Dr. King on the Brown Decisions: "Desegregation and the Future," 1956

When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, et al. on May 17, 1954, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was still little known. The civil rights movement took off in the decisions' wake, and by December 1956 he had become a national figure. That month he spoke at the National Committee for Rural Schools luncheon in New York City, in an address titled "Desegregation and the Future."

A room full of the Brown story

Several people tied to the Brown cases were there:

• Billy Flemming of the Clarendon County Improvement Association reported on desegregation efforts in South Carolina, where Briggs v. Elliott, one of the Brown cases, began.
• Judge J. Waties Waring, the U.S. District Court judge who wrote the minority opinion in Briggs, chaired the committee; Flemming paid tribute to him, and King noted that Waring's lone dissent had become the Court's majority view.
• Dr. Kenneth Clark, who with his wife, Dr. Mamie Clark, gave the "doll test" in several of the communities behind the five cases decided together as Brown, introduced King.

Why segregation is evil

King called the 1954 ruling one of the most important in the nation's history and a legal and social blow to a long-entrenched wrong. He gave three reasons segregation could not be defended:

1. It always produces inequality. Under Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), "separate but equal" had meant rigorously enforced separation and no real equality. Even identical buildings would leave Black children unequal, he argued, because equality is psychological as well as material — including the chance to know and talk with all children. He illustrated it with a recent experience: on a flight delayed in Atlanta, he was the only Black passenger, and the airport restaurant tried to seat him in a closed-off back room, with a manager insisting everything there was equal. King answered that he would lose the room's surroundings, be pushed toward bitterness, and be cut off from the white seatmate he had been talking with — three kinds of inequality at once.
2. It damages everyone it touches. Segregation gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority and the segregator a false sense of superiority. He credited Clark and other social psychologists for showing the Court how it warps children's personalities.
3. It turns people into things. Putting an "I–It" relationship in place of an "I–Thou" one, he said, segregation treats the segregated as objects to be used rather than persons to be respected.

The resistance

King acknowledged the other side of the story. Southern legislatures were invoking "interposition" and "nullification," and white citizens councils were using threats, intimidation and economic reprisals against Black residents and white allies, while claiming to reject violence. He faulted the federal government for letting them go unchallenged, contrasted its concern for Hungary with its silence about Black citizens in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and said both major parties had failed Black Americans, with a coalition of Southern Dixiecrats and conservative Northern Republicans blocking civil rights bills. Segregation, he said, persisted openly in the South and subtly in the North.

What must be done

• Federal enforcement. The executive and legislative branches, he argued, had to follow the judiciary's lead and enforce the law.
• Courts and legislation. Law cannot make people love one another, he granted, but it can govern behavior — it can stop an employer from refusing to hire someone because of race. He urged continued support for the NAACP, even as several Southern states moved to outlaw it.
• Money. Opponents were trying to delay integration through endless litigation, so the cause needed generous funding.
• Leadership that was calm, principled and devoted to justice rather than publicity or money.
• Courageous, nonviolent protest — which he called the most important of all. Segregation was legally dead but still alive in fact, and Black Americans themselves would have to press for the law to be carried out, without violence or hatred, even at the cost of jail or worse. Met with that kind of steady, nonviolent resistance, he said, oppressors could be shamed and enemies made friends.

He closed with a vision of a nation where freedom rang from every mountainside, from the Rockies to Stone Mountain in Georgia and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee.

Sources

Based on the National Park Service article "Dr. King and the Brown Decisions" (Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park), whose introduction is public domain. The speech itself, "Desegregation and the Future," is quoted there from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University; it is not the government's work, so it is summarized here in hubnx's own words rather than reproduced.