May 17 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that racial segregation in education is unconstitutional. The landmark Supreme Court decision was decided 178 years after the promise of liberty for all was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – and it would take another five decades to be legally accepted throughout the U.S. On this anniversary, let’s reflect on what this delay in fulfilling justice and righteousness has meant for us as a people.
A year before I was born, a key promise of the Declaration of Independence was finally enshrined into law. No, I wasn’t born in the 1770s; it just took 178 years. I wish I could say it only took that long, but Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was only the beginning of the next chapter in a very long struggle for justice and righteousness in our nation.
Righteousness, you say?
Have you ever really studied the word in the biblical context? Righteousness is when a person is operating as they are meant to be, as they are designed to be. We are designed in the image of God with all the moral disposition that image encompasses. The very reason we can even conceive of justice is because we are designed to be righteous. So, biblically speaking, are we living as God originally intended us to live?
Apply that to our own nation. Even though our first national document, the Declaration of Independence, is not a religious document, it does promote certain values that are in keeping with biblical concepts of righteousness. For example, it states foremost that all are created equal, that, among the inalienable rights the Creator has endowed us with, are life and liberty. It also mentions the pursuit of happiness, which may or may not be a component of righteousness.
Now, I am not speaking to the question of whether the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. Rather I am speaking to the notion that it can be argued that the Founders saw this nation as established on the concept of liberty for all because of their understanding of righteousness within the diverse religious and philosophical worldviews of their day.
Justice delayed is justice denied
But it was purely aspirational. Liberty and the sense equality – meaning equal under the law – were not central to life in the U.S. for much of its history. As late as 1954, the Supreme Court, in that most landmark of decisions – Brown v. Board – overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896. Basing its ruling on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court declared that separate does not mean equal.
I’d like to report that segregation, Jim Crow laws, and our form of apartheid were all struck down in that instant. But as with fulfillment of the 14th Amendment itself, the fight had a long way to go. Even the Court acknowledged as much, stating it would take much litigation to see the objectives of Brown v. Board achieved.
Ruby Bridges, born a few months before me, was black and lived in the American South. In this famous scene from 1960, she is escorted by U.S. Marshals as she leaves school for the day, under serious threat of violence, a scene which would play over and over for months. It took till the following school year for her to be able to attend class with white children.
One could argue that its legacy is not yet fully realized in spirit. From a legal standpoint, litigation stemming from that 1954 ruling continued for another fifty years. The last schools in Texas desegregated in 1970. The Dallas Independent School District did not end its fight against desegregation until 1980. Meanwhile whites were voting with their feet and at the ballot box – fleeing to private schools and refusing to pass bond measures supporting public schools. The litigation over desegregation in East Texas did not end until 2008.
2008. Fifty-four years after Brown v. Board!
Martin Luther King Jr. stated that justice can take a very long time, but he also said that “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Certainly, for the enslaved granted their freedom in 1863, delayed justice did mean denied justice. They never saw it in their lifetime or in the lifetime of their children.
Justice was promised with the Emancipation Proclamation, with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and with the Civil Rights Act of 1875. As these promises were passed into law, Black codes were being put in place, followed by Jim Crow laws in the 1870s, and by Plessy v. Ferguson which enshrined them into national law in 1896. Justice only legally brought us back to the intent of those three Constitutional amendments with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
A century before I was born, back in my great-great-great-grandparents day, most Black Americans were still enslaved. When I was ten years old, Congress finally got around to fulfilling the dream of the Declaration of Independence in legal terms with the modern Civil Rights Acts. But I would be in my fifties before Brown v. Board would cease to be fought against.
That is a lot of generations in my family. Women were not given the right to vote until 1919 and were still without certain basic legal rights even into my lifetime. But aside from the slowness of freedoms granted to the female members of our lineage, our family has generally enjoyed the full rights and responsibilities of our society for all those years.
What about our friends of color for whom justice has far too long been denied? We are talking generation upon generation upon generation.
Courage for the long struggle
I would be naïve to think the fight is really over. It is far from, and just as reverses in progress happened in the 1870s, so too they have continued to happen. No, we are not back where we were in 1863 or even in 1954, but it has been a two-step-forward-one-step-back and occasionally several steps back for a lot of generations. It has been a dizzying – and uncertain – dance to freedom.
I applaud the courage of Brown v. Board, knowing from my studies in constitutional law how much effort it took to get to that place. The legal efforts to overturn Plessy began twenty years before. Even when the Court is obviously right, it cannot push for that rightness until society is ready for it. Granted, not everyone was ready for Brown v. Board in ‘54, not by a long shot, which is why it took years after to litigate. But by the mid-50s there was a growing consensus that something was rotten in the core of our nation and something significant had to be done to change it. Thank God, there were brave hearts in the land ready to wage the long fight.
If anything, there is a lesson here that fighting for the right means committing to years – generations even – of effort. Watch the movie, Amazing Grace, for a lesson in how long it took the likes of a moral giant like William Wilberforce to stop the slave trade in the British Empire.
What has to accompany changes in laws is a change of hearts. But until such time as hearts have been changed, it is the duty of a moral society to legislate justice. Again, to quote Dr. King, “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” Otherwise, there would be no use for laws of any kind.
The British Empire abolished slavery years (1833) before the United States did (1863). It has been argued by some historians that our nation’s declaration of independence delayed the very thing we were declaring – universal equality. Their contention is that the enslaved would have been emancipated at least a generation earlier if we had remained in the British Empire.
The idea, as some argue, that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery is too simplistic for my understanding – there were antislavery advocates in Philadelphia in 1776, after all, and the fight over the three-fifths clause that was embedded in the Constitution in the following decade was long and contentious. Even so, I will acknowledge that we as a nation certainly were slow on the ramp to the level of righteousness that we proclaimed.
Why does it take a nation such as ours so long to do the right thing? I was reading this morning in Psalm 10 where the psalmist cries out to God, “Why do the unjust prosper and why are the oppressed not avenged sooner?” The answer that comes back is that God is still enthroned – and forever. Righteousness and justice will triumph in the end. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote during the American Civil War, “The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.” It may take time, but the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice.
What can we learn from all this?
So, what does Brown v. Board have to teach us today? For one, it teaches us that it takes great and concerted effort to do the right thing. As a nation, we, 250 years later, are still learning to live into our own understanding of righteousness and justice.
Earlier, I referred to the question often asked as to whether we were founded as a Christian nation. Far more importantly, I think, is whether we as a nation – and especially we citizens who proclaim Christ – are doing what is right and just. Are we working to change unjust laws, to reconcile broken communities, to restore right living, and to transform wrong thinking? Are we demonstrating how to live as we were intended to live?
Proverbs 14:34 is often quoted with fingers pointed towards our national leaders: “Righteousness exalts [elevates] a nation.” I think the way to point that finger is toward us who follow Christ. The nation’s founders had this idea that a righteous nation would be one where all people were treated as equals before the law, all people were treated as divinely endowed, or to put all that in churchy terms, that all people were to be viewed as made in the image of God.
On this 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, here’s my two-fold call to action:
- On May 17, make time to remember what happened seventy years ago and what that continues to mean for us as a nation.
- Ask yourself, What can I do today to live righteously in my society as God intended?
You are welcome to put some thoughts in the comments section about how you answered that.
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