Law Professors Reflect on Brown v. Board of Education

phoebewilliamsThe United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is without question one of the most significant cases in modern constitutional law.  It was also a defining event in the lives of a generation of American law teachers.  Vanderbilt University Press has recently published Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education (2009). The book, edited by Professors Mildred Robinson and Richard Bonnie of the University of Virginia, contains forty essays, each written by a law professor who discusses the way that his or her life was affected by the Brown decision.

The forty contributors vary considerably by gender, race, and ethnicity.  A majority, but only a majority, grew up in states where legally segregated schools existed at the time of the Brown decision.  Some are old enough to have remembered the day that the decision was handed down; others were born after it was already the law of the land.  But all, to one extent or another, believe that their personal and professional lives have been profoundly shaped by the Brown decision.

I read Law Touched Our Hearts with great interest.

Although I am too young to remember the actual announcing of the Brown decision — it was handed down two weeks before my second birthday — it was clearly a defining event in my life.  In 1956, my family moved from Giles County, Virginia, where I was born, to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.  Two years earlier, after an attempt to integrate the White Sulphur schools in response to Brown, the town and nation witnessed the first post-Brown, anti-integration riot in the United States which led the county school board to cancel the integration experiment after only one week.  In 1956, integration occurred a second time, this time as the result of a federal court order.  My mother started teaching at White Sulphur Elementary that fall, and when I started school there two years later the fate of integrated education seemed anything but certain.  In 1959, we moved back to Virginia where the schools were completely segregated, and I experienced integration a second time in 1964, when Giles County decided to voluntarily close its black schools and incorporate the entire black and white population into a single school system.  (Incredibly, Giles County was the first county in Virginia to do this.)

I was also interested in Law Touched Our Hearts because eight of the contributors are good friends of mine.  I can say, though, without fear of contradiction, that the most moving and most poignant essay in the entire collection is the one written by my Marquette colleague Phoebe Williams.  Phoebe’s essay, titled “Segregation in Memphis,” tells the story of her experiences as an 8-year old school child in segregated Memphis schools when the Brown decision was handed down.  Although the Brown edict was to be adopted with “all deliberate speed,” the “promises of Brown,” as Phoebe puts it “remained unrealized” in Memphis.  There had been no school integration in Memphis when Phoebe graduated from high school in 1963, and there would be none for years to come.  Her first experience with integrated education came when she enrolled at Marquette as an undergraduate.

Phoebe’s essay wonderfully captured the spirit of optimism that arose with the handing down of the Brown decision, as well as the disappointment that accompanied the failure of southern states to live up to its mandates.

I was already familiar with much of Phoebe’s account because of an appearance she made several years ago in a class on the History of the Civil Rights Movement that I was teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences.  I invited Phoebe to come speak to the class about her experiences growing in the era of segregation.  The students in the class were riveted by her presentation, even though most were northerners and had been born more than two decades after the Brown decision.  Many students later told me that Phoebe’s presentation was the highlight of the class.

I strongly recommend Law Touched Our Hearts to anyone interested in the history of civil rights in the United States, but I insist that anyone with any sort of Marquette connection should read Phoebe Williams’ contribution to the collection (pp. 123-134).

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Milwaukee Foreclosure Mediation Program Kickoff

With a terrific training session last week for our new volunteer attorney-mediators, I am pleased to report that the Milwaukee Foreclosure Mediation Program is moving forward.  You can link here for the website giving the background details (including generous funding by the city and state — see the announcement by the Dean here) and our training materials.  After the training, I have a better idea of how we reached this crisis (with 7500 homes in Milwaukee in foreclosure) and what options might exist for working this out. 

I don’t expect that all of these cases will magically work out (and some are absolutely ripe for litigation).  At the same time, I am optimistic that this program can help people save their homes.  We will start mediating cases soon and will be tracking not only our immediate settlement rate, but whether people are in their homes six months, twelve months, and twenty-four months down the road.

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New Issue of Marquette Law Review

The Summer 2009 issue of the Marquette Law Review (vol. 92, no. 4) is now available on-line.  Congratulations to the editors of Volume 92 for a job well done.  Here are the contents of the new issue, with individual links to each article:

BARROCK LECTURE

THE LEGITIMACY OF POLICE AMONG YOUNG AFRICAN-AMERICAN MEN
Tracey Meares

HALLOWS LECTURE

BEYOND DECISIONAL TEMPLATES: THE ROLE OF IMAGINATIVE JUSTICE IN THE TRIAL COURT
The Honorable Sarah Evans Barker

ARTICLES

DRAINING THE MORASS: ENDING THE JURISPRUDENTIALLY UNSOUND UNPUBLICATION SYSTEM
David R. Cleveland

THE DISAPPOINTED EXPECTATIONS TEST AND THE ECONOMIC LOSS DOCTRINE
Ralph C. Anzivino

INFORMATIONAL BLACKMAIL: SURVIVED BY TECHNICALITY?
Chen Yehudai

COMMENT

“SLICING A SHADOW”: THE DEBATE OVER COMBINED REPORTING AND ITS EFFECT ON WISCONSIN’S BUSINESS CLIMATE
Staci Flinchbaugh

NOTE

JAMIE S. V. MILWAUKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: URBAN CHALLENGES CAUSE SYSTEMIC VIOLATIONS OF THE IDEA
Amy L. MacArdy

SPEECH

LAW REVIEW ANNUAL BANQUET: THE JOY OF LAW
The Honorable William C. Griesbach

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