68

think of -- economically, culturally, politically and legally -- that you are inferior and second class, no matter what your parents may tell you. The message that envelops you from people in power makes it very difficult for you not to feel inferior, not to be ashamed of your thick lips and your broad nose and your brown face and your kinky hair.

In that integrated school I learned that whites weren't super people. I learned that they weren't all smarter than I was. A lot of them, in fact, were not nearly as smart as I was, and relatively few of them were smarter. Some were better basketball players, some were worse. Some of them were really lousy people; some were really lovely people who are still friends of mine today. I could not have learned those things in segregation and I could not have been as effective a citizen in this country had it not been for those experiences with my white classmates in Grand Rapids.

Now as for Brown: While I obviously can't speak for every black person of my generatio nand some would disagree, for me, May 17, 1954 was a second emancipation day. That's because Plessy v. Ferguson, ¹ which in effect said that the Declaration of Independence, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the Gettysburg Address -- all those good documents -- apply to other people but not to you, was a stake in our hearts. Plessy in effect said, "You are so inferior that the Supreme Court had to carve out an exception from those documents for you, keep you separate, and that separation -- which is invariably unequal -- represents your own inequality." However often you told yourself that was a life, it was very difficult to ignore the fact that the Supreme Court had found no reason to change its mind from the time Plessy was handed down in 1896.

It is of course perfectly true that courts can't make a difference if the executive branch doesn't do its enforcement job, and after Brown, President Eisenhower didn't do his job. He had lived in the South as a kid and had come up in a segregated institution, the United States Army, and he just didn't believe in integration. That was particularly sad because he was the most popular man in the country. Had he just given his approval in ringing words, it would have made a great different.

But the interesting thing is what the resistance to Brown accomplished. If it did nothing else, the resistance raised consciousness. Maybe white people weren't thinking about Brown, maybe civil rights didn't get much coverage in the New York Times, but black people were thinking and talking about the resistance, and we were getting madder and madder and madder. I do believe that the Brown decision had something to do with emboldening the black people in Montgomery. After all, the people who planned the bus boycott were the NAACP, and they were people who were in step with Brown. And no matter where we were, we identified totally with

Brown v. Board: Its Impact on Education, and What it Left Undone 15