Reflections on justice before and after Brown.

• Author: Motley, Constance Baker

In the 1950's, Mississippi had the largest number of African-American citizens of any state and was, as Professor C. Vann Woodward observed, "profoundly isolated from national life and opinion." (1) Few blacks were registered to vote, (2) white supremacist doctrines governed law enforcement, and the legislature declared that Brown's directive was "unconstitutional and of no lawful effect." (3) After James Meredith's 1961 application for admission to the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford, I made twenty-two trips to the state during the year and a half of litigation that was needed to compel the school to accept him. (4)

An incident that occurred on one of these visits illustrates the intrusive indignities of Jim Crow customs and laws. I took my then nine-year-old son, Joel, with me because Medgar Evers, who was at that time the NAACP director for the state, (5) had three children of about my son's age. Medgar's wife Myrlie decided she would take all the children to the zoo one day and while they were there, my son parked himself on one of the benches. Along came a white policeman and said, "Boy, get up off that bench!" And my son was just startled, he didn't really understand. Myrlie came over to him and explained, "You know, Joel, they allow us to come to the zoo and see the animals, but they don't allow us to sit down on the benches. You have to stand." My son got up and shook his finger in the policeman's face and said, "I'm going to have you arrested!" Joel lived in New York, and that was his first encounter with real segregation.

One of segregation's other faces was danger. Lynchers were going unpunished and violence was a common Jim Crow method of repression. (6) United States marshals guarding James Meredith were attacked by armed mobs that were allowed onto the campus by state troopers. (7) Meredith had earned credits in military service toward his college degree and had spent a year and a half at Jackson State University before he was admitted to the University of Mississippi, so he only had a year to finish. During that entire year, federal marshals had to sleep with him in his room. He could not go anywhere on campus without being accompanied by these marshals.

Southern resistance to Brown, and to the civil rights activities the decision inspired, took many forms. Martin Luther King started a new movement, challenging state-enforced segregation directly rather than litigating, and it was very effective. (8) He moved around the South to various places where he was invited, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and organized peaceful marches to protest against Jim Crow. During the course of Dr. King's activities then, adults in Birmingham, Alabama who had been marching got rather tired. Someone then came up with the great idea that they would have the schoolchildren march on a Saturday when they were not required to be in class, knowing that they would not tire as easily.

Eleven hundred children did march on a Saturday, but the local school authorities devised an ingenious punishment. All of the participants were summarily expelled from school, and that was one week before graduation. Naturally, the parents were very upset about this. King and his close associates asked the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for help. Leroy Clark and I from the Legal Defense Fund both just happened to be in Birmingham for a case involving the University of Alabama. (9) We filed a suit in the federal district court asking that the expulsion of the students be enjoined. The local Federal District Court Judge, a man named Clarence W. Allgood who had been appointed by President Kennedy, (10) denied our application for an injunction. He did not actually issue his decision until two o'clock in the afternoon, although we had appeared before him at eleven in the morning. He knew that we would be going to the Fifth Circuit before Judge Elbert Tuttle to appeal his decision, and so he held it up, thinking, "Well, if I wait until two o'clock they will miss the last plane to Atlanta, at 3:00 p.m."

We had arranged with Judge Tuttle to hear us that afternoon, telling him we would be coming in with a special application, and we should be there at three or four o'clock. Of course we called Tuttle when we got the opinion late, and said, "Oh...