A colloquy with Jack Greenberg about Brown: experiences and reflections.

• Author: Sobel, Richard
• Position: Interview

This colloquy draws from conversations with Jack Greenberg about this experiences with and the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. The discussion between Greenberg and Richard Sobel took place during class in March 1995, as Part of a seminar on civil rights law at Princeton University. A follow-up interview in May 1995 provided details on topics broached earlier. Edited together they provide intriguing insights into the historic case and Jack Greenberg's role.

Jack Greenberg: Before and after class, Richard Sobel and I have been talking about some issues addressed here. And I thought it would be a better way of exploring some of the issues of Brown v. Board of Education,(1) some of the factors that are involved in it, if we would engage in a colloquy. And so he may ask questions and make observations, and we'll talk back and forth. I'm going to ask Professor Sobel to address some things that concern him, and then we'll have a colloquy.

Richard Sobel: I think all of us are aware how historic the Brown decision is. As a historian and a political scientist. questions come to mind which other people have asked to. (I brought my precept from the history of law because the story of what's going on here is so important.) I want to get into history as I talk about it in my classes, as it comes at the time it's occurring, and not just in retrospect.

I'd like to see if we could begin with some historic questions about what it was like at the time that Brown was being decided. If you look at the front of Crusaders in the Courts(2) you see a much younger Jack Greenberg. And I'd like to try to take you back to that time. You talk in the book (p. 166) about how you had just been admitted [12/8/52] to practice before the Supreme Court. Can you give us some sense of how you felt the day that you went to the Supreme Court to argue your part of Brown v. Board of Education, though you'd also done some of the Kansas [case]?(3)

JG: Well, these are important personal reflections that had, I think, no widespread political significance. I'm happy to answer your questions. . .

RS: But this is something that People are interested in.

JG: I mentioned in the book that I'd been in the Supreme Court several times before (cf. p. 74). I had been there for argument in the Groveland case.(4) I had been there for the argument of Sweatt(5) and McLaurin.(6) The first time I went into the Supreme Court -- I am not a religious person and did not have a religious upbringing, but I felt as if I was walking into a synagogue and somehow I just didn't have my skull cap on. My personal reaction was, for what it's worth, that I was in a holy place; that was my gut reaction. (p. 74).

RS: How did you feel when you got there, when you actually had to stand up and address the Court [for the first time]?

JG: "Was I scared? Was I frightened? Was I anxious?" The answer's no, I wasn't because we had rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. I knew pretty much what I was going to say. The arguments had been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. It was not as if we walked in there and gave it for the first time. We had "dry runs." (p. 72) (I really think we were the first ones to do that, but before, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Hastie and Charles Houston used to have dress rehearsals in the basement of the Howard Law library. The next time I heard of it was when John F. Kennedy was debating Nixon on television [1960] and they put him through a dry run.) Having rehearsed it, people came up to me afterwards and said "Hey, that was really good." And I thought I was on top of it. (p. 174)

RS: You said that you weren't nervous, but you didn't really say how you did feel. Can you recall what sort of emotions were going through your mind at the time that you were arguing this momentous case before the Court?

JG: Well, I'll tell you what I do recall, and obviously I recall something. But I'm not very demonstrative externally or internally, and if I can liken it to something, I was on a ship that landed on Iwo Jima in the first wave [February 1945]. That's something that could be a pretty frightening experience. I just calmly did what I had to do. I just sort of stood there as somebody was firing a gun, couldn't hear a word I was saying because it was making so much noise.

It was not as if I had just been dropped in the middle of the case. This is something that I tried in a lower court, that I had argued in the Supreme Court of Delaware.(7) I also tried the Kansas case.(8) There were all sorts of rehearsals, dry runs, innumerable conferences and discussions. I could have been, I think, nervous and panicked and had a variety of reactions. But this is something which had been rehearsed to a fare thee well; and so essentially the only thing that we had some concern about would have been some question that would take us by surprise...

RS: But do you remember anything about what you were feeling at that time?

JG: I felt that I was doing what I had prepared to do, if you want me to intellectualize about it a little bit. I mean ... I was deeply committed to what I was doing ... I believed in it.

RS: But do you remember feeling satisfaction, relief, boredom, anticipation?

JG: Satisfaction, yes. As of the moment it turned out well. And certainly in the end it turned out well. Boredom, certainly not. I was sitting there [listening to] the story by [opposing counsel] John W. Davis about Aesop's fable of the dog with the bone. Instead of calling everything a fancy effort to attain prestige (p.190), that was to open some rhetorical trap that was not going to succeed, I felt satisfaction at scoring that point.

There was also the feeling that you wondered what difference the arguments made. Whether or not you were being swept along by a historical tide and in a connection that eventually you assisted. And there were all those other cases; all these cases were separate cases, but it was really one big issue on a continuum. This was just part of the bigger things that were going on for a long time. People looking at it from the outside saw this case, but we saw it as more globally, at least I did. Globally in the sense of being part of a larger effort, in the battle to acquire desegregated schools. I think the others did too.

RS: Before the decision came down, how did you think the decision was going to go?

JG: At different times, our guesses were different. We kept changing our estimates. When things began, we thought [Justice Robert H.] Jackson would be against us on the ground that he thought this was something that should have been done by Congress. He was against segregation, had been a Nuremberg prosecutor, believed in human rights and civil rights, and he had written some very strong pro-civil rights opinions in related areas. But he felt something like this should have been done by Congress. We had heard that, and later, the examination of the records of the discussions in conference of the Court, indicate that that he strongly felt that way. But he went with the majority. We heard that [Justice Stanley F.] Reed was against us, that he thought it would stir up too much turmoil.

We thought we would win, and we thought it would be something like 6-3 or 7-2, maybe at worst 5-4, but we would win. We had been through Sweatt and McLaurin, and the logic of those decisions which the Court had to appreciate at the time they handed those decisions down indicated that we would win. (p. 193)

RS: How did you feel, what did you think, personally, and how did you feel after the decision came down [9-0]?

JG: Well, I was outraged as a matter of principle that there was such a thing as segregation: it was totally insupportable. So I felt this was something that we had to win. And I felt that our arguments were right in a legal, constitutional sense, for the reasons we set forth in our briefs. Didn't believe in all of the arguments in our briefs; some of the arguments on history, for example, were essentially defensive, trying to neutralize the argument from the other side. The argument that Plessy(9) was based upon social scientific assumptions: we knew at that time that they were false. Even though our own evidence had a lot of imperfections, still it was a matter of common sense. We knew that the purpose, as Charles Black said, of segregation was essentially to stigmatize Black people.(10) (pp. 120, 123) So I was a true believer. I felt that this was something we had to win.

RS: And was the case something you were going to win?

JG: Yes, we thought we were going to win. (p. 193) The only debate was would it be unanimous or would it be closer to 5-4.

RS: How did you feel, personally, when the decision came down as it did?

JG: We were all euphoric, obviously. I did not feel at that time, that this was going to be the end of it all. I think Thurgood [Marshall] had said before the decision came down, that in "Georgia, there were 100 counties, we'll have to have 100 lawsuits." And I believed that was right, and I believed this [because that was] the experience we had with the universities and law schools. Not a single one of them capitulated without being sued. Even in the same state, to integrate the University of Texas, you'd have to sue all of the other branches, same thing in the other states. I felt there was going to be a long struggle. The...