Sixty-five years ago this week, a young man from WestBaltimore named Thurgood Marshall listened as Earl Warren pronounced the mostimportant legal words uttered since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Marshall was there as the NAACP attorney seeking racialintegration of the nation’s previously segregated public schools. Warren wasthere as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
America was about to be changed forever, in ways we’re stilltrying to figure out.
“I have for announcement,” Warren intoned from the bench,“the judgment and opinion of the court in Oliver Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka.”
He did not stop talking for the next 28 minutes.
For Marshall, the case highlighted a career in which hewould argue 32 cases in front of the Supreme Court, and win 28, and lead to hisconfirmation as the first African-American high court justice.
But it was more than that. Marshall grew up in WestBaltimore and attended segregated Douglass High School. He wanted to attend theUniversity of Maryland Law School, where he could have walked to class. But thelaw school was segregated, so Marshall had to ride the train to Washington eachday, to Howard Law School.
It was personal, too, for all those who packed the courtroomthat morning of May 17, 1954, because America was about to be asked to live upto its essential credo of fairness and justice.
As Warren read the court’s opinion, Marshall glanced atthose around him. He saw reporters from the nation’s black newspapers. Manywere scribbling notes with tears coming out of their eyes.
“We conclude,” Warren said, “that in the field of publiceducation, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separateeducational facilities are inherently unequal.”
The words would echo across the coming generations – butwith each passing year, they became more difficult to hear.
In much of Maryland, they were first met with denial. InBaltimore, Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. told the school board’s Walter Sondheim,a vocal proponent of integration, “The priests tell me you were right.” And thecity’s schools quickly commenced integration.
But the counties did not. A year after the Brown decision,only eight of Maryland’s 22 counties integrated their schools. Harford Countywaited three years. It was 1957 before 78 schools in Baltimore County enrolledany black students, and 1962 before the last five Maryland counties openedtheir doors to black students.
And as the city schools integrated but the counties draggedtheir heels, Baltimore experienced what many municipalities across America wentthrough – a vast exodus of white families to white suburbia.
That migration is still felt today – in re-segregated publicschools, and in entire communities.
More on the impact of 65 years ago later this week.
Read part 2: Have We Lived Up to Thurgood Marshall’s Dream?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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