Speaking Truth to Power on School Desegregation

Is Power Listening?

By Amy Stuart Wells

On Sunday, Dec. 3, two Teachers College graduate students and I traveled from New York City to Washington to camp out in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. We were in line to get the few public tickets for the Monday morning oral arguments in the Jefferson County, Ky., and Seattle voluntary-school-integration cases. As the night wore on, we were joined by cold but guardedly optimistic lawyers and advocates, who, like us, support the school districts’ position that they have a compelling interest in using race as one factor in how they assign students to their schools.

Periodically throughout the chilly night, I looked at the stone steps and pillars of the court building and recalled the picture taken there more than 50 years ago of a young but hopeful Thurgood Marshall. He and his colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund had come to speak truth to power in the school desegregation cases that were decided in the landmark Brown v . Board of Education decision. And, as the world now knows, power listened.

Ruling in Brown to reject the “separate but equal doctrine” previously established in Plessy v . Ferguson , the Supreme Court of 1954 found that the evidence of the negative impact of segregation is “amply supported by modern authority.” This statement was supported by the court’s famous footnote 11, which cited not only the legendary doll studies of Kenneth B. Clark, but also six other studies on the effects of racial segregation, including Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma .