words

Part 2 of 4 (Part 1 here)

The legal regime

A handful of laws and Supreme Court cases have truly shaped and continue to shape the day-to-day lives of Americans and their children. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) is one of those cases. Its consequences have been an unmitigated disaster for white children.

Getting to the Brown decision and forcibly integrating schools in America was a long journey that had begun with the laying of its early groundwork more than 20 years prior. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund sued several law schools and graduate programs to force them to allow blacks entry, citing that as no similar programs were available elsewhere, a “separate but equal” institution was not available to blacks.[1] Separate but equal was the then legal standard for segregation, as decided in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. Further, Plessy provided that legal segregation did not violate the equal protection clause under the Fourteenth Amendment.[2]

I would like to note an interesting bit of history regarding the Warren Court, of which Brown was an early decision. The Warren Court gave the United States the majority of its watershed civil rights legislation (Brown v. Board, Lucy v. Adams, Loving v. Virginia, Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. United States, etc.). Earl Warren was appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who rode his military success in the Second World War into the White House — although “rode” may be an inaccurate term, as Eisenhower was nominated for the presidency as a reward for his obedience in destroying Europe and the Axis powers. Then, as President, he appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, which became a campaign of destroying the United States from within. I do not believe this chain of events is coincidental. A direct line can be drawn from the defeat of Germany in 1945 to white children being beaten by gangs of blacks in the hallways of their own schools in 2023.

Esther Brown (no relation to Oliver Brown, the plaintiff in the famous lawsuit), a Jewish housewife from Kansas, began to advocate for racial integration in her local school after her black maid complained about the conditions her children experienced there. Brown would eventually begin to raise money for a lawsuit and involve her local NAACP chapter. Brown then raised most of the money for the legal battle to racially integrate her local elementary schools. “I don’t know if we could have done it without her,” said Linda Todd of the Topeka branch of the NAACP.[3]

After a series of legal victories in relation to segregation in academia, and thanks to the work of a Jewish housewife, the NAACP sights were then set on racially integrating primary and secondary schools — which, unlike graduate and law programs, already existed in black schools.

Arguing before the US Supreme Court for the NAACP was Jewish attorney Jack Greenberg, who would succeed Thurgood Marshall as the director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. In his memoir, Greenberg would note that of the lawyers working on Brown v. Board, “very few were white, but almost all of those who were, were Jewish.”[4] This information came from an article in The Jewish Forward titled “Jack Greenberg, the Lawyer Who Used Law as a Weapon to Desegregate America’s Schools.” Using the law as a weapon is an interesting notion, and we can glean the mindset of Jewish activists regarding the law. They see it not as something to used merely to maintain order in society, but as a weapon to wield against their enemies.

Next comes Felix Frankfurter, a Jewish immigrant in New York City who would conspire to make the Brown decision possible with his Jewish immigrant law clerk, Alexander Bickel, as well as another child of Jewish immigrants, Phillip Elman, his former clerk and assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. When the Supreme Court initially heard the case, they were split on how to decide. Frankfurter, through a memorandum written by Bickel, urged the Court to reargue, buying time for the integration arguments to gather momentum. Elman used this time to present a Solicitor General’s brief to the Court, arguing again in favor of racial integration. Throughout the case Frankfurter and Elman were in secret communication, amounting to collusion between the Supreme Court and the US Justice Department, to ensure that the decision went how they wanted it to go. Under nearly any other set of circumstances, this would have been viewed as a wildly improper miscarriage of justice.

The Solicitor General is the fourth highest-ranking official in the US Department of Justice. The Solicitor answers to the Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General, who in turn report to the President. A brief on behalf of the Solicitor General was also filed in the landmark Supreme Court case on housing, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Phillip Pearlman and Simon Sobeloff were the Solicitor Generals during those two cases, respectively — and both were Jewish.

Given a high level of collusion occurring between the upper ranks of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, along with a blessing from the President of the United States (who would later dispatch a thousand soldiers to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas at bayonet point) and his appointed Chief Justice, the arguments and evidence presented in the case were ultimately incidental.

