Not So Supreme

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re marking the 99th running of the Indianapolis 500 this weekend with a show that’s all about speed in American history.

BRIAN: In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its famous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Racial segregation in public schools, the court said, deprived children of their right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Oliver W. Hill was a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Richmond, Virginia at the time.

He and his colleagues were filing case after case against segregation, including one initiated by a student protest in Prince Edward County, Virginia. That was one of the five cases folded into Brown. And when the Brown ruling came down–

OLIVER HILL, JR.: It was the happiest I’d ever seen him.

BRIAN: This is Oliver Hill, Jr. He remembers his dad’s reaction to Brown because it was so out of character.

OLIVER HILL, JR.: I mean, he was always pretty low key. He didn’t really emote that much, around the household anyway. And that particular day, I just remember him just beaming.

ED: But the joy didn’t last. The very next year, the Supreme Court mandated a timetable for desegregation. And that’s when speed became an issue. In a case known as Brown vs. Board 2, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered segregated school districts to comply with the first Brown decision, quote, “with all deliberate speed.”

It was a phrase with built-in ambiguity. And across the South, many school districts took advantage of the ambiguity to take their own sweet time with the order. Some districts in Virginia chose to close their public schools down entirely, while funding so-called private academies for white boys and girls.

BRIAN: I sat down with Oliver Hill Jr. to talk about this depressing chapter of American history. He told me that his father was part of the legal team that was asked to help the court come up with a timetable in Brown 2.

OLIVER HILL, JR.: And in fact, after they had made a few proposals to the opposing counsel and all of them were rejected, my father said they finally, just in exasperated way, asked, well, what do you think would be a reasonable time frame? And the other lawyers came back with 2020. So–

BRIAN: 2020?

OLIVER HILL, JR.: 2020 was what they thought would be a reasaonable–

BRIAN: So we’re not there yet.

OLIVER HILL, JR.: We’re not there yet. And I think deliberate speed was the most benign translation of 2020.

BRIAN: Do you think that deliberate undercut speed, or do you think that it was intended to kind of reinforce a steady– I have always interpreted it as a kind of steady speed.

OLIVER HILL, JR.: Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable interpretation. But again, I think from the standpoint of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers, why was there a need for any kind of equivocation? This is now the law of the land. Let’s Institute it.

BRIAN: Right.

OLIVER HILL, JR.: The white perception was, particularly in the South, that there would be this bloodbath if it took place too fast. And so I think it was to placate the more southern-leaning members of the court that Earl Warren kind of agreed to that phrasing. And I think that within a year or two, deliberate speed meant never.

[LAUGHTER]

OLIVER HILL, JR.: I mean, I was in one of the first groups to desegregate schools in Richmond, Virginia. And that was in 1961, so that was already seven years after the original decision. And even at that time, it was really just token integration. There were just a few black students in a few white schools.

BRIAN: Tell me about your experience, being one of the first African-Americans to desegregate a school?

OLIVER HILL, JR.: It was like entering another world. In the days of segregation in the South, even growing up in a middle class household, my world was circumscribed by the black community. It was very self-sufficient. So I really didn’t have a lot of experience interacting with white people.

And so this first day, it was at Chandler Junior High school in Richmond. I must’ve been 12. And I was walking up the steps. It was a very imposing building. They must have had us come late, because there wasn’t the usual hustle and bustle of kids going in and out of the school.

There was absolutely nobody out in front of the school as I was walking up the steps. I really didn’t know what to expect. And it was interesting. I mean, for the most part, most of the kids and most of the teachers were friendly. There were few, both teachers and students, who you could tell did not want us there.

BRIAN: How could you tell that?

OLIVER HILL, JR.: Well, they would call you names or things like that– not the teachers, but the students. Or they would call you the n word, or any creative thing. One time somebody called me a burnt biscuit.

BRIAN: Oliver, were there moments on that first day or the first week or maybe over the course of your public school education where you kind of wondered whether this was too speedy– I mean, you personally?

OLIVER HILL, JR.: Well, I personally didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be with my friends in the black school. But I’d kind of been geared toward this and so I understood the larger issues. My father would always talk to me about integration of the schools as the process by which people would learn how to live together.

And in fact, that experiment was working pretty well when I first started integrating the schools. Gradually, we had more and more black kids coming in. There was actually meaningful integration for a couple of years. There was kind of a gradual, grudging recognition of each other’s humanity. So the experiment was working.

Unfortunately, just as it was starting to have some breakthroughs in terms of the social experiment, there was that immediate resegregation of schools with white flight toward the end of the ’60s. When, I think, at the point where it was recognized that this wasn’t going to be reversed and this wasn’t going to change, then new strategies were put in place.

BRIAN: Well, some of that white flight– and I’m in no way condoning it– but some of it was in reaction to the court finally getting serious about implementing its decision in 1954 and 1955. In 1964, for instance, the Supreme Court said, there’s been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed.

What if the Supreme Court, rather than using that phrase “all deliberate speed” had said “immediately, and without delay,” or even something simple like, “within three months,” back in 1955? What if?

OLIVER HILL, JR.: First of all, I don’t think there would have been a bloodbath. I think children are very resilient. A lot of black and white children in the south were playing together anyway. And I think the same social experiment that I was going through in the early ’60s would have happened earlier and in a more comprehensive way.

And I think because of the delay, a lot of other factors started to come into play. Because in the ’60s, once you had the passage of the civil rights laws and society was generally more open for black people, not only did you have white flight to the suburbs, but black middle class flight to the suburbs. And so inner cities started to be starved of their tax base.

You had this concentration of poverty. And so what started out as a race issue started to get conflated with class. And it made the problems of inner city schools and city life in general much more problematic than they would have been without those complications.

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BRIAN: Oliver Hill, Jr. is a psychology professor at Virginia State University. He’s also on the board at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where our show is produced.

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