Revisiting Landmark Decision : ‘Separate but Equal’--A Trial by Talk

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a desegregation ruling in the Brown vs. Board of Education case that would dramatically alter the course of American life. But slowly and agonizingly.

You get some of this enduring saga--mostly the judicial part--in “Separate but Equal,” an interesting but labored two-part ABC drama airing at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channels 7, 3 and 10.

As far as it goes, this is the “Rocky” of legal/civil rights stories.

That’s because writer/director/co-executive producer George Stevens Jr. tightly focuses on the racial tensions and backstage maneuvers shaping the court’s historic order to desegregate public schools, ignoring the frustrating aftermath. To tell it all, he’d probably need 40 hours instead of four.

There are far easier stories to tell than ones hinging on landmark Supreme Court decisions--witness also NBC’s “Roe vs. Wade” in 1989. Credit “Separate but Equal” with surpassing that fence-straddling, largely unsatisfying treatment.

“Separate but Equal” ranks among TV’s most cerebral stories, in fact, operating almost entirely on a high plane of ideas and intellect as it attempts, among other things, to distinguish racism from the concept of States’ rights. And with Sidney Poitier as the protagonist (plus Burt Lancaster later battling him in court and Richard Kiley ultimately weighing in from the bench), there are some moments of high drama.

In the main, however, “Separate but Equal” is a rigid, ponderous work that, especially in Part 2, presents this chapter of the black struggle against white supremacy almost in a sort of abstract legalese.

We open in 1950. In Clarendon County, S.C., where black children must walk miles to their shabby segregated classrooms. A request for a school bus by black principal J.A. DeLaine (Ed Hall) is rejected by the district’s red-neck superintendent. Encouraged by Thurgood Marshall (Poitier), chief counsel in New York for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, DeLaine and a local black attorney petition the court in Charlestown for a bus plus equal school facilities guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

Ultimately, the agenda widens as these events mushroom into the broader Brown vs. Board of Education case that Marshall and famed attorney James W. Davis (Lancaster) argue on opposite sides before a High Court whose newly appointed chief justice, Earl Warren (Kiley), will play a crucial leadership role in the unanimous ruling.

Almost immediately, “Separate but Equal” conveys a sense of that era’s institutionalized racism, especially in the Deep South where inferior education helps give black children low self-esteem and where would-be reformers are in constant danger. At one point, white firemen ignore DeLaine’s pleas for help when his home incinerates after being torched by cross-burning night-riders.

You can feel the foreboding. Moreover, the story is compelling on another level when briefly depicting the northern NAACP’s inner debates on desegregation strategy and peeking into the minds of the nine white male justices.

Yet, in trying to humanize constitutional arguments, Stevens becomes oppressively talky, weighing down key characters with dialogue so leaden that they could get hernias just from saying their lines. The court scenes are from transcripts. But it’s the gentlemanly private chats of Warren and his fellow justices that come across as especially stiff, thick and surreal, as if these guys were seeking to communicate not with one another but with the future historians who would judge them. While Marshall and his fellow reformers are regular folks, the justices sink under the tonnage of their own loftiness.

Despite not even vaguely resembling or sounding like Marshall (a Supreme Court justice since 1967), Poitier is convincing as this man who gained a national reputation while battling in court to end school desegregation. Poitier is a rare sight on any size screen these days, and it’s good to have him back acting.

Although Lancaster’s appearance turns out to be more perfunctory than substantive and Kiley is more or less manacled by the script, there is some nice supporting work here by Gloria Foster as Marshall’s dying wife, Cleavon Little as an NAACP lawyer and especially Hall as DeLaine, the minister/teacher who may be the most courageous figure depicted in this story.

Although lawyers and lesser courtrooms are a constant prime-time playground, TV scenarists have seemed awed by the sheer supremeness of the Supreme Court, an institution that frequently occupies the nation’s epicenter of political controversy despite its hallowed image.

Yet the legacy of this 1954 school desegregation case affirms that the High Court alone cannot shape national policy. As experts have noted, its rulings require execution and implementation by other government branches, a level of action and leadership attained only sporadically when it came to carrying out Brown vs. Board of Education.

That the execution of this order has come only haltingly and with much foot-dragging and even violence over the years is only hinted at here in a terse footnote at the end of Part 2. It informs us that even after the decision, a black South Carolina youth whose plight helped motivate the case “never attended a desegregated school and never had an opportunity to go to college.”

Rocky stumbles.