Peripheral as they may have been, the primary arguments favoring racial integration were legally and factually flawed. The arguments centered on what is best for black children, as well as their feelings or possible feelings. At no point in the Court’s opinion was the welfare of white children considered.

In 1950 the American Jewish Committee hired Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist, to study how segregated schooling was affecting black children’s self-esteem.[5]

Clark’s study is now infamous and taught in many university classes, commonly known as “the doll test.” Black and white children are given black or white dolls and then asked various questions about their feelings regarding them, such as “Which dolls do you like best?” or “Which doll is nicer?”[6] Overall, black children preferred white dolls, stating that black dolls were “bad.” Clark and other liberal academics cite this as evidence of white supremacy, white privilege, racism, and so on. It was used in Brown to support racially integrating the schools. The theory posits that if black children find white dolls preferable to black dolls, something is wildly amiss.

Clark’s doll experiment, or some variation of it, was mentioned many times during my undergraduate studies on racism. I personally believe that black children say that white dolls are more intelligent, nice, friendly, and hardworking because they accurately perceive racial realities at that age. Yet, I have never once seen this proposed in all of the “scientific” literature I have read in academic journals concerning this phenomenon.

When the Court’s opinion came, it stated that separation is inherently unequal by its very nature — meaning that if black children are separated, even if the schools’ facilities are equal and equally funded, the existence of separate schools harms black children’s minds.

From the Supreme Court’s Brown decision:

Here, unlike Sweatt  v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other “tangible” factors. Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

To separate them [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.

The Brown court held that you can never have equal separation, even in theory, because it will indicate to blacks that whites do not want them around, and thus they will always feel inferior. Thus, going to black-only schools causes them psychological harm.

During my time in law school, a professor opined that Plessy v. Ferguson was an absurd decision because we cannot, as a society or individually, answer the question of “who is black.” A week later, we started discussing the legality of affirmative action. It’s funny that they can figure out who is black when it comes to affirmative action programs.

Most of the historical and legal discussion focuses on Brown, yet the aftermath is far more concerning, and is where most of the damage occurred. The Brown decision made it illegal to prohibit blacks from attending white schools, but the Court did not stop there. Simply making it illegal to segregate schools wouldn’t have changed much, since most neighborhoods were themselves segregated. Thus, the Court demanded that schools racially integrate via bussing schemes. As a result, busloads of black kids started to be brought from other parts of towns and into white schools — and vice versa — all over America. Many white children then found themselves riding buses past schools that were within walking distance from their homes, ending up in a different neighborhood or town, and then being thrown into a new school where they were separated from their friends — and were now a racial minority.

Northern schools were not spared, either, in the Court’s post-Brown integration frenzy. School districts that had never practiced any formalized legal segregation became targets of the Justice Department and lawsuits if they were deemed to be too white.

Eventually, however, school districts were “released” from the threat of having their funding withheld if this was not done, and whites began to self-segregate.

*  *  *

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Notes

[1] See Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Siquel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma 1948), and Sweatt v. Painter (1950).

[2] Interestingly, the plaintiff in Plessy was denied access to a train car for whites while being one-eighth black. The phrase “octoroon” appears in the Supreme Court record.

[3] Lawrence Bush. “Esther Brown v. Board of Education,” Jewish Currents. May 18, 2013.

[4] Benjamin Irvy, “Jack Greenberg, the Lawyer Who Used Law as a Weapon to Desegregate America’s Schools,” Forward. October 13, 2016.

[5] Jewish Women’s Archive, “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.” At the risk of belaboring this point, it should be noted that there is a pattern of Jewish activism that often makes use of black “front men” — in this case, standing behind the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, the Shelleys, and so on.

[6] In most of the studies, children were asked eight questions:

1. Give me the doll that you would like to play with or like best.

2. Give me the doll that is the nice doll.

3. Give me the doll that looks bad.

4. Give me the doll that is a nice color.

5. Give me the doll that looks like a white child.

6. Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.

7. Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child.

8. Give me the doll that looks like you.