The More Things Change . . .

Supreme Court Decision Upholds Brown: Media Misrepresents Issue

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based school assignment in Louisville and Seattle has set off a huge uproar among the usual racial suspects.

And those suspects include the Mainstream Media.

It has widely been attacked as backing away from Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case which, in 1954, overturned government imposed segregation.

The liberal mythology about Brown, unfortunately, has come to completely obscure what Brown intended to do.

When Brown was being argued before the Court, NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall was asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter:

You mean, if we reverse, it will not entitle every mother to have her child go to a nonsegregated school?

Frankfurter is asking here whether a black parent will have the right to demand that her child attend a predominately white school if the Court upholds the NAACP position.

Marshall makes it clear this is not what he is arguing for.

The school board, I assume, would find some other method [besides race] of distributing the children, a recognizable method, by drawing district lines.

And later:

The only thing that the Court is dealing with . . . [is] whether or not race can be used . . . . What we want from the Court is the striking down of race. . . . Put the dumb colored children in with the dumb white children, and put the smart colored children with the smart white children -- that is no problem. (Lino Graglia, Disaster By Decree, p. 31)

This was what Brown aimed to achieve back in an era when liberals were against racial discrimination, and most people of good will agreed with them.

By the 60s, the Constitution was being used by liberal activist judges to impose a massive social experiment in forced busing on the nation.

That social experiment is now widely recognized as a failure, so much so that the Milwaukee Public Schools has a “neighborhood schools” initiative.

But during the heyday of busing (and in some places to this day), every black parent, ironically, was deprived of the right to say “I don’t want my child bused.” They were deprived of the right to say “I prefer my neighborhood school, so please keep your hands off my kid.”

The media, which is both biased and ignorant of Constitutional history, is not going to tell people the truth on this. It’s not only that they don’t want to. It’s that they literally don’t know how.