[Joseph DeLaine Sr.] was forced to leave [Summerton, S.C.] and take a church in a neighboring county … which was in the town of Lake City, S.C. That church provided a parsonage and required that the pastor live there. So, he split his residency between Summerton and Lake City. It was just after that occurred [in 1951] that the home in Summerton was burned. And when the house burned, the fire department refused to put the flames out, saying it was 20 feet across the town line. When my father went to collect the insurance on the house, it had already been paid to settle this [libel] judgment [to a corrupt school principal DeLaine had insisted be fired].
When the second Supreme Court decision came down, which was the one that said “with all deliberate speed”–there was also the development of the White Citizens’ Council, which sort of replaced, in a sense, the [Ku Klux Klan]. The secretary of the White Citizens’ Council for the state was an attorney from Summerton who also represented the Elliott faction in Briggs v. Elliott. And he came to Lake City.
Over the next two or three months, there were a series of [attacks] against the church parsonage where my father was residing. And in one case, a license number of a car was recorded and reported to the police. The police told my father, “Preacher, you don’t know how to read. Buy yourself some glasses. This number, this license plate, is invalid.”
It was not an invalid license number. The situation culminated around the first of October 1955. Then a letter arrived giving my father 10 days to leave town or die. In that letter it said, “If you don’t leave, the same thing will happen to you that happened to the black postmaster in town.” And they were referring to a case, I believe, in 1898 when a black postmaster was assigned to Lake City, and he refused to resign. He was forced to watch his house burn, while some of his children burned in the house. And then he was shot. So this was to be a reminder of what they could do.
Seven days after that letter arrived, the church adjacent to the parsonage went up in flames. And it was arson: the first accusation was that my brother loved to play with matches. However, my brother was away in his first year of college at that point. The report that was given to the FBI was that the people in the church were fighting among themselves, and one group burned the church to spite the other group. Three days after the church burned, there was … I guess we can call it a posse, a delegation, or what have you, appeared about midnight shooting around the house. This subsided, and on the third time that the volley of shootings occurred, my father shot back. And it is alleged by news reports that he injured three people.
Anyway, he fled and, of course, with help, ended up in New York. There are many stories as to how he got out. Most of them were false to protect people who helped him leave. Now, the people we know [who helped are] one lawyer and the other was the president of the Forest County NAACP, both of whom lived in Florence, [S.C.].
The state of New York had heard about the case and indicated that they would not honor extradition. He was then given the task of starting a new church in Buffalo, N.Y. So, when I came home from Korea, I met them in Buffalo … And he had picked up some members. Three fourths of them were from the South, and he had pastored their parents or even some of them in earlier years in the South.
In the meanwhile, a Calvary Church in Brooklyn that had a lot of members from South Carolina had been requesting him as pastor from the time he first came to New York. Each time, it was pushed over and ignored. And so he was finally told that he would be given that church. When the announcement came out, he didn’t get it. He got a church in New Rochelle, N.Y., with about 12 members. After that, he was assigned to the Calvary Church that had been requesting him for two years or better. He stayed there until his retirement in 1970. And then he moved to Charlotte.
I believe he had cancer at the time and knew it. But we didn’t know it. And he wanted to get my mother closer to her family. What he had done is purchase a lot next door to her brother in Charlotte and then requested that I see that a house be built there for them. So that was the motivation to come to Charlotte; that’s as close as he could get to South Carolina.
We firmly believe if it hadn’t been for what Daddy did at the time–he and Thurgood Marshall and Judge [Julius Waties] Waring–we possibly, in this country, would still be in a segregated state. All those men helped to set a stage for the Supreme Court to take a certain action. After that, other people started taking action. Even though we [his three children] did not attend integrated schools, I think there are some tremendous benefits that we have had because of the Brown decision. I don’t think that any of the three of us ever would have acquired the positions or jobs that we had if it were not for the Brown case.
Russell Simmons, founder and CEO of Rush Communications:
I think the [Brown] decision had something important to do with my ability to integrate across races and cultures and to help my companies thrive. I was bused to school. My being bused helped me get to know other people. It allowed me to move beyond my community.
I have a house in East Hampton. It never occurred to me that I had to be in Sag Harbor, where most blacks live. There were no black clothing companies before Phat Farm. I never knew what I wasn’t supposed to do or be as a black American.
I don’t know that I would be where I am today [if not for the Brown decision]. We’d all be in less fortunate positions. But I have to recognize what integration did to the black community. Forced integration was necessary but brutal in its impact within the black community–specifically on black businesses. Black lawyers, black doctors and black pharmacists who had been necessary in black communities were no longer necessary after the decision.
Our lack of self-esteem even played a part in companies and people from outside our communities taking over our businesses. When I look at it analytically, [integration] affected businesses in the black community negatively. But what I see for me are all these opportunities. Many blacks now have retaken the black market rather than accepting the opportunity of integrating their ideas into the broader society. Phat Farm, my company, is an American clothing company, not a black clothing company, as white businesspeople often refer to it. That lack of vision by white corporations, or older people who run them, means they haven’t accepted the diversity that’s in America. That is how we, my company, built upon our opportunity–by capitalizing on their not appreciating what integration is.
