Revisiting Brown v. Board of Education’s Legacy in a New Era of Massive Resistance

Exactly 70 years after some of the greatest Black legal minds in the U.S. challenged racial segregation in public schools, the assault on diversity in the classroom and beyond is gaining fresh momentum.

Black students have long been subtly pushed out of schools thanks to disciplinary policies with roots in widespread resistance to desegregation efforts. Making matters worse, many universities and Republican-led legislatures are undermining initiatives created to nourish learning about dissimilar experiences and cultures.

In the early 1950s, Thurgood Marshall, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., represented some of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education. Pauli Murray, a legal theorist and longtime activist, and Charles Hamilton Houston, the first general counsel for the NAACP and Marshall’s mentor, also worked tirelessly to ensure that Black students had a seat at the table of educational excellence.

On May 17, 1954, their efforts paid off. The U.S. Supreme Court struck a major blow to the country’s system of educational apartheid, declaring in a unanimous 9-0 decision that “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

Isolating Black children from their peers “solely because of their race,” Chief Justice Earl Warren made plain, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Additionally, he noted, segregation steals from students the “intangible” value of classroom diversity: allowing young people “to engage in discussions and exchange views” with those of different backgrounds.

Yet, the philosophy of the Supreme Court of 1954 is hard to find today.

“At this moment in 2024, we have a Supreme Court decision — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College — that has unleashed this unrelenting attack on Black intelligence and Black excellence,” Cornell William Brooks, a professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Capital B. “Brown was about the equalization of resources, yes, but it was also about the fact that separate is inherently unequal. It was a statement of Black intellectual and academic worth.”

On Monday, the Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to divert its $2.3 million budget for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to “public safety” after Israel-Hamas war protests rattled the campus. One trustee even claimed that DEI programs are “discriminatory and divisive.”

Earlier this month, a federal judge refused to impose a statewide ban on an Arkansas law that punishes public school educators for teaching about race and other “controversial” topics, though he did say that two educators at Little Rock Central High School won’t be disciplined under the law.

And in April, more than 100 jobs at public universities in Texas were eliminated as a result of a new ban on DEI programs. The cuts follow the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision prohibiting affirmative action in higher education.

To further discuss Brown’s legacy in the context of our present day, Capital B spoke with Brooks, the former president and CEO of the NAACP. He stressed that “we have to appreciate the tectonic shift in the country’s legal and moral landscape” that resulted from the case.

“Brown didn’t only open the door for Black children in the classroom. It opened the door for Black people to move from the back of the bus to the front of the bus. And it opened the door for Black people to seize opportunities in terms of employment,” he said. “I’d argue that it hastened the quest for the franchise. This was in the mid-1950s. You didn’t get the Civil Rights Act until 1964, the Voting Rights Act until 1965, and the Fair Housing Act until 1968.”

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: What parallels do you see between attacks on classroom diversity today and those of the past?

Cornell William Brooks: In a real sense, we’re in the middle of another movement of Massive Resistance. The response to Brown by much of the country wasn’t, “Thank you for reminding America of our democratic ideals and then holding us accountable for our sake and for the sake of our children.” Much of the country responded with massive resistance. And here we are in 2024 with a kind of revisionist, retro massive resistance. Anti-DEI? Massive resistance. Efforts to ban books that reflect Black life? Massive resistance. Efforts to defund, de-legitimize, and stigmatize public education? Massive resistance.

Here’s what I’d challenge. Look at the anti-DEI laws that have been placed on the books, and I encourage you to read the legislative preambles. What you’ll find is nary a study, nary a statistic. No data. Juxtapose that with the Brown brief, which was just packed with social science. So, we had intellectual rigor. I want you to compare that with the anti-DEI crowd calling into question Black people’s intellectual capabilities when they’re passing law after law after law with no social scientific or empirical basis. Vacuous and empty.

This is the moment we’re in. It’s a moment of massive resistance. It’s not people spitting on our children. It’s not people carrying racist picket signs. It’s political leaders passing legislation that’s intellectually ridiculous.

The present-day Supreme Court, as a whole, is much less sympathetic to protecting civil rights. How does this dynamic affect Brown’s legacy?

Well, it doesn’t de-legitimize Brown’s legacy. What it does is chip away at Brown’s efficacy, even as impugning Brown’s legacy is impossible. We know this because we have conservatives who sing the praises of the heroes and heroines of Brown, but then they attempt to dismantle Brown’s efficacy.

This is the same Supreme Court that’s essentially declared a pause on integration. If a school system makes a token effort at integrating, that’s sufficient. You aren’t really compelled to help these schools, which are as segregated now as they were back then. There’s really not a whole lot being done by the courts.

The courts are trying to do to Brown what they’ve done to the Voting Rights Act. They want to allow it to stand on the books as a kind of moral victory, but then turn it into a legal nullity. That way, we can pat ourselves on the back, in terms of the kind of nation we envision ourselves as being, while ignoring the cowardice we’re demonstrating by not adhering to Brown’s legacy.

In what ways is Brown’s mission incomplete? And how do we move closer to accomplishing what the Supreme Court set out to do 70 years ago?

Brown envisioned a school system that offered educational excellence to Black children, assuming that they were competent, capable, and deserving of America’s best. And what we have these days is a school system that’s intellectually and morally suspicious of Black children. In other words, the degree to which Black children are left behind isn’t seen as a matter of the inequality of school funding.

People want to underfund schools, segregate neighborhoods, congest neighborhoods with pollutants, turn every school zone into a food desert, and then wonder why these children aren’t performing as well as children at Choate or Andover. They want to question Black children’s abilities and their commitment to educational excellence, but not question the country’s complicity in the educational mediocrity that’s forced on these children.

In terms of the incompleteness, it’s an incompleteness with respect to educational excellence. I think that this has to be fully understood, instead of mere integration. Because that, too, has been perverted and characterized as, “We want integration because integration ensures educational equality.” If you look at the history, educational equality was part of educational excellence. Sitting next to white kids wasn’t in and of itself the goal. The goal was to ensure that our children had educational excellence.

Now what we’re essentially being offered is segregated public schools and the crumbs of educational excellence that are being offered via charter schools, which can be necessary but not sufficient. My point is that educational excellence is kind of baked into the Black narrative, into Black history. But that’s being whitewashed.

Brown was about the educational aspirations of Black people. And in this moment, it’s really important for us to fully appreciate that. Brown was the culmination of the aspiration to get rid of literacy tests, but also secure the right of Black people to read and write. It was the culmination of a group of people who came out of slavery and, in a matter of decades, established newspapers, literary societies, and schools. It’s critical that when we talk about the incompleteness, it’s not just what America has failed to do. It’s also what America has prevented Black people from doing.

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