All Deliberate SpeedEssay Preview: All Deliberate SpeedReport this essay“Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”i These were the words uttered by the Supreme Court on may 17, 1954 in the ruling of the Brown vs. Board of Education Case that overturned the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling of fifty-eight years earlier which stated that separate but equal was not unconstitutional. Brown is viewed perhaps as the most significant case on race in Americas history.i It seemed to call for a new era in which Black children and White children would have equal opportunities to achieve the proverbial American Dream . However the victory was perhaps premature and immediately caused hostility by Whites opposed to integration, who went to the extent of saying that many Blacks were retarded and that tuberculosis and venereal disease would spread. Their point was that integration would destroy their way of live.i The Court action thereafter can be seen as sympathetic towards Whites when they added to the ruling that the schools should integrate “with all deliberate speed.”i The apparent victory was compromised from this point on because the denotation of the ruling meant slow and resisters were allowed to end segregation on their own timetable. All Deliberate Speed, by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. offers his personal reflections on the historic civil rights decision of Brown vs. Board of Education, as well as an extensive discussion on why the Brown decision, coming at a time of great racial inequality in America, marked a critical effort by the Supreme Court to state that legalized racial inequality in America would no longer be tolerated. Ogletree later goes in depth with the social and historical impart of the Brown decision and how he was personally impacted by the decision and concludes with a personal discussion of the legacy of Brown in the twenty-first century.
All Deliberate Speed is the culmination of fifty years of personal reflections of a “Brown baby.” Ogletree had three goals in mind when writing this book. He wanted to demonstrate that Brown not only raised new obstacles to segregation in legal civil social contexts but also challenged the assumption that there was no option but loyalty to the status quo. He then goes on to discuss the important work of lawyers who started the legal fight for racial integration decades before the Brown decision, the obstacles they faced and overcame, and the disappointment they eventually experienced, as they saw a critical decision weakened not only by the legislative and executive branches of the government but by the same Court, as its membership to conservatives who turned their backs on the mandate articulated in Brown. Finally he brings into this book his personal reflections on Brown during his lifetime. Ogletree recounts his story through the various stages of maturity and self discoveries he underwent and takes the reader on that journey. He begins with his childhood encounters with race, his experiences in college and law schools as a beneficiary of Brown and affirmative action programs, and the impact that the end of legal segregation had in his life. He comes to the conclusion that “To be blind to race is to be blind to reality,” and that this country will always be divided into two nations separated by race, income and opportunity because of the race relations established since the colonization of America. It is for this very reason that he doubts there will ever be a time when affirmative action programs will be unnecessary and become a relic of the past in a race-blind nation unless major steps are taken to attribute reparations to African Americans who have worked hard and have thrived against all odds in the face of slavery then segregation and now discrimination.i
“With all deliberate speed,”i echoed the Supreme Court unanimously during the Brown case. This case was quite different in that it was the first time that the balance of power was not maintained and the judicial branch overstepped its boundary into the legislative and even executive branch. The court was allowed to enforce its ruling by penalizing schools which attempted to resist integration and was able to mandate integration through the ingenious system of busing. This was also the first instance in which the Supreme Court before its ruling in the Brown case require a unanimous decision.i Brown was perhaps among the first cases which overturned a ruling that the Supreme Court had made in the past and therefore raised new obstacles to segregation in but also challenged the assumption that there was no option but loyalty to the status quo.i No other cases ruled by the Supreme Court had created such dissension amongst Whites and Blacks except when one famous American used a similar expression eighty-nine years earlier. President Abraham Lincoln when asked whether he favored the immediate emancipation of the slaves, he responded, “It will do no good to go ahead any faster than the country will follow..” i So in this reference the faith of African American was only meant to be change by a slowed convergence from the majority when they saw fit. It is not surprising therefore that eighty-nine years after the proclamation of Emancipation done only as an end to prevent a scale-wide revolt amongst African-Americans, the Court would attempt to use a similar tactic to ensure that there was no disruption in the hierarchy and balance of power of American society. By including that clause within the ruling, the Court basically failed to pass a concise and impartial decision which would later come to cost them more through demands of reparations because of their unwillingness to force White Americans to fully embrace the Brown decision. i So the evil that Brown sought to eliminate segregation, is still with us to this day and the good that it sought to put in its place, integration-continues to elude us. i For here lies the power that the four words uttered by the Supreme Court fifty years ago allowed the perpetuation of discrimination towards minorities and more precisely towards African Americans in the American society.
The Brown case not only proved to impact Americas history but it was also infiltrated into the American society as a whole. It sought to eradicate all traces of a caste system as well as the color line dividing Blacks from Whites. Most importantly it put into question the eighty-nine years of the segregation experienced by Whites and Blacks. When Brown claimed that segregation was unconstitutional, it was not challenging the environment alone but it was also challenging the access to equal resources whether you are in an all Black or integrated setting, equal resources and integration of differing ideas are essential to a well rounded education.i However by challenging the segregated educational system, Brown as well challenged segregated public areas such as restaurants, pools, movie
The Brown case was based on an analysis of the U.S. education system, not a study of the South. The authors said in their paper the Brown case highlighted a “deeply rooted and insidious bias” by the state that discouraged black students from studying at the very institutions in which they were taught to. There was nothing unique or unique about the South that might have influenced how they dealt with student segregation. Rather there was a massive effort by an underclass to ignore the fact that it was black students that, on average, were incarcerated. This is what was learned by black students for the first 30 minutes of a class.
In the Brown case, the state and students who were exposed to a black student were the ones who were less likely to write out an essay that could be used as a form of protest. In other words, only black students could write their essay in the presence of a black student. And that wasn’t just an issue. The state was even more successful because there was an even bigger problem with this, because if a black student didn’t do anything wrong, they were locked up. The problem was so severe that a study in the Columbia University School of Law in which black students were recruited by a black political party found blacks, in a minority class with significantly higher rates of depression, were much more likely to be incarcerated. According to the paper, “[W]e found that blacks in the classroom reported the biggest declines in verbal stress and depression over a seven-year period, as compared to students who participated in black class.” The article goes on to explain further that in this survey: “[A]ccording to a 2003 paper by the National Center for Health Statistics, black students are at the lower end of what they would not expect to find in their class. In fact, blacks and whites are at the bottom for the same time period.”
Despite this strong and significant case for segregation, Brown and other students of color were still denied the opportunity to do anything about it. The case went on to address the broader social justice crisis of the 21st Century, which led to the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1972, in which black-on-black crime and violence and the use of paramilitary teams to track suspects on the go has been blamed for many of the horrific acts in the United States that took place from the early 1990s onwards.
The United States currently experiences an ongoing crisis in its history of racism and that is part of what ultimately led to Brown’s decision to continue the segregation agenda. And it should be emphasized that the Brown case is the first time that the government has tried to remedy it. The state of California was sued by students of color, in 1996, by an all-white class not for any segregation but rather because the state was involved in the school’s racially discriminatory and racially oppressive practices. The courts took a majority of the case but not nearly as many as Brown and their supporters believed they had. The Brown case also resulted in the formation of the NAACP and its current founder, Dr. Martin Luther King.
Dr. King was born in Atlanta, GA and lived on a farm. Like Brown, King was born in California for reasons other than race,