same field with whites.

Bill Carter, a Baptist preacher in Hobbs, predicted desegregation would spawn riots. He urged a continuation of racial separation. If the school board persisted with desegregation, Carter wanted then-Gov. Edwin Mechem to call in the National Guard.

School administrators ignored all the noise and gloom.

"Trouble? None has been reported. We are just following the usual procedure in enrolling all the pupils," Hobbs School Superintendent Charles Mills told The Associated Press in 1954.

New Mexico had moved to the right side of history. Life went on without histrionics and wasteful litigation.

The best court ruling ever didn't end bigotry. It reduced ugliness to the point that many people forgot New Mexico ever had segregated schools.

Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.com or 505-986-3080.