Calling on the magic of Brown
In an election year, everybody wants to invoke the famous case
By Craig Colgan
March 2004
American School Board Journal
The 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education arrives, for better or worse, during a very political year. Education is likely to be a bigger issue during the 2004 presidential election than it has ever been, with both parties twisting and turning the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for political ends. Count on seeing references to Brown and other politically charged terms related to education thrown about daily.
Why? Because the Supreme Court's landmark decision still carries plenty of political, moral, and educational currency, even after 50 years. Adam Cohen, an editorial writer with the New York Times, calls Brown "the most important legal decision of the 20th century, perhaps of all time."
In these days of appropriating not just rhetoric but entire agendas, invoking Brown has begun in earnest on all sides of the political spectrum. References to Brown pepper a Harvard Civil Rights Project study that claims "backward movement for desegregation in American schools." Secretary of Education Rod Paige calls NCLB "the next step after Brown."
Professional political analysts also know the decision's rhetorical value. On TV's "Hardball"earlier this year, Democratic strategist Jacques De Graff said: "[Voters] want to know whether women's rights to choose are going to be protected. It's the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision. They want to know whether people of color's rights are going to be protected."
Democratic presidential hopefuls have invoked Brown to show their connection to black voters. Sen. Joseph Lieberman met supporters inside a historic South Carolina house that served as a meeting place for those who helped draft the legal petition for Briggs v. Elliott, one of the cases folded into the Brown lawsuit. The Rev. Al Sharpton used the Brown anniversary to criticize what he called the continuing system of dual education.
Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University professor and author who investigates how language works in daily life and in relationships, says she's not surprised that the Brown decision has become a popular political sound bite.
"The general phenomenon of contemporary politicians -- and journalists, I'd bet, too -- adopting the language of the Civil Rights Movement seems to be the inevitable adaptation of a culture to its own heritage, the integration of its mythology into contemporary idiom," Tannen says.
"Invoking Brown, King, Selma -- that's simply going to happen, because it is part of our culture, part of our shared history and vocabulary. It is effective because it calls up a spirit of group effort, of a time when people united to achieve something we are now proud of. Talk of dreams, conquest, triumph, struggle, fighting the good fight, hope -- these are inspiring." And irresistible, too.
Brown, Paige, and NCLB
Invoking Brown and civil rights in the debate over NCLB have resulted in some odd politics. With a few vigorous exceptions, for example, much of the traditional civil rights coalition opposes some or all of the federal legislation, formerly known as the Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In their opposition, ironically, they invoke arguments that often sound like a call for states' rights.
At the same time, no one is invoking Brown more these days than the secretary of education. In two January speeches, Paige set out to claim Brown's legacy for the Bush administration and its education policies.
"Sadly, the vestiges of segregation are alive and well," Paige said in one speech. "That is why the No Child Left Behind Act is the next step after Brown."
He then went further, invoking phrases from the civil rights rhetorical lexicon while arranging the argument so that the Bush administration's use of such language sounds reasonable, if you see the race debate from its side, which is to note the race of students only to track their achievement, and hold schools accountable if they do not educate all students to high standards.
NCLB "addresses latent segregation, a de facto apartheid that is emerging in our schools," Paige said. "Like Brown, No Child Left Behind is facing resistance. But if we have the will, this law will have a profound and healing impact on our society."
After a January speech, a reporter asked Paige if he was likening those who support NCLB to segregationist governors such as Alabama's George Wallace and Arkansas' Orval Faubus.
"I don't think I went quite that far," Paige said with a chuckle. A month later, he went further, calling the National Education Association "a terrorist organization" for its opposition to NCLB. He later apologized, but the message was clear.
"Those who fought against Brown were on the wrong side of history, just as those who fight No Child Left Behind will one day also be labeled," he said in the January speech. "We have come to expect strident resistance to any major changes in education, particularly if they change the status quo and challenge the educational establishment that seeks to protect itself. So unless we begin to eliminate racism in our schools, other later attempts will be much more difficult."
Paige invoked more civil rights imagery in another speech earlier this year. He said vouchers and school choice are issues of "social justice" and "civil rights" because they provide poverty-stricken children in poorly performing public schools with an opportunity for better education and a brighter future.
The Harvard Civil Rights Project couldn't agree more about the need for social justice, even though it believes that NCLB certainly is not the "next step" after Brown. In late January, the organization released a report asserting that NCLB has derailed state reforms and assessment strategies.
"The parallel here [between NCLB and Brown] is that some states don't want to do this," says Andrew Rotherham, director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "People are evading at the local level. States are trying to opt out, and there is this newfound affinity for states rights. But the parallels only go so far.
"Brown was a watershed moment in American history," Rotherham says. "I do think people who oppose NCLB are on the wrong side of history, but some of the rhetoric Paige has employed is unfortunate. The politics here are complicated, and some of this rhetoric needlessly complicates [them] even more."
The rhetoric of social justice
When Paige speaks of Brown, he does so to explain and defend the administration's efforts to close the achievement gap between white and minority students. He says fulfilling the purpose of Brown means excellence in the classroom, regardless of a school's racial makeup.
