Interview with Jack Greenberg and Gilbert Holmes

May 16, 2004

Jack Greenberg was 27 years old when he helped argue the Brown vs. Board of Education cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He succeeded Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he worked for more than 30 years. He is a professor of law at Columbia University. His memoir, Crusaders in the Courts, was published in a new edition this month.

Gilbert Holmes, dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, is a graduate of the New York University School of Law. He has served on the law faculties of Texas Wesleyan University, Southern Methodist and Seton Hall.

At the invitation of The Sun, Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Holmes met May 12, 2004, just days before the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, to discuss its legacy.

The transcript begins with an interview with Mr. Greenberg, then Dean Holmes joins the conversation. The interviewer is Sun reporter M. Dion Thompson.

Mr. Greenberg: "Brown was filed as a case to integrate schools, and for a long while it didn't do that simply because of massive resistance. You had about a hundred congressman and senators denouncing the Supreme Court, and all kinds of other resistance. You had violence. There were economic sanctions against people ...Then it went into decline...I don't think anybody thought it would follow that trajectory. But at the same time a great many things happened that we had not foreseen.

"Brown was a catalyst for the creation of the Civil Rights movement. It didn't do it all by itself, but there's no better evidence of that than (that) the first Freedom Ride was scheduled to end in New Orleans on May 17. The Freedom Riders were essentially paying homage to Brown. And you talk to Civil Rights demonstrators and, yeah, they had Brown in mind. Rosa Parks was an official of the NAACP and they drank and breathed Brown. But more important, the Montgomery bus boycott came to a successful conclusion when the Legal Defense Fund, our office, filed a law suit to enjoin the enforcement of the Montgomery segregation laws. We won that case. And the entire Supreme Court opinion consisted of quote, Brown vs. Board of Education, unquote. ?

"Brown was the catalyst to the Civil Rights Movement, and out of the movement came the Civil Rights Act, which changed everything. Public accommodations integrated almost immediately. Voting took a little longer. But we went from a situation where black voting in the South, in the areas where black population was greatest, was 2 percent to 8 percent, and now we have 39 black congressmen and the mayor of many a large city is black. So, it would be crazy to say Brown did it, but on the other hand, it wouldn't have happened without Brown. People who disagree with that are always going to disagree.

"I always view Brown as a school case, and I also view it as a catalyst to the Movement, the Civil Rights Act and so forth. But I never really had a full appreciation for what it meant to American social politics until last year, last summer, when I went to Eastern Europe and participated in a discussion of the integration of Roma gypsies into the public schools in Eastern Europe. They were highly segregated. ? I was just so astonished. I went to Bulgaria to see what was happening in terms of the integration of schools.

"The cases that led up to Brown came out of a campaign that was led by Charles Houston, based on a study that he had been done by Nathan Margold. And, the Margold Report considered this very question ? and this was in the late 1920s, the early 30s: Should we go to equalize schools, or should we go to integrate? And he did a study of what would happen.

"The law was separate but equal, and what he found to no surprise is that it was not equal, it was not even remotely approaching equal.

"And, so Houston considered: Should we file some cases to equalize the schools? He didn't have to file a case to establish the principle that they should be equal, because the principle was there. You had to file cases to really make them do it. And he said, 'Well, we have enough money to file about seven cases, maybe not enough money to file 70 cases. And he said maybe we would win a lot of them, but then would be the problem of actually wringing the money out of the school districts. The court does not print money. You've got to get it from the legislature. And he thought you would have a hard time doing that. Well, that was an absolutely valid perception.

"The next point is, even if you did get the funding, that is not what black kids need. To go to school in a segregated environment is, sometimes, maybe unavoidable. Now, in particular because of residential segregation, it is widely unavoidable, but all the evidence shows that an integrated education is superior to a segregated one, the grades and the scores, but even more than that, the social networking that comes out of an integrated education.

"That is not to say you can't have an absolutely first-rate all-black school. There are a few such examples, but I think the term people use is 'can you bring that to scale?' Is that something you can have as a nationwide thing? In a particular school with highly dedicated teachers, those aren't aberrations, but can you sustain that on a national basis?"

Interviewer: "You mention earlier that one thing you all were surprised at was the arc of integration, where you have zero, then you have a peak in the early '80s, then tailing back off. Surprised because you thought it would be a continual upswing."

Mr. Greenberg: "Well, I want to tell you, we were like, five lawyers, with maybe a couple dozen people we worked with on an ad hoc basis. We weren't sitting around trying to predict the future. We were doing the best we can with the circumstances. So, if somebody said to one of us at that time, what do you think is going to happen? ? Nobody anticipated the Civil Rights Act would be passed. Nobody anticipated then there would be Title VI. If somebody said, 'What do you think will happen?' I would have said: The same thing would happen that happened on the university level. In retrospect I would have thought that the elementary and high schools would have moved along like the universities, a little bit at a time ? the difference being that parents of elementary and high schools are tied to a place of residence, and parents of university students are not. You have people coming from all over to go to a university. But tied to a residence, then you're tied into residential segregation, the whole city-suburb."

Interviewer: "So, you think integration would have been more incremental, more gradual."¶

Mr. Greenberg: "Yeah, and by gradual, I mean very gradual. I don't think you can do it all, just because of the residential segregation. I don't see it. Now, the small towns and the rural areas of the country are pretty well integrated because they don't have dense, wide, dense areas of all black and all white.

"Since Brown, it's all moved off into the political sphere. You're not going to get a court decision saying what you're going to do, you're going to get the Congress, or the state legislature, or the City Council deciding. It's not the same thing with this whole gay marriage thing: The court decided it, now it's all up to the legislatures.

"One of things that's clear: There was not a place in the South where a black could get a Ph.D. There was one black medical school. There were no black law schools: Now there are 10,000 black law students. Ole Miss is now well integrated.

"It transformed the particular values of the country. It gave rise to equal rights for women, gays, Hispanics, elderly people, handicapped people. The whole notion of equality has become pervasive. It transformed the status of black people."