Brown v. Board: 70 Years of Integrating Education and Expanding Democracy

On Friday, May 17, 2024, our country celebrated the 70th anniversary of Brown vs The Board of Education—the landmark decision that declared segregation an inequality, legally mandated the integration of schools, and pushed us closer to creating a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic democracy. 

Seventy years later, we celebrate the work of over one hundred years: the work of the teachers and preachers, the schools of the hush arbor, the church basement schools; the work of literacy by candlelight and hushed tones and by the historically Black normal schools that would later become our HBCUs.

Integrating schools is ancestral work—not the professional achievement of a few, but the blood of many—both known and unknown. Brown’s legacy lives in us, in how we carry the radical idea of the multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic democracy forward. Personally, my sisters and I were the first generation in our family to attend desegregated schools. While holiday debates and dinner table conversations for years argued and lamented whether the Brown decision was right for Black people, it was clear that the elders in my family understood the risks and the rewards. Our young bodies and minds would be in the regular custody of some people whose intent was, at best, morally ambivalent and, at worst, acrid and hateful. But they trusted, like many before, knowing and understanding that segregation is evil. Evil because it distorts power and resources, creating conditions for a human to identify with and over-identify their role in society—lording, metering, and doling power over one another—creating obscene and profane comfort for one group at the expense of another, compromising the health, mobility, motility, and one's imagination. 

When asking them why they made the choice, again and again, to send us to school with white children, their perspective was rooted in their trauma as much as it was the promise of America. Even though they grew up in segregation, they were also raised in supportive, identity-affirming communities where the concept of family extends beyond surname and the dinner table. And while the terrors of the KKK, white police officers, and shop owners were real and present and frequent dangers and holders of incredible mortal weapons, their daily lives were also shaped by their communities and the teachers, preachers, doctors, dentists, and funeral directors who saw and treated them as smart, capable, hardworking, thoughtful, and creative multidimensional human beings. They did not interact regularly with white people until adulthood, and it was a traumatic shock when they did. They did not want their children to experience the trauma of integration directly. They did not think that the white school was better because of white people. They knew that this new world would require us to know and learn white people and for white people to know and learn about us. My parents said we didn't think the integrated school would help you, but we are glad it didn't hurt you. At six, I started learning the skills they had to learn at 22 and 23. This is a part of both their legacy and Brown’s inheritance. 

This month, an unexpected homegoing brought the inheritance of Brown and multicultural, multiracial democracy into clearer focus for me. My second mother transitioned to the ancestral realm, and she was eulogized on May 10. In her life, we saw not just the inheritance of Brown but also how to build a multicultural, multiracial democracy. From her college years spent desegregating the Greensboro lunch counters to executive hospital administration as an adult, she acted in place, creating a multicultural democracy wherever she went. In her golden years, after amassing political, social, and financial capital and seeing the need for healthcare in their hometown, she and her husband (my father) founded a free health clinic to ensure that the poorest residents had access to high-quality free healthcare as a human right. They started with themselves and designed at the margins, using their lived experience to see and define the proximate problems. They ceded their political, social, and economic power to build a new institution. While many of us credential our commitment to justice in words and slogans, their commitment became the cornerstone of a new institution.

But how does one know if they have lived a legacy of justice? How do we know if we are humbly holding our inheritance? As Bill Downey remarked, everything, both people and events, happen in the dash- the space between our birthdate and death date. As we move through life, the witness of the living assesses the richness and texture of the dash. For my second mother, we saw who came to pay their respects in death–700 people from multiple races, cultures, and ethnicities gathered together connected by one person. The legacy of Brown is not just black and white children sitting together in a classroom. This is also the legacy of Brown—the opportunity to build and be in relationships with others across racial differences without fear of exclusion, harm, or threat to the body. The legacy of Brown lives in our own cultural inheritance and how we acknowledge our familiar patterns and habits of exclusion and still work tirelessly to build new relationships. The legacy of Brown lives in our own courage to interrogate our own habits of exclusion and establish a real intention for Radical Inclusion. 

But what do we do now? Schools are more segregated than ever. Our communities are more polarized, fragmented, and fractured. Technologies designed to create ease and convenience have broken relationships with ourselves and our earth home. The multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic democracy is fading into the recesses of our imaginations. Do we need more policies? Do we need more laws and lawsuits? Perhaps the equityXdesign framework can direct us in the direction of more promise and opportunity. 

First, the writers of the Combahee River Collective remind us that ‘“We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” We are reminded to first start with ourselves.  With this wisdom, perhaps we can look at what we can do in our own communities. Perhaps this is the moment for us to interrogate our own habits of exclusion and how and why we rationalize and justify them. Perhaps this is the moment that we realize that the designs of  Mary Peake,  Mary McCleod Bethune, and  Septima Clark were never drafted in the halls of the Supreme Court, but had more humble beginnings. They started in radical and humble third spaces like church basements, trash dumps, or under the shade of an oak tree. Perhaps to hold our inheritance with grace and reverence is to be still enough to witness suffering right where we are, assess our own financial, political, and social capital… and then decide to act.  

Second, the third belief of the equityXdesign framework—Foresee: Process and Product— reminds us that we cannot model the future on the past, we need to live the future we want today. The Brown narrative of the past started in the schoolhouse but ended in the courthouse. But the future that we want today asks us to write the next chapter of the story. To that end, maybe it’s our moment to remember that Brown was a step on the path to something bigger. Perhaps we are not just being asked to dismantle racial segregation and discrimination publicly but we are asked to do it privately. And in the same throbbing vein, we are also asked to build a new democracy with a heartbeat of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The work that started in the schoolhouse may also end in the schoolhouse. Work that started publicly can also start privately. 

The legacy of Brown is not just in the policy and laws. The legacy and inheritance of Brown lives in our individual actions—our imagination, the lives we live, the problems we see, and what we choose to do about it. When we have the moment to be still and look inward, we can also see the legacy of Brown in our families. And when we are really, really still— we can see the legacy in ourselves.