It was less than two weeks after my birthday, nearly 70 years ago, on May 17, 1954, that Chief Justice Earl Warren issued a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court that school segregation was inherently unconstitutional. Thus ended nearly 60 years of “separate by equal” schooling that permitted separate schooling for Blacks that was anything but equal.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka wasn’t the beginning of the end of segregation or racism; it was just one battle in an exhausting, seemingly never-ending series, ranging from microaggressions to murder with the jackboot of governmental authority on the neck of Black people in the streets.