The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring the “separate but equal” segregationist policy in American schools to be unconstitutional and ordering their desegregation, was handed down on this date in 1954. It resulted from a suit brought by Esther Brown, a 30-year-old Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, who learned from her African-American maid about the abysmal conditions at the all-black two-room Walker School, which lacked indoor plumbing, a cafeteria, and even a principal. Brown complained to her all-white school board, then stepped up her efforts, recruited the local chapter of the NAACP, and hired a black attorney. She raised money for the legal battle, making pitches at a Billie Holiday concert and other venues, then organized a boycott of the Walker School and helped set up private educational networks instead. During the course of her efforts, she was threatened with harm, a cross was burned in her yard, and her husband was fired from his job — but she won her suit in the Kansas Supreme Court in 1949. She then helped the NAACP bring the issue of school segregation to the U.S. Supreme Court, using thirteen black parents, and their twenty elementary school-age children as plaintiffs — with the list headed by Oliver Brown (no relation), for whom the case was named, and his daughter Linda, a third-grader. Esther Brown died in 1970. Five years later, a public park across from the former site of the Walker School was dedicated in her honor.
“I don’t know if we could have done it without her.” —Linda Todd, Topeka branch of the NAACP
Denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall in segregated Washington, D.C., Marian Anderson gave an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial on this date in 1939. The event was arranged by her Jewish manager, Sol Hurok, with the backing of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who resigned from the DAR in protest), Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Walter White, president of the NAACP. An audience of 75,000 (including 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.) attended, and the concert was nationally broadcast. Anderson, by then a world-renowned contralto, had previously been subjected to racial discrimination, including in Princeton, New Jersey, where she was turned away from hotel accommodations during a concert tour in 1937 — and ended up being hosted by Albert Einstein, who became her fast friend. To see her singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (after an introduction by Harold Ickes), see below.
Hurok “understood that booking Constitution Hall was a matter of toppling centuries of oppression in Washington, DC, and he enlisted the help of the city’s two most experienced civil rights leaders: NAACP President Walter White and Howard University professor Charles Cohen. While Hurok gradually created inroads with the DAR, White and Cohen planned the Anderson camp’s response to the eventual refusal, from courting alternative concert venues to contacting Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes about the concert. In January 1939, Hurok finally revealed to the DAR his goal for Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall, but the management of the hall denied the booking.” —Persephone Magazine
Anti-racist consciousness seems to be stirring anew in our country, reawakened, at least in part, by the best-selling success of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by civil rights attorney and law professor Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 2012). The New Jim Crow has been talked about all over the media, and is being studied in activist circles in several states. The San Francisco Chronicle has described it as “the bible of a social movement.” (See Cheryl Greenberg’s review of the book.)
Alexander argues, with tons of data to back her, that the War on Drugs launched by President Richard Nixon more than forty years ago has targeted and decimated black and Hispanic communities, even though illegal drug use actually occurs at the same frequency across racial and ethnic lines. With non-whites arrested and convicted for drug crimes at much higher rates than whites, Alexander observes, some 60 percent of the world-record 2.3 million people in prison today are non-white — out of a U.S. population that is about 13 percent African-American and nearly 17 percent Hispanic. The result, Alexander says, is a justice system that is more about social control of people of color than about protecting society from crime. After all, [click to continue…]
Imagine that police routinely set up road blocks and conduct blood-alcohol level tests on nearly every driver. They raid bars to find underage drinkers with fake IDs, then move to the parking lot to test drivers getting into their cars. They interrupt college parties to arrest those under 21 holding a drink in their hands, and scour dormitories for those drinking in their rooms. Every underage drinker, every driver with a DUI, is tried and imprisoned with a mandatory minimum sentence, and their cars are impounded. Each bartender and owner is arrested and sentenced as well, and their places of business are seized by the police and sold to benefit their departments.
Imagine hundreds of thousands of non-violent people, many of them young and with no prior records, finding themselves behind bars for years on end, disenfranchised for life, excluded from many jobs and universities, barred from receiving public aid or housing, and permanently stigmatized. Their families would be destroyed, their futures poisoned. Many would end up on Skid Row.
We would all be up in arms.
This is the reality, every day, for young black and brown people in America, thanks to the forty-year-old War on Drugs. Michelle Alexander, formerly the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California and now an associate professor of law, has written a powerful, moving book about the mass incarceration engendered by that war, and the many political pressures and economic and social realities behind it. Her basic argument is that an interlocking complex of law enforcement discretion, conscious and unconscious racial bias, mandatory sentencing policies, inadequacies of the legal system for indigent defendants, Supreme Court decisions limiting appeals, and the economic importance of the prison and parole apparatuses, combine to create and maintain a system of racial control — a system that has replaced Jim Crow in our now supposedly colorblind society. While not every aspect of the current system is rooted in, or relies on, racism, its genesis and many of the reasons for its expansion have been explicitly racist, Alexander suggests. “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed,” she writes. “It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.” [click to continue…]
By Rabbi Jonathan Kligler Woodstock Jewish Congregation I want to describe two reasons why the New Jim Crow, the system of mass incarceration, is a Jewish issue, and why I wanted our synagogue to host this gathering. The first reason should be self-evident: the central Jewish narrative is our story of how we originated as [...]
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key force in the civil rights movement, was launched on this date in 1957, the brainchild of Martin Luther King, Jr., who became the SCLC’s president, Ella Baker, who was the organization’s sole staffer for several years, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levison, a Communist attorney and businessman. The organization [...]
Roland Gittelsohn, a Reform rabbi who was the first Jewish chaplain ever appointed by the U.S Marine Corps and served the invading forces at Iwo Jima, died at 85 on this date in 1995. Gittelsohn was a critic of McCarthyism in the 1950s and an early, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He also served [...]
A prisoner takeover of Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security penitentiary in western New York, was crushed on this date in 1971 when Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller sent in more than 1,000 state troopers, National Guardsmen, and local police. Forty-three people, including ten hostages, were killed and eighty were wounded during the assault, which was [...]
On this date in 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the findings of research by Drs. David M. Spain and Daniel J. Nathan linking heavy smoking to heart disease. In a study of 3,000 men, they found that two-packs-per-day smokers under 51 years old had double the chance of having coronary heart [...]
President Lyndon Baines Johnson unveiled his plans for “The Great Society” in a speech at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on this date in 1964. (To hear his speech, click here.) The phrase was coined by speechwriter Richard N. Goodwin, who had been secretary-general of the Peace Corps and an advisor on Latin America [...]
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring the “separate but equal” segregationist policy in American schools to be unconstitutional and ordering their desegregation, was handed down on this date in 1954. It resulted from a suit brought by Esther Brown, a 30-year-old Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, who learned from her African-American maid about the abysmal conditions at the all-black two-room Walker School, which lacked indoor plumbing, a cafeteria, and even a principal. Brown complained to her all-white school board, then stepped up her efforts, recruited the local chapter of the NAACP, and hired a black attorney. She raised money for the legal battle, making pitches at a Billie Holiday concert and other venues, then organized a boycott of the Walker School and helped set up private educational networks instead. During the course of her efforts, she was threatened with harm, a cross was burned in her yard, and her husband was fired from his job — but she won her suit in the Kansas Supreme Court in 1949. She then helped the NAACP bring the issue of school segregation to the U.S. Supreme Court, using thirteen black parents, and their twenty elementary school-age children as plaintiffs — with the list headed by Oliver Brown (no relation), for whom the case was named, and his daughter Linda, a third-grader. Esther Brown died in 1970. Five years later, a public park across from the former site of the Walker School was dedicated in her honor.
