How Thurgood Marshall Paved the Road to ‘Brown v. Board of Education’
by Sherrilyn Ifill/Smithsonianmag.com
The following essay from Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, covers the five-year-span from 1949 to 1954. Ifill describes the long campaign of desegregation cases brought by Thurgood Marshall, then president of the Legal Defense Fund, focusing on a suit that arose out of Hearne, Texas. World War II and its aftermath exposed the contrast to fighting fascism abroad while the system of Jim Crow governed the American South. The school system of Hearne, Texas, produced a stark example of this contradiction when, following a fire that destroyed the black high school, the white school superintendent decided that the barracks that once housed German prisoners of war should become the new segregated school. Ifill’s essay captures the long struggle for educational equality in the United States.
In 1948, U.S. officials vigorously prosecuted German war criminals in Nuremberg for enforcing anti-Semitic policies, practices and laws that advanced a theory of ethnic and religious inferiority of Jews. At the same time, state officials across the American South were enforcing segregationist policies, practices and laws that advanced a theory of white supremacy and the racial inferiority of African Americans, undisturbed by the federal government.
Carol graduated from Riverside White Cross School of Nursing in Columbus, Ohio and received her diploma as a registered nurse. She attended Bowling Green State University where she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History and Literature. She attended the University of Toledo, College of Nursing, and received a Master’s of Nursing Science Degree as an Educator.
She has traveled extensively, is a photographer, and writes on medical issues. Carol has three children RJ, Katherine, and Stephen – one daughter-in-law; Katie – two granddaughters; Isabella Marianna and Zoe Olivia – and one grandson, Alexander Paul. She also shares her life with her husband Gordon Duff, many cats, and two rescues.
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Whether anyone likes it or not, the African American slaves who were “freed” after the War between the States, were in general a severely psychologically and socially damaged group.
Considering the circumstances of their new status and how it was obtained, plus the lack of a broad awareness of the crippled condition they were in at the time, it is regrettably understandable to see how the subsequent course of events unfolded.
But time heals all wounds they say, and if there weren’t certain factions deliberately preventing a full healing process, we would all be a lot better off.
Regardless of that, I believe it could be said; “we’ve come a long way baby!”
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