American history is replete with paradigm-shifting, landscape-altering, game-changing moments. Brown v. Board of Education is one of them. Little of what we knew or understood before May 17, 1954 — 70 years ago next month — resembles what came after. Good thing.
Dismantling America’s system of educational apartheid was long overdue. The stigmatization of Black children as inferior to, or lesser than, white children was more than enough to call into question the moral currency of segregation. The Supreme Court would finally call that question in the Brown case. Separating schoolchildren based on race, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued, “affects the hearts and minds [of Black children] in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” We cannot abandon an entire race, he said. State-authorized and legally sanctioned stigmatization can no longer endure.
The court’s simple and profound declaration that the Constitution “neither knows nor tolerates” racial separation was as manifest as it was magnificent. It has been reverberating ever since.
It is certainly true that desegregation was slow in coming on the heels of the Brown decision. It is equally true that de facto school segregation persists. Still, Brown managed to accomplish something essential to a free society. It gave legitimacy and force to an ideal — an Enlightenment ideal that “all men are created equal.”
America needed that. It needed a reminder that a first principle of the republic — equality — was rotting. There was no equivocation on the part of the unanimous court. In unison, all nine justices drifted to the correct corner of the moral universe. To come from the most respected of governmental branches helped — it had the feel, for progressives at least, of a commandment. The court’s unassailable voice made a difference.