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It was a brilliantly sunny, early Friday afternoon in September, the kind of memorable day one yearns for in the bleakness of winter. Classes at Columbia had just started, and hundreds of students were clustered along the steps and sidewalks, sunbathing and enjoying their conversations. I hurriedly navigated my way through these human obstacle courses, embarrassed at being uncharacteristically late for my lunch appointment. Finally I could see the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 116th Street, at Columbia’s Law School, and searched frantically for my guest. Cool as a cucumber, Federal Judge Robert Carter was there, patiently waiting for me to arrive. “Not to worry,” Judge Carter smiled warmly, “it’s a lovely day.”
It’s not often that a historian has a lunch date with history. But lunch with Robert Carter was exactly that.
At eighty-six, Carter is still physically trim, dapper in dress, and his mental dexterity is as extraordinarily sharp as it was in court battles a half century ago. Yet for one who has accomplished so much in a celebrated career of public service and social justice advocacy, his manner is remarkably modest. His deep interest in African-American history and especially the experiences of struggle by blacks during Reconstruction, he explained, had helped to motivate him toward pursuing a law degree at Howard University. It was at Howard on November 8, 1938, as a student, that Carter witnessed the legendary civil rights attorney, Charles Hamilton Houston, rehearse the arguments he would employ before the Supreme Court the next day, in what would be called the Gaines case. Hamilton’s victory in Gaines over the all-white law school of the University of Missouri would pave the road toward the ultimate triumph over all segregated education many years later.
After military service during World War II, Carter joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), and quickly rose as second-in-command to the LDF’s charismatic and capable leader, attorney Thurgood Marshall. Judge Carter talked fondly about his early experiences on the LDF staff of the Legal Defense Fund back in the 1940s and 1950s. I reminded him that for a time the offices of Thurgood Marshall and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois were adjacent to each other, much to Du Bois’s displeasure. Carter laughed aloud, recalling Marshall’s habit of caucusing with his talented legal assistants at the end of a hard workday in boisterous, smoke-filled bull sessions around his office at late hours. The constant noise, and not infrequent earthy language, Carter carefully explained, irritated the proper Doctor. Carter’s small office was right down the hall on the same floor, so he was an intimate witness to the sometimes tense relationship between these two icons of black history.
Today, Robert Carter is best known as the original attorney in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, which along with four other cases culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing of legal racial segregation in public schools. But the political story behind this civil rights achievement is too little appreciated.
In 1896, in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court had declared that racially segregated schools were constitutional, provided that all-black schools were “separate but equal” to white schools. In practical terms, however, the separate-but-equal standard created and perpetuated gross inequalities in the educational access of African Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South. The NAACP’s attorneys, first led by Houston, and subsequently by Marshall, launched a series of successful legal challenges against unequal access in higher education over a quarter century. These early cases did not challenge the principle of “separate” head on. But they nevertheless laid the foundation for a direct assault on the legality of Jim Crow Education. It was not until 1950 that Marshall and the NAACP decided that racial segregation could be successfully assaulted in education cases before the high court.
As Marshall’s chief lieutenant, Carter was central in mapping the entire legal strategy. It was Carter who contacted social scientists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose studies establishing the destructive psychological effects of racial exclusion on black children provided an important rationale for their legal argument to outlaw separate schools. Carter and his colleagues argued that the Plessy standard was unconstitutional because it denied equality under the law to Negroes as stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. But hedging their bets, just in case the Supreme Court refused to overturn the Plessy precedent, they also pointed out that even Plessy mandated fully “equal” educational facilities for Negroes. The only way to accomplish this was to integrate all public schools
On May 17, 1954, in a surprisingly unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the LDF, the NAACP and the plaintiffs in Brown and the other cases. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, in his decision, declared: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe it does. . . . We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The Brown decision of 1954 set the legal framework for a mass Black Freedom movement to overturn legal racial segregation in all public accommodations and institutions, which was achieved a decade later with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Robert Carter never underestimated the enormous difficulty of achieving racial fairness through the desegregation of public schools, or the pervasiveness of racial discrimination. At times, Carter and Marshall were at odds; Carter favored a more aggressive legal approach, while Marshall was much more cautious, preferring to litigate only those cases that could be won. Reflecting on the ambiguous legal of the Brown decision in 1994, Carter wrote that “for most black children, Brown’s constitutional guarantee of equal educational opportunity has been an abstraction, having no effect whatever on the educational offerings black children are given or the deteriorating schools they attend.” Carter’s point, I believe, is that behind the formal structures of racial exclusion, lies an even more powerful dynamic of economic and class oppression, which still places under-funded, urban school districts at an enormous disadvantage in comparison to suburban white schools.
As historian James T. Patterson recently noted in his excellent history of the Brown decision and its legacy, by 1998-1999 the vast majority of America’s urban school districts were as racially segregated as they had been a half century earlier. That school year, 90 percent of all public school students in Detroit and Chicago were either African American or Latino. Today, roughly 70 percent of all black children still attend public schools where less than half the student population is white. The promise of equality in Brown still remains unfulfilled.