Tannen points out that Paige's remarks are not the first time the Bush administration has dipped into the well of social justice rhetoric when it comes to education. The name of the law itself is a slight variation on the "Leave No Child Behind" slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, a group that advocates for increased public programs that benefit poor children.
In one respect, Paige is right about Brown's connection to NCLB, especially to the original version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated that states that continued to discriminate would not receive federal funds. The first ESEA in 1965 forced many states to begin providing equal and integrated schools or risk losing access to the newly established Title I funds.
Funds are also an issue for Gary Orfield, the codirector of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Using language that some view as incendiary, he invokes Brown and Martin Luther King Jr. and warns of "racial isolation." Orfield calls segregation "a returning and insidious evil" and says resegregation is worthy of attention and resources regardless of how we measure student achievement.
Like Paige, Orfield's organization was a newsmaker in January with its own take on the Brown legacy. Brown at 50: King's Dream or the Plessy Nightmare? the organization's study of integration policies, concluded that American schools are segregated to 1960s levels.
"If you really believe in Brown, you can't celebrate it right now," Orfield told the New York Times. "But the potential is there."
And as the NCLB-driven discussion of the racial achievement gap broadens, it is no surprise that politicians, academics, analysts, and advocates of all stripes take the opportunity to promote their views of the Brown legacy.
"For too long, the racial gap in academic performance was treated not only by civil rights leaders, but by the media, and even by scholars, as a dirty secret -- something to whisper about behind closed doors," write Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. "As if it were racist to say we have a problem. ... Suddenly, however, this shamefully ignored issue has moved to the front and center of the education stage."
Brown and precision
Simply talking about race, segregation, Brown, and educating children today invites confusion, even when America's elites are doing the talking.
In a presidential candidates' debate, National Public Radio's Neal Conan asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich how he would address the resegregation of U.S. schools if he were president.
"It's a great tragedy," Kucinich replied, and then called for greater focus on inner-city schools, and spoke of the need for increased resources, smaller class sizes, better-paid teachers, and universal prekindergarten.
But what do any of those policy ideas have to do with "resegregating"?
"Nothing short of a return to Jim Crow could be called re-segregation," writes Keith M. Woods at the Poynter Institute, a professional organization for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. "When language slips from the moorings of context, history is set adrift."
At Poynter, Woods writes about race and how journalistic indifference gets in the way of getting the story right. In recklessly using such charged terms themselves, or in not challenging those who do, journalists are just plain lazy, Woods says. He calls it a "lack of precision."
"I think journalists should simply be challenging, more directly, the language people are using around race. Period," says Woods. "Whether it's talk of civil rights or segregation or police shootings, journalists are too easily lulled into using pat language that is laden with clichés and words with hollow meaning."
Journalists who question candidates on these issues "begin with the premise that 'segregated' means all black, not all white," says Woods, a former editorial page writer for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. "And the candidates are accurately interpreting the journalists' meaning and answering the question as they understood it.
"So the problem with precision, in this case, is that 'segregated' is a synonym for 'inferior' and 'all black' is a synonym for 'segregated,' so all black equals inferior," Woods says. "As a graduate of an all-black high school and college, I beg to differ. But public opinion and social policy flow from that equation. So precision has a direct bearing on social policy."
Too often the rhetoric flows too fast, outpacing understanding, Woods says.
"Stories get distorted and conflated so that the simple goal of the Brown decision -- outlawing state-sanctioned racism in public schools -- gets folded into every spin-off movement meant to fix the damage bigotry has done to the education of black children in particular and to race relations in general," Woods wrote in a recent column. "Desegregation becomes busing, which becomes integration, which becomes diversity."
Those terms themselves have their own charged meanings, as do recently fashionable attention-grabbing phrases -- "racial isolation," "black exposure to whites" -- used frequently by the news media as well as experts on one side or the other. As both sides wrestle over the same territory, stealing each other's rhetoric would seem to be inevitable as well.
"Both proponents and opponents of race-conscious affirmative action, for example, claim they are the true inheritors of Brown and its legacy," writes Jack Balkin, editor of a collection of essays entitled What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. Although Brown is revered today, Balkin writes, many scholars and analysts have attacked the integrative ideal the decision seemed to represent. "Many critics now argue that integration is a failed strategy and that it is better to push for equalization of facilities and equal educational opportunity."
But does this have to be an either/or equation? Can invoking both "student achievement" and "desegregation" be good for the debate -- and for society? And is it only people on one side of the political fence who are allowed to invoke Brown?
"A fair question," says Tannen.
Echoing Woods, she says that no matter who's invoking what, people should always check the facts behind the invocation.
"It's OK for anyone to invoke Brown and use civil-rights inspired language in the service of actions and goals that resonate with the goals and accomplishments of those causes," Tannen says. "It is cynical when they are invoked to gain support for actions that have opposite goals, or when the words are intended to mask the lack of or failure of action."
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Craig Colgan is associate editor of American School Board Journal.