I was recently on the Macy’s department store main floor. They had Phat Farm, Sean John and Rocawear–all black-owned–on the floor. In the corner was Ralph Lauren’s Polo, Tommy Hilfilger, Nautica, Calvin Klein. All of them were ice cold. They are distributed by major multibillion-dollar companies, and none have invested in the new companies that are black-owned. That is because of their lack of vision.
You know there are still race issues in business. So even after the Brown case, there is a lot more struggling to do. It’s not so much a legal thing. It’s in the mind. Beyond that, the laws changing did have a dramatic effect. I certainly see America having become better at promoting itself as a melting pot. The next generation promises us something much better.
Brown had nothing to do with running videos from black artists on MTV. The black faces that got on were about the continuing struggle by young people. That kind of thing has a much greater effect on the psyche of America than even legal decisions. It is equally important that kids are making these changes and taking these positions regarding race.
White kids, by the way, are smarter than their parents because of school integration. The doctrine of white supremacy isn’t as heavy on them, so that I can work with the children and do something cool. But for the black community, it was devastating. Many black businesspeople still have the mind-set that we have to do things for blacks only–when there is the opportunity to do something for everyone, no matter of race. Look at what Ebony magazine was able to do, and what Bob Johnson was able to do with BET. But then look at what MTV 1 and MTV 2 did by taking advantage of hip-hop. There’s nothing to prevent a black hair-care company from marketing goods to whites.
There’s still is no equality of education in this country today. Many people don’t like the idea of distributing the nation’s resources in a way that will allow for that. We are still fighting to get equal education, despite Brown. That is an American goal we still haven’t realized. We are going backward. I know my children’s schools in Saddle River [N.J.] are like those in the inner city. There are nice schools here in New York and really horrible ones. The idea of equal education is one that we still have to work on.
Hodding Carter III, president and chief executive officer of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and former assistant secretary of State for public affairs:
“It’s a calamity. Obviously we have to change, but the idea of doing it by judicial edict is all wrong,” [Carter’s initial reaction to Brown, while a student at Princeton University]. I offer that up because I think that was the moderate reaction in much of the white South. I also offer it up because it was an accurate statement about where I was in 1954. It also needs to be noted that my father [publisher and editor of the Greenville, Miss., Delta Democrat-Times]–who was to write an editorial two days later saying that this was the law of the land and it needed to be treated as such, though it would take time–had prior to the decision, great Southern moderate that he was, been opposed to a sweeping judicial edict on the subject.
The pressures on my father were tremendous because he had come back from the war in 1945 and written a series of editorials mostly attacking the racial demagogues in Mississippi, for which he won the Pulitzer. He was also to write a series of books, which, however conservative they look in retrospect, had already marked him as a scalliwag, the worse sort of betrayer of the heritage.
Within two months [of the high-court decision], what became known as the Citizens’ Councils, sometime incorrectly called the White Citizens’ Councils, because that’s what they were, formed in a neighboring town. He attacked them right away [and] was promptly labeled a liar by the legislature. And he promptly told them to go to hell. It was war thereafter.
Mind you, we had a lot of friends. We had a lot of supporters, even though they didn’t agree with us editorially. We were not busy trying to establish that we were some outsider’s brand of wonderful crusader. These were Southerners talking to Southerners.
In 1966, I gave a talk when I was a Nieman fellow at Harvard to a bunch of Radcliff students. Its title was supposed to be “What Next for the South?” About that same time, Julian Bond, even younger than he was when he showed up in 1968 at the Democratic Convention, was talking at Harvard. And I told them if they really wanted to hear the really good fire-eating statements they had to go listen to Julian but that I would say this about the South, that “it was not going to be a great trick getting the South up to the North’s high moral plateau. The trick was going to be when everybody discovered how low that was. And now that the South had acclimated to the Northerners’ morality, would the North still have a taste for moving on.” I got booed. Not many years later, when the federal troops were being deployed around Boston to enforce desegregation, I said, “I want to give a set of remarks that I gave a few years ago in the same city.” This happened to be to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund annual convention, and they gave me a standing ovation, because by that time Martin Luther King had been run out of Chicago, the nation had turned away from its commitments as expressed as recently as the late 1960s in the Civil Rights Acts.
So where are we today? We have postponed a final reckoning with the reality that race and the mishandling of race has been at the center of the American experience forever. It wasn’t just at the center of the Southern experience, but of the American. Having [ended] Jim Crow, we are not far enough advanced on the question of “What now?” There is a general feeling in the white community that “Haven’t we already dealt with that?” and in the black [of] “I’m not sure I want to be a member of that club, in the old integrationist sense.”
It took so long to get to the crest of belief and pressure that has so marked the period from the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s. You had to have a whole new form of looking at man’s history. You had to have a whole set of social-gospel preachers laying out a whole doctrine about what it was that Christianity had to say about race. You had to have a whole set of new Americans, no longer just WASPS or Irish-Catholics or whatever. Had to have at least some other notional ideas about the complexity of human relations, the whole arguments about who ought to naturally be on top. Well, right now, strangely enough, we have most of the ingredients for a damn good ongoing discussion, but there is virtually no political will for it.
