Brown v. Board of Education: Dictator “Barack Obama” Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Destruction of Constitutional Government

 

 

Playing “the Brown Card”: How the Supreme Court’s Unconstitutional Brown Decision Shut Down American Legal and Political Discourse on Race and Destroyed Constitutionalism
By Nicholas Stix
April 3, 2011
WEJB/NSU

It was after Brown that “progressive” elites (their ranks already beginning to swell with the post-war expansion of the law and graduate schools) came to “regard the Constitution not as a form of government but as a means of getting what they want,” as Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard puts it. Over the last four decades the corpus of constitutional law has increased vastly as courts have removed issue after issue from the arena of popular decision and subjected them to judicial control. The law schools reflect that change. Constitutional law, usually a one-semester elective for second-year law students in 1960, today has migrated into the required first-year curriculum, and the great national law schools offer 20 to 30 second- and third-year courses devoted to the subject. And what do they learn? One popular con law text book actually begins with Brown instead of Marbury v. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall first laid out the Court’s much more modest claim of judicial review in 1803.

There has been opposition to all this, of course, but opponents are hobbled by fear of what has come to be called “the Brown card.” The scenario is familiar: after arguing that some particular judicial initiative or other is without foundation in text, or original understanding, or history, and is therefore illegitimate, the critic of judicial activism is faced with the question, “Well then, you must be opposed to Brown v. Board of Education.” Instantly darkness descends; the critic feels the stab of panic. For affirming the correctness of Brown is now conventionally understood to be a minimum qualification for being taken seriously in polite society: to criticize Brown is to risk being called a racist. Suddenly the issue is not one of intellectual disputation but of social respectability. Therefore the critic scrambles: “Yes, I support Brown as a marvelous achievement of judicial statesmanship; it is just looking to Brown as the model for constitutional judging that I condemn.” So ingrained has this reflex become on the part of critics of judicial activism that it is often offered in an anticipatory fashion, so as to ward off attack and embarrassment.

An example is an otherwise excellent article by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon in a recent issue of Commentary. Glendon deplored the “expansion of the role of the judiciary in American life” exemplified by Justice William Brennan. Quite correctly, she saw Brown as ushering in the style of judging to which she was objecting. But she was at pains to distinguish between the “effects of Brown on the legal profession and on the legal order as a whole” and the Brown decision itself. She held that “although scholars may argue about its foundations in constitutional text and tradition,” Brown was indeed “a great act of statesmanship.”

The truth, of course, is that scholars do not argue very much about Brown’s “foundations in constitutional text and tradition.” Agreement is widespread that solid foundations did not exist. But if nevertheless Brown is still to be elevated as an act of great statesmanship, then how was Justice Brennan wrong to believe that the Court possesses both the power and the duty “to promote social and political change,” the view that Glendon opposes? Perhaps Glendon would argue that the Court was justified in 1954 in acting in an extra-constitutional fashion because of the moral gravity and magnitude of the issue, but that one is still free to deplore the later extra-constitutional rulings of the Court, modeled on Brown, because these respond to matters of lesser import. Many commentators resort to this position, but it is untenable. Once one admits a role in one case for the Court as extra-constitutional promoter and architect for social change, it is impossible to explain why that justification should not apply to other situations.

[“Coming Clean about Brown,” by Richard E. Morgan, City Journal, Summer 1996.]

The best critique I know of the Brown decision available online is by historian Raymond Wolters: “Constitutional History, Social Science, and Brown v. Board of Education 1954–1964.”

“Part I: The Historical and Social Science Evidence for and Against Brown”; and

“Part II: The Continuing Controversy.”

The problem with Brown wasn’t simply that the wrong means were used to achieve a just end; the end itself was unjust.
 

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
May 15, 2014

Presidential Proclamation -- 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

60TH ANNIVERSARY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

May 17, 1954, marked a turning point in America's journey toward a more perfect Union. On that day, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing racial segregation in our Nation's schools. Brown overturned the doctrine of "separate but equal," which the Court had established in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. For more than half a century, Plessy gave constitutional backing to discrimination, and civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People faced an uphill battle as they sought equality, opportunity, and justice under the law.

Brown v. Board of Education shifted the legal and moral compass of our Nation. It declared that education "must be made available to all on equal terms" and demanded that America's promise exclude no one. Yet the Supreme Court alone could not destroy segregation. Brown had unlocked the schoolhouse doors, but even years later, African-American children braved mobs as they walked to school, while U.S. Marshals kept the peace. From lunch counters and city streets to buses and ballot boxes, American citizens struggled to realize their basic rights. A decade after the Court's ruling, Brown's moral guidance was translated into the enforcement measures of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Thanks to the men and women who fought for equality in the courtroom, the legislature, and the hearts and minds of the American people, we have confined legalized segregation to the dustbin of history. Yet today, the hope and promise of Brown remains unfulfilled. In the years to come, we must continue striving toward equal opportunities for all our children, from access to advanced classes to participation in the same extracurricular activities. Because when children learn and play together, they grow, build, and thrive together.

On the 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, let us heed the words of Justice Thurgood Marshall, who so ably argued the case against segregation, "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody...bent down and helped us pick up our boots." Let us march together, meet our obligations to one another, and remember that progress has never come easily -- but even in the face of impossible odds, those who love their country can change it.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 17, 2014, as the 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with programs, ceremonies, and activities that celebrate this landmark decision and advance the causes of equality and opportunity for all.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand fourteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA