Editor's Newsletter

If you have not seen it, please see this 13-minute video from 60 Minutes and be amazed. Then, follow me below as I take advantage of this monumental achievement to get something off my chest.

This month, seventy years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and outlawed racial segregation in schools.

I have always supported the 9-0 Brown decision as correct, but I have long considered the reasoning problematic. The Court concluded that “whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson [in 1896], this finding is amply supported by modern authority.”

What was this modern authority? The modern authority was social science, with several psychological studies mentioned. However, the pioneering African American duo of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and their famous doll studies figured prominently in the argument by Thurgood Marshall and his NAACP colleagues. 

Nevertheless, the Clarks’ doll studies were problematic. They gave black children in the North and South, aged six through nine, a white doll and a black doll. They then asked the children to provide them with “the white doll,” “the colored doll,” and “the Negro doll” to test whether children understood the notion of race. Then they asked each child to point out “the doll you like best,” “the doll that is a nice doll,” “the doll that looks bad,” and “the doll that is a nice color.” Most of the black children preferred the white doll, so they concluded that this proved that segregation created feelings of inferiority.

The doll studies, being early psychological studies, had several flaws, including sample sizes that were too small and no control group. Perhaps most problematic, however, was that black children in northern states without legal segregation were even more likely to prefer the white doll than black children in the legally segregated southern states. The Clarks may have offered evidence — if any was necessary — that in white-dominated American society, black children would quickly learn the social meanings of white superiority and black inferiority. However, they had hardly demonstrated that legal segregation in schools was the sole or dominant cause of this understanding.

The Supreme Court concluded, “To separate [Negro school children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of 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.”

Because of this psychological harm, the Court determined that black children can never get an equal education to white children if they are in a segregated school, no matter how good the physical facilities or curriculum.

The NAACP argued that segregated schools are not equal and cannot be made equal. It is obvious that in most instances of segregation, black schools are not equal to white schools. However, I’m afraid I have to disagree that black-segregated schools cannot be made equal, and I am in good company. Legal scholar Derek Bell makes a similar point in his critique of the Brown decision.

In a big way, St. Mary’s Academy in New Orleans supports this different perspective. In a relevant but less spectacular way, so did the all-black Christiansburg Institute in the 1950s, which had higher scores on the standardized tests than white students in the segregated schools in Montgomery County, Virginia.

There was also my experience from back in the time of the Brown v. Board cases. In no way am I trying to compare my situation long ago to that of these two subject teens in our story; However, I reflect back to the time of the Brown Decision to my little severely under-resourced high school in rural Alabama, where three members in my 12 member high school class scored in the top 15 black students in the state on the language and mathematics tests, signifying what DuBois wrote in 1935:

In a Journal of Negro Education article in 1935, DuBois warned that [a] mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad.” He added, though, that “[a] segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing is equally bad.” He concluded that “[o]ther things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth… But other things are seldom equal, and in that case, Sympathy, Knowledge, and Truth outweigh all the mixed school can offer.” That’s what we got in my high school.