A Personal Perspective: Reflections on Brown v. Board

Article by Eleanor Bell.

Fifty years of change, fifty years of progress. How near, how far the destination? Appropriately, the commemoration serves as a focal point for rededication to the concept of basic human rights for all people.

By their nature, anniversaries evoke mixed feelings. Those who can remember the original event will likely experience it on an emotional level, whereas those who cannot remember will experience it in an intellectual/historical context. This is not to suggest that one context is superior to the other -- each has its own value -- but there is no question that the emotional is the more powerful motivator.

I am among those for whom Brown was and still is an emotional experience. As a child born in 1929, I attended an all-white grade school in Wichita. But from time to time, my neighborhood playmates became otherwise occupied -- when black dignitaries (in town for the somewhat controversial "Institute for International Relations") were staying at our home.

Despite this somewhat contradictory childhood environment -- and perhaps even because of it -- my parents' influence created and reinforced a strong personal philosophy that embraced an unequivocal commitment to human rights. My father was business manager at a small Quaker college. In the early 1940s, I found I had more in common with the socially active college students than with my junior high peers. Few men were left on campus during World War II, but one (rumored to be 4F) led a group of 12 to 15 young people comprising a couple of black students (one from Nigeria, one local), two Nisei (Japanese-Americans brought from the relocation camps to attend college), an assortment of Caucasian students, and me. We would proceed to local eateries during the dinner hour, take a seat, and take our cue from the management.

Sometimes managers and servers refused to acknowledge our presence. Most often, we were told that they would not serve the blacks. So we simply all filed out. We always responded politely, but our numbers assured us the attention of the clientele. Had we not been blessed with the youthful conviction of invincibility, we could easily have succumbed to futility. But we persisted, and we would see our "sit-in" method become widely utilized 20 years later in numbers that brought about effective changes in a system that we, with our limitations, could not even dent.

Not until high school did I have any black classmates. Even then, the cultural milieu kept us effectively segregated, so I didn't really have an opportunity to make friends across racial lines at school. It was my loss; it was not until 40 years after graduation that I had a chance to visit with classmate Dorothy Jenkins, whose daughter, Lynette Woodward, would subsequently make basketball history. Other classmates, black and white, distinguished themselves in various fields; the white ones I knew, the black ones I knew only on sight.

For me, the decision in Brown v. Board felt like a personal victory as well as a national humanitarian and cultural one. Like so many, I imbued it with more power than it proved to have, but the failure of people to immediately embrace its spirit (which we should have anticipated) in no way diminishes its significance.

Now, as then, I deplore our fragmented approach to the matter of human rights. Equality of rights is an absolute in the sense that no degrees are possible; no one is equal unless and until each of us is. In retrospect, then, it would appear to have been more efficient to have united the efforts of those who have sought equality on behalf of various categories of people. However, there were (and still are) pragmatic complications to this approach.

For one thing, the problem was perhaps too large to be successfully enjoined as a single encounter. For another, significant humanitarian issues are often resolved largely by grass-roots groups that rise up, poorly organized and inefficient, but with potent emotional power directed toward one narrow goal that may be only a part of the total solution. On the other hand, intellectual issues are generally championed by well-organized groups, "properly" structured from the top down to function efficiently. But they often lack the motivational punch to effect much change.

Although I normally avoid stirring ashes of a dead past, I do so here in a search for embers to ignite new fires of enthusiasm for the cause of human rights. I would hope that the new fires would be more energy efficient than those of the past, but the long-term goal is indisputably worth whatever expenditure of resources is necessary for its realization.

From this orientation, I contend that the most critical task for the Brown commemoration is the creation of an emotional significance for those who did not experience the original event. If we can succeed in accomplishing this goal, the anniversary observance will focus the spirit of the decision toward the ultimate achievement of equality of rights for all of humanity.

Revised from an editorial in the Newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Topeka in 1979.