Yet the examples of Robert Carter, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall set into bold relief the political courage and selfless dedication that will be required to achieve that final victory over structural racism in America. These advocates of civil rights effectively used the courts and the political process to force this nation to implement its own constitutional democratic principles on behalf of all its citizens. That same willingness to directly challenge the institutions of racialized inequality must inform the building of a new movement for social justice, in our own time.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies, and the Director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University in New York. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.
It’s not often that a historian has a lunch date with history. But lunch with Robert Carter was exactly that.
At eighty-six, Carter is still physically trim, dapper in dress, and his mental dexterity is as extraordinarily sharp as it was in court battles a half century ago. Yet for one who has accomplished so much in a celebrated career of public service and social justice advocacy, his manner is remarkably modest. His deep interest in African-American history and especially the experiences of struggle by blacks during Reconstruction, he explained, had helped to motivate him toward pursuing a law degree at Howard University. It was at Howard on November 8, 1938, as a student, that Carter witnessed the legendary civil rights attorney, Charles Hamilton Houston, rehearse the arguments he would employ before the Supreme Court the next day, in what would be called the Gaines case. Hamilton’s victory in Gaines over the all-white law school of the University of Missouri would pave the road toward the ultimate triumph over all segregated education many years later.
After military service during World War II, Carter joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), and quickly rose as second-in-command to the LDF’s charismatic and capable leader, attorney Thurgood Marshall. Judge Carter talked fondly about his early experiences on the LDF staff of the Legal Defense Fund back in the 1940s and 1950s. I reminded him that for a time the offices of Thurgood Marshall and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois were adjacent to each other, much to Du Bois’s displeasure. Carter laughed aloud, recalling Marshall’s habit of caucusing with his talented legal assistants at the end of a hard workday in boisterous, smoke-filled bull sessions around his office at late hours. The constant noise, and not infrequent earthy language, Carter carefully explained, irritated the proper Doctor. Carter’s small office was right down the hall on the same floor, so he was an intimate witness to the sometimes tense relationship between these two icons of black history.
Today, Robert Carter is best known as the original attorney in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, which along with four other cases culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing of legal racial segregation in public schools. But the political story behind this civil rights achievement is too little appreciated.
In 1896, in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court had declared that racially segregated schools were constitutional, provided that all-black schools were “separate but equal” to white schools. In practical terms, however, the separate-but-equal standard created and perpetuated gross inequalities in the educational access of African Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South. The NAACP’s attorneys, first led by Houston, and subsequently by Marshall, launched a series of successful legal challenges against unequal access in higher education over a quarter century. These early cases did not challenge the principle of “separate” head on. But they nevertheless laid the foundation for a direct assault on the legality of Jim Crow Education. It was not until 1950 that Marshall and the NAACP decided that racial segregation could be successfully assaulted in education cases before the high court.
As Marshall’s chief lieutenant, Carter was central in mapping the entire legal strategy. It was Carter who contacted social scientists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose studies establishing the destructive psychological effects of racial exclusion on black children provided an important rationale for their legal argument to outlaw separate schools. Carter and his colleagues argued that the Plessy standard was unconstitutional because it denied equality under the law to Negroes as stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. But hedging their bets, just in case the Supreme Court refused to overturn the Plessy precedent, they also pointed out that even Plessy mandated fully “equal” educational facilities for Negroes. The only way to accomplish this was to integrate all public schools
On May 17, 1954, in a surprisingly unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the LDF, the NAACP and the plaintiffs in Brown and the other cases. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, in his decision, declared: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe it does. . . . We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The Brown decision of 1954 set the legal framework for a mass Black Freedom movement to overturn legal racial segregation in all public accommodations and institutions, which was achieved a decade later with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Robert Carter never underestimated the enormous difficulty of achieving racial fairness through the desegregation of public schools, or the pervasiveness of racial discrimination. At times, Carter and Marshall were at odds; Carter favored a more aggressive legal approach, while Marshall was much more cautious, preferring to litigate only those cases that could be won. Reflecting on the ambiguous legal of the Brown decision in 1994, Carter wrote that “for most black children, Brown’s constitutional guarantee of equal educational opportunity has been an abstraction, having no effect whatever on the educational offerings black children are given or the deteriorating schools they attend.” Carter’s point, I believe, is that behind the formal structures of racial exclusion, lies an even more powerful dynamic of economic and class oppression, which still places under-funded, urban school districts at an enormous disadvantage in comparison to suburban white schools.
As historian James T. Patterson recently noted in his excellent history of the Brown decision and its legacy, by 1998-1999 the vast majority of America’s urban school districts were as racially segregated as they had been a half century earlier. That school year, 90 percent of all public school students in Detroit and Chicago were either African American or Latino. Today, roughly 70 percent of all black children still attend public schools where less than half the student population is white. The promise of equality in Brown still remains unfulfilled.
Yet the examples of Robert Carter, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall set into bold relief the political courage and selfless dedication that will be required to achieve that final victory over structural racism in America. These advocates of civil rights effectively used the courts and the political process to force this nation to implement its own constitutional democratic principles on behalf of all its citizens. That same willingness to directly challenge the institutions of racialized inequality must inform the building of a new movement for social justice, in our own time.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies, and the Director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University in New York. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.