Craig Howard-Hamilton Akbar-Williams The U.S. Supreme Court had five cases in 1952—four from different states and one from the District of Columbia—challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in America’s public schools; these were consolidated under one name: “Oliver Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas;” the plaintiff, an African American, wanted his daughter to attend the all-white school in her neighborhood, and a class action suit, aided by the local NAACP chapter, included the names of 13 parents of school-age children. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the court’s unanimous opinion: The “separate but equal” doctrine established in 1896 violated the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Public school integration was thus mandated, “with all deliberate speed.”

Overlapping activities honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first Brown v. Board event took place on the frigid evening of Jan. 21 in the Main Library at IUB. At a panel discussion titled “With All Deliberate Speed” (the phrase the U.S. Supreme Court borrowed from Oliver Wendell Holmes and used in the wording of the decision to emphasize the need for immediate school desegregation), the atmosphere quickly heated up as three individuals—Mary Howard-Hamilton, associate dean for graduate studies at the School of Education; Byron Craig, a doctoral student at the Department of Communication and Culture; and Tahirah Zubaidah Akbar-Williams, a graduate student at the School of Library and Information Science—shared the impact of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education on their personal lives and offered strategies for building on the legacy of that decision into the 21st century.

Before panel moderator DeLoice Holliday, multicultural outreach librarian at the IUB Main Library, introduced the speakers, she put the Brown v. Board of Education decision into a historical context by tracing it to the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which not only rendered the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, but stated that all blacks—slave and free—could never be U.S. citizens, and the legal precedent established by Plessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 decision that upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” as constitutional.

Born in Alton, Ill., in 1954, Howard-Hamilton shares her birth year with the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She attended her first desegregated school in 1961, when she was entering the second grade. Having attended an all-black school in the heart of Alton’s African-American community for two years, she found herself one of only two black children in her class.

“It was a scary, intimidating experience for which I was not prepared. I had never been exposed to that many white children. They laughed at everything I said or did, and it just shut me down,” she said. “At my old school, we had an oral tradition of letting students know when to eat lunch, go to recess, go home. I didn’t understand the Pavlovian aspect to the ringing of bells to make children do these things.”

Howard-Hamilton believes that the white teachers, who were trained in the 1940s and 1950s, didn’t know how to adjust to the post-Brown v. Board classroom or relate to children of color, and that there was a definite tendency to rely on stereotyping. “My mother was a domestic, and she worked for my third-grade teacher. Naturally, my teacher figured I would follow in my mother’s footsteps,” she said. “It wasn’t until junior high that there were more teachers of color in the schools and things got better for me. I am a living, walking, breathing history lesson of how Brown v. Board can impact one’s life. For some African-American children, it just turned their little worlds upside down.”

Craig’s family was the first black family in a middle-class Sandusky, Ohio, neighborhood. “Not without duress,” Craig said, chuckling. He concurred with Howard-Hamilton’s belief that many black children, especially males, were earmarked for underachievement. Craig’s twin brother was shuttled into special education classes in elementary school, while Craig was in a regular classroom. “This kind of labeling follows students the rest of their lives, making it impossible to get into certain colleges and, therefore, sentenced to a lower socio-economic stratum,” he said. “As for my brother, when we finally did take a class together in high school, I cheated off of him, because he was smarter than me.”

Craig attributes his belief in the power of grassroots activism for social change. “I remember brothers lying down in front of buses to protest unfair busing practices. In the end, things changed. Ultimately, there is no such thing as ‘deliberate speed.’ The law doesn’t work unless we push it.”

Akbar-Williams calls herself a “post-civil rights baby.” Yet, although she was coming up a couple of decades after Howard-Hamilton and Craig, she is amazed at how parallel their experiences were. “I was a ‘project’ girl, the fifth child of ten. Then, my mother remarried, and we moved to a middle-class white suburb in Phoenix. It was, shall I say, a difficult transition. For the first couple of years, I thought my first name was ‘Nigger.’”

Akbar-Williams said that Brown v. the Board of Education did not come with a “road map.”

“Even 50 years later, we’ve got a tough row to hoe,” she said. “The educational institutions simply do not reflect the true multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity of our society. The fact is, I’ve been the only ‘black child’ in most of my classes for the past 10 years!”

Like Craig, Akbar-Williams believes that genuine diversity will occur only through grassroots activism, and when communities become inclusive of populations that differ in racial, ethnic, or socio-economic status or in sexual orientation.

“We need to stand together—there is strength in numbers. Most important of all, we need to show younger generations that they should reach out to groups and to older individuals as mentors,” she said. “The older generations that fought the good fight in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s have a lot to share, and young people need to hear them.”

Editor’s Note: The N word

Kennedy

The decision to print or to edit out a racial or ethnic epithet in editorial copy is always difficult. On one hand, there is the clear hope that such words will become extinct if they are not used; on the other, that language—and the words chosen to define experience—should be left as they have been spoken so that the powerful images they evoke are clearly portrayed.

The feature story above contains a racial epithet; the usage springs from a childhood memory, a powerful reminder of how racism in America has affected individuals as well as society as a whole.

As Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote in his 2001 best-seller, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” this particular epithet “is a key word in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term in American politics. To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one’s life.”

—Jayne Spencer