discriminatory practices in voting, education, and housing made it impossible to think that equal protection of the laws could be maintained by action in one field alone: the overall problem had 9 to be simultaneously attacked on all fronts."

On the 20th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, then, it seems appropriate for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to commemorate the Supreme Court's decision with an examination of civil rights progress between 1954 and 1974. We wish to honor Brown by showing that it is a decision which continually affects one of the most vital areas in the life of our Nation. We wish to

commemorate Brown by relating the Supreme Court's judicial pronouncement to the lives of human beings.

During this anniversary year, the Commission will publish a series of concise reports summarizing the status of civil rights in education, employment, housing, public accommodations, political

In which ways,

participation, and the administration of justice. and to what extent, have the lives of black Americans and members of other minority groups changed? Where has progress been made, where has it been limited, where has it been nonexistent, and why? How is Brown as yet largely unfulfilled? What must be done to bring

about the racial equality affirmed by the Supreme Court 20 years ago?

9. Dulles, The Civil Rights Commission, p. 79.

The Commission seeks through these reports to commemorate Brown v. Board of Education as a landmark, a divide in American race relations--as the starting point for a second American revolution. If that revolution, within the limits of American law and based upon the law, has not been concluded, this is more a comment on those of us who have been called upon to complete the task than on the judgment which set the task in the beginning.

This first report in the series provides a brief historical

background for the reports which follow.

Their first steps in this

Linda Brown was only 7 years old when her father, the Reverend Oliver Brown, took her by the hand for the short walk to Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas. unsuccessful attempt to enroll Linda in the second grade at the "white" school four blocks from their home marked the beginning of a long struggle to open segregated schools to black children everywhere. One year later, Reverend Brown filed suit against the school board of Topeka. After 3 more years, on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v. Board of Education.

Even though her family lived in an integrated neighborhood, Linda could not attend Sumner because she was black, and 24 years later Linda still recalls the hurt and bewilderment she felt each fall when she had to leave her white and Mexican American playmates and travel almost 2 miles to a "Negro" school. In describing the circumstances that led her father to press her case against Topeka's segregated school system, Linda now remembers:

Both of my parents were extremely upset by
the fact that I had to walk six blocks
through a dangerous train yard to the
bus stop--only to wait, sometimes up to
half an hour in the rain or snow, for the
school bus that took me and the other black
children nearly 2 miles to "our school."
Sometimes I was just so cold that I cried
all the way to the bus stop...and two or

8

It was her father's reaction to the news that Linda had

returned home crying on one of those bitterly cold days that prompted
him to act. Linda recalls: "Mother said that she had never seen him
so angry. He was so fed up with the cruelty and injustice of it all
that he decided then and there this was going to have to stop." Her
memories of the day when her father confronted the principal at
Sumner are still vivid:

Daddy told me, "I know that they aren't
going to accept you, but I'm going to

try. I remember him going into the
office with the principal. I don't
know what they said, but they spoke
very sharply. We walked home that
morning very briskly. My father was
holding my hand, and I could just feel
the tension in him.

"Naturally," Linda's mother remembers, "the principal gave the expected excuse: there wasn't anything he could do about it--Negro children couldn't attend Sumner because of the school board's policies." But after the refusal, Reverend Brown contacted his friend and former classmate at Topeka High School, Charles Scott. Reverend Brown was a member of the Topeka branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Mr. Scott

10.

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are taken from interviews with Linda Brown Smith and her mother, Leola Brown Montgomery, on December 7, 1973, Topeka, Kansas.

was the local NAACP attorney. They agreed that a suit against the school board was their best hope for relief.

Oliver Brown soon was joined in his suit by 12 other black parents acting in behalf of their children, and the case was taken to the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. A three-judge panel subsequently held that segregation impaired the development of black school children, but the judges said that, so long as school facilities and programs were substantially equal, no relief could be provided. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

Almost at the same time, the issues raised in the Kansas case were being raised in four other cases which eventually were decided 11

on the same day as Brown. These cases were from South Carolina,

Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.

In each case,

school segregation was the basic complaint, and in each case testimony from social scientists was presented to show the

psychological harm inflicted by such segregation.

Not only were

black children damaged, according to the evidence, but also the view was expressed that white children could not avoid the scars produced by racial exclusion. In various ways, each of these cases made its way to the Nation's highest court.

11. For a full description of the school segregation cases, see Daniel M. Berman, It is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on on School Segregation (New York: Norton, 1966), upon which this summary is based.