Was Integration the Wrong Goal?

Why some mainstream Black intellectuals are giving up on Brown v. Board of Education

- By Justin Driver

On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court's gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare "that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. "I was so happy, I was numb," he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall.

Later, he told reporters, "It is the greatest victory we ever had." For Marshall, the "we" who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they'd toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem's Amsterdam Neus, echoing Marshall, called Brown "the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation." W. E. B. Du Bois stated, "I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954." When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: "Thanks be to God for this." Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery's activists in 1955 by invoking Brown. "If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong, If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong." Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown's anniversary.