Brown Oliver - Brown v. Board of Education: a fight for simple justice

Brown v. Board of Education

School at Anthoston, Henderson County, Kentucky.

Copyright 2016 by Susan Goldman Rubin

All Rights Reserved

Book design by Trish Parcell Watts

HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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ISBN 978-0-8234-3708-5 (ebook)w

ISBN 978-0-8234-3709-2 (ebook)r

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rubin, Susan Goldman, author.

Title: Brown v. Board of Education : a fight for simple justice / Susan Goldman Rubin.

Description: New York : Holiday House, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004631 | ISBN 9780823436460 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Brown, Oliver, 1918-1961Trials, litigation, etc.Juvenile literature. | Topeka (Kan.). Board of EducationTrials, litigation, etc.Juvenile literature. | Segregation in educationLaw and legislationUnited StatesJuvenile literature. | African AmericansCivil rightsJuvenile literature.

Classification: LCC KF228.B76 R83 2016 | DDC 344.73/0798dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004631

For Linda Brown Smith Thompson, Cheryl Brown Henderson, John Watson, Jr., Joan Johns Cobb, Barbara Johns Powell, Carrie Stokes, John Arthur Stokes, Harry Briggs, Jr., Spottswood Thomas Bolling, Jr., Shirley Barbara Beulah Stamps, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, and the hundreds of other people who were part of Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown v. Board of Education

A FIGHT FOR SIMPLE JUSTICE

A picture titled How about a decent school for me? from the NAACP collection of photographs of schools and activities to end segregation. 19401960

WHEN John Stokes and his twin sister, Carrie, started school in Farmville, Virginia, in 1940, they were nine years old. They had to wait till they were big enough to walk the four and a half miles along a busy highway to reach the school for black children. There were no buses for black children. The twins protective older brothers, Howard and Leslie, who went to the black high school, next to the elementary school, walked with John and Carrie.

A classroom heated by a potbellied stove in the main building of Robert R. Moton High School, Farmville, Virginia. 1952

The trip wasnt so bad on nice days, recalled John, but when it was hot or rainy, we were miserable. The worst part was when a bus carrying white kids to school passed us. Sometimes they would spit at us and call us names.

Walking home at night was much worse. White drivers sometimes stopped and attacked blacks. One day when John was twelve he attended a Boy Scout meeting led by the principal of his school. Johns parents had told him to come straight home to the farm after the meeting so he could walk while it was still daylight. But John disobeyed and slipped into downtown Farmville to go to the movies with some other kids. In those days in the South, movie theaters were segregated, just like public schools. Farmville had one theater for white people only, and another for both races, but black people entered separately and had to sit in the balcony. After the show, John raced home.

I was so terrified that night, he recalled. During this time, wrote John, it was not unusual for colored boys and girls to be taunted, hurt and even killed, especially if they were caught alone at night. Whenever a car approached, he hid. His mother and father had warned him to take cover in ditches and gullies, behind bushes and trees if he walked after dark.

Finally, he reached his farm. I pray to God and thank him that I made it home safe, he said at the time.

Blacks in the Jim Crow era faced constant danger. Jim Crow was a derogatory term for a black person... that caused us to be treated as second-class citizens, explained John. The term sprang from a songbook published in Ithaca, New York, in 1839. The book ridiculed a minstrel show character named Jim Crow. By the 1890s the expression was used to describe customs and laws that segregated people on the basis of the color of their skin.

Blacks were known then as coloreds or Negroes. In the South, blacks could not use the same public bathrooms or drinking fountains as whites. It was against the law for blacks to talk with whites on the streets. Blacks couldnt try on clothes and shoes in department stores. At first, streetcars, buses and trains were segregated, then restaurants, boarding houses, hotels, telephone booths, baseball parks and playgrounds all followed suit. In South Carolina, courts even had special Bibles for swearing in black people as witnesses. In Topeka, Kansas, the swimming pool at Gage Park was off-limits to blacks except during a gala picnic one day a year. Restaurants downtown had a sign in the window reading NEGROES AND MEXICANS SERVED IN SACKS ONLY. This meant they could order food but could not eat it on the premises. Laws prevented blacks from voting or made it nearly impossible for them to register to vote.

Colored waiting room at the bus station in Durham, North Carolina

There were also unspoken rules. If a white person accused a black person of not knowing his or her place, the punishment could be jail time, a beating, or worse. Worse meant a lynching. Lynchings occurred when mobs of whites took the law into their own hands and tortured and murdered black boys and men suspected of committing what white people considered crimes. This could be making eye contact with a white woman, speaking to her or bumping up against her. These constant threats of violence intimidated blacks, and allowed whites to retain power.

In the South, black children were almost never allowed to attend the same school as white children. However, school segregation existed in the North, too. Local governments in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey enforced segregation in public schools even though these states had laws that prohibited the practice.

As early as 1849 in Boston, Massachusetts, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts attended a grammar school for blacks. The school was run-down and badly neglected. Her father, Benjamin F. Roberts, tried to enroll her in one of the better elementary schools for whites near their home. When the Massachusetts school board turned him down, he took his case to court. His lawyer, renowned politician and abolitionist Charles Sumner, argued that a segregated school could never be the equal of a white school. Children should not be separated because of their skin color. However, the judge ruled that segregation was legal.

A one-teacher Negro school in Veazy, Greene County, Georgia. 1941