What is all this fanfare and celebration over the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision of 50 years ago? It was only a short time ago that if you were Black, you could not eat at a local restaurant, swim in the local pool, stay at a local hotel, use a gas station toilet or attend school with white kids. Many of us remember going to the movies with our parents and having to sit in the back or upstairs; separated from whites. Even attending Catholic Church on Sunday, Blacks would have to sit in a segregated area and have separate communion.

It was on May 17, 1954 that the Supreme Court, in an unanimous 9-0 decision, handed down a ruling that school segregation was unequal and that eventually public facilities would have to be open to everyone. Most of us take this decision for granted, but it was obtained not only with great skill, but at a great price. Thurgood Marshall was the lead attorney for the NAACP and Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former California governor, worked the court in favor of the decision. But, the heavy price was paid by people such as Dr. Arthur Fletcher, who is the last living plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education and my predecessor as the Board Chairman of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. The economic retaliations and many death threats, month after month, sustained by Dr. Fletcher and his wife during this case, forced them to leave Kansas and resulted in her committing suicide.

However, this historic decision ushered in the period of Civil Rights and later, affirmative action, both of which have benefited all African Americans. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. initiated the Civil Rights movement in 1964 and Dr. Arthur Fletcher sold affirmative action to President Richard Nixon in 1969 as a “national security” issue. “He believed me and gave me the license to get on it,” states Fletcher, who was then the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor and who is now revered as “The Father of Affirmative Action.” By the year 2000, the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries have become non-Black.
It has been 50 years since school desegregation and it looks like we have come full circle to the status, “Separate and Unequal,” again. With the passage of California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, terminating affirmative action, the 10 campuses of the State public University of California are practically a segregated system for whites and Asians. UC Berkeley admitted 194 African American students this year out of 7,753. Mindful of apartheid 10 years ago, even the recruiters for minority students staged a protest outside the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s office on April 21, 2004. “It’s absolutely intolerable and inexcusable,” states Yvette Felarca, a graduate student and organizer of the pro-affirmative action group, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. For Black folks in America the struggle continues.