Revisiting Landmark Decision : COMMENTARY : Has Racial Isolation Eased 37 Years After Brown?

“Separate but Equal,” the excellent portrayal of the personalities and issues on opposite sides of the 1954 Supreme Court school integration decision airing Sunday and Monday on ABC, mirrors the optimism with which many black Americans viewed prospects for improvements in their lives in the mid-’50s.

Despite a rigid system of segregation in the South, enforced by both state-sponsored and private terror, there were clear signs that change was in the offing.

Black Southerners, with veterans of World War II in leadership positions, were organizing to win freedoms at home that they had risked life for overseas.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, badly wanting black votes for his party, was pushing beyond his President’s cautious limits in promoting civil-rights legislation.

The national leadership of both political parties was competing for black votes north of the Mason-Dixon line. By the decade’s end, the Republicans were the civil-rights party, with Vice President Richard M. Nixon a clear favorite of black voters over Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy.

Only Kennedy’s 5-minute telephone call to the wife of imprisoned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.--and Nixon’s refusal to make the same call--halted an expected flood of black votes from the Democrats to the Republicans.

And the United States Supreme Court had sent a unanimous signal that legal segregation was finished.

That ruling destroyed segregation’s legality; soon a nonviolent army would arise to challenge its morality as well.

Building on the legal authority of Brown vs. Board of Education, the movement that burst upon the American South in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, won legislation that ended segregation in public accommodations and at the ballot box.

I was 14 years old when Thurgood Marshall won Brown. My sister and I had already been plaintiffs in a suit to integrate the public schools of Chester County, Pa. The one-room black school we would have attended was separated from the white school by a two-lane country road.

By the mid-’60s, Jim Crow was legally dead.

But today, 37 years after Brown, America’s awful problems with race continue, and few are hopeful about solving them.

Southern schools are more integrated today than Northern ones; but racial isolation is everywhere, and many have begun to ask that race-segregated schools be sex-segregated as well, as if further isolation were the answer.

Others argue that blacks’ lives have worsened because of, not in spite of, the victories that followed Brown.

The Republican party has abandoned its pursuit of black votes, succeeding instead in using opposition to integration as a weapon in its pursuit of power.

And, as a nation, we are bereft of heroes.

“Separate but Equal” is full of heroes, its era full of women and men of great stature:

Thurgood Marshall and his penniless, bare-bones NAACP staff struggling against years of law and custom and the best legal minds of 27 states; J.A. DeLaine and Harry Briggs Sr., risking everything to improve schools for South Carolina’s black children; Earl Warren, shaping consensus out of a court divided.

In a darkened Washington theater, as I watched “Separate but Equal,” I wondered what the story meant to Marshall, sitting in the front row, and to his colleagues, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter, seated nearby.

Marshall saw himself a younger, more vigorous man, with greater ability to sway the Warren Court as lawyer than today’s court as associate justice. Souter and O’Connor, one hopes, were reminded that the cases they decide involve real people, with real lives, who for a while believed that the Supreme Court would do right by them.

And I wonder what the story will mean to those who see it Sunday and Monday nights? I hope they will see what possibilities we Americans had 37 short years ago.

We had a President who repudiated his background and his past to elevate freedom, however reluctantly.

We had a Supreme Court that favored justice.

We had the beginnings of a national commitment to racial equality.

Perhaps “Separate but Equal,” by reminding us of what we’ve lost, will make us yearn to have it once again.