I used to give a set speech that said, “No racial change has ever come in the United States without presidential leadership.” That is not to say that movements did not arise before presidents moved. But as far as actually pushing the ball in a significant way, you had to have a president who was willing to take a major initiative and speak to the question. Other than that, things tended to be extremely difficult.
George Wallace’s old great remark about the limousine liberals is now just a fact. The leadership class basically has abandoned the public schools. And when the leadership class ducks out, you don’t have to worry about whether [schools] are integrated or not, you just have to know that the amount that is really going to go into making them of mutual benefit to everybody is going to be severely diminished.
I think that this nation is going to be fundamentally altered for the worse if we essentially accept as a given that an integrated society is no longer achievable or desirable. The issue is now beyond black and white, it’s all about what kind of a society we are going to have of Asian, African, South African, and all of the other permutations. You can have a nation eternally divided by these kinds of racial and other breakdowns, but it won’t be the United States of America or the conception that drove the United States of America, however imperfectly, for so many decades and centuries.
Elaine Jones, outgoing president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund:
You know, I was in elementary school when Brown was decided. They shut down the schools of Virginia for a while right after the decision. They had to open up churches for us. We would go there and have classes and we did that for about a month. I haven’t seen that in the history books. But that’s what happened in ‘54, between the two decisions. We knew something had happened–all the adults walking around, whispering, carrying on. Something momentous had taken place. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew it affected the schools. And so I knew something was wrong with the system. And somehow I felt that I could change it.
I went to law school because I had come from the South, from Norfolk. I remember the segregated water fountains. I was a little girl growing up in that. And all the policemen were white, walking down the streets with guns on their hips. Blacks would go down to the police station, never [to be] heard from again. And, although your parents decided to shelter you, it really was an oppressive environment.
I was looking for some lawful way to change the system. And I thought that courts could do it, maybe. Also, I had gone to court as a young girl around the age of 12 and had won a case against a dentist. I came home from school one day–I had a toothache and I went to the dentist; he gave me full-mouth X-rays and I went on home. Later he sent a bill that my parents declined to pay, because they said he had no permission from any adult to do a thing to me.
We went down to court, and I never will forget it. The lawyer for the dentist was there, and I stood up. The judge asked me, “Young lady, did you have permission to go to the dental offices?” And I had a moment of indecision. I wondered, “Should I lie?” ‘Cause if I had said yes, I thought it would make me look good for the court. That would look more obedient. And if I said, “No, I didn’t have permission,” it would look like I was rebellious, a bad girl. I decided to tell the truth. And then [the judge] said, “Does every child that walks into this office have a full thing of X-rays? This is on him.”
After college, I wanted a break. That’s why I went to the Peace Corps. I went to Turkey for a couple of years. I applied to law school from Turkey. My idea was, I was going to apply to the University of Virginia [in Charlottesville], knowing that I would be rejected. Virginia, like most other states, would pay your way to go to an out-of-state university if you qualified to go to the state university [and were rejected for racial reasons]. And they called my bluff. That’s how I ended up in Charlottesville.
[In the 1950s] black people had no way of voting. We couldn’t have impacted the political system in any way because we didn’t have the vote. The executives did not care we were locked out. And so the only place you had a shot in this free government system we had was the court. And even the courts were not welcoming. That’s what was so brilliant about the strategy–to make white men in America who are privileged have some sense of duty; to believe that you could go into a segregated court system and make a change. And to believe that so firmly, because judges went to law school and you knew they could understand lack of equality. That was why you had all those cases. They were law-school cases.
So I went to law school because I wanted to be like Thurgood Marshall. I got temporarily sidetracked because I got a job offer with Mr. [Richard] Nixon’s law firm paying $18,000 a year, which was big money. The average nonprofit job was paying $7,000, $7,500. So I initially accepted that job my third year; and then I felt guilty about it, because I knew that was not why I had gone to law school. And so finally around Christmastime I reneged, I told them I would not be coming. I was jobless. And the [law school] dean told me to come to New York and see his friend Jack Greenberg [the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund]. It was 1970.
I came to New York for that interview, I went into the offices, and no one was there; it was about midday. I wondered what was going on. I sat there for about an hour, found out they’d had a bomb scare.
This [country] could have gone for the separate but equal. So that part of Brown worked–in business, in lots of places it has worked. And we can celebrate. [But] public education, 50 years later [remains segregated].
If this country wants to stay at the top of its game and continue to be the leading nation in the world, you can’t do it if we don’t educate our kids. These black and brown kids are going to be the majority.
We have to find a way [to motivate people] and that’s the challenge in 2004. We have to find a way of getting this issue on the lists of most Americans. The first question we’ve got to ask as a nation is, “Do we still believe in government education?” I don’t know the answer to that, but we need to discuss it across this country, in every school district. And we can’t leave it to the educators and the principals and the policy writers to have this discussion.
