Seventy
years ago, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme
Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That
landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional.
Brown
v. Board was
a turning point in American history. It
established that the U.S. government would, once and for all, use the
Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from discriminatory
legislation written by state legislatures.
Added
to the Constitution in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern state
legislatures were writing laws that made Black Americans subservient to white
Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment asserted that the federal government could,
and must, stop such discrimination.
It
established that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of
law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.” It gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment.
In
the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court nodded to racial segregation in
the 1896 Plessy
v. Ferguson decision, getting around the Fourteenth Amendment
by asserting that separate accommodations were fine, so long as they were
“equal.”
But
in 1954 a unanimous court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had previously
been the Republican governor of California, ruled that racial segregation
established by state law in public schools denied to Black children the equal
protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
“Separate
educational facilities are inherently unequal,” it wrote.
Just
two weeks before it decided Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court had
decided Hernandez
v. Texas, which established that not only Black Americans, but also
Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups, were entitled to equal
protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Over
the following decades, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to
strike down state laws against interracial marriage and gay marriage, and to
establish equal rights for women, including the right to abortion. It also
ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, constitutional.
That
new legal framework, embodied in Brown v. Board, both established the equal
rights that were central to the modern era and sparked a backlash against
them.
The
federal requirement that states desegregate their public schools spurred
southern state legislatures to pass laws and resolutions to block or postpone
desegregation. In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina Democrat
Strom Thurmond, wrote the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” quickly
dubbed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing desegregation as
unconstitutional.
Lawmakers
also found ways to transfer tax dollars to private schools, which were not
covered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Attendance at so-called segregation
academies exploded. By 1958, more than 250,000 students had migrated to
segregation academies, a number that jumped to a million by 1965.
Those
opposed to racial equality made common cause with those businessmen determined
to get rid of federal regulation of business. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr.,
the son of an oilman, started National Review, a periodical that promised to stand
against an active government that protected labor and regulated business.
Buckley said he would tell the “violated businessman’s side of the
story.”
In National
Review, Buckley gave Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick a
platform to assure readers that desegregation challenged American values. Black
Americans had no right to the equality declared unanimously by the Supreme
Court, Kilpatrick wrote. Rather, the white community had an established right
“to peace and tranquillity [sic]; the right to freedom from tumult and
lawlessness.”
Desegregation
would lead to bloody violence, he promised, implying that Black Americans would
rage and riot, although, in fact, it was the white community that was attacking
Black Americans.
In
1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater brought these two themes to his
presidential campaign. He stood firm on the idea that the federal government
had no business either regulating business or protecting equality. In The
Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960,
Goldwater asserted that the federal government had no power over schools at all
and certainly could not order them to desegregate.
Goldwater
accepted the Republican presidential nomination in July
1964, less than a month after three civil rights workers
registering Black Americans to vote had disappeared in Mississippi. Goldwater
told his cheering supporters: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice, and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Strom Thurmond
publicly announced that he would vote for Goldwater.
Goldwater
lost in a landslide, but his loss fed the backlash against federal protection
of equality, especially after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to
expand Black and Brown voting, moving many of those voters into the Democrats’
camp.
In
1968, Republican Richard Nixon courted Thurmond and white southerners with a
promise to slow down desegregation and a defense of state’s rights. The
so-called Southern Strategy moved the former Dixiecrats to the Republican
Party.
Religious
traditionalists, particularly those among the Southern Baptist Convention, also
opposed the federal government’s support for equality, although they got less
press in the early years of that expansion. In their view, the Bible laid out
hierarchical social arrangements, especially patriarchy. Government defense of
women’s equality was a direct assault on their worldview.
When
he ran for the presidency in 1980, former California governor Ronald Reagan
courted those religious traditionalists, and in 1985 his people made them a key
part of the Republican coalition.
Americans
for Tax Reform brought together big business, evangelicals, and social
conservatives under the leadership of Grover Norquist, who had been an
economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Traditional Republican business
groups can provide the resources,” Norquist explained, “but these groups can
provide the votes.”
In
the following decades, Republican leaders used racist and traditionalist
dislike of equal rights to turn out voters who would let them put their
economic policies—cuts to taxes and deregulation of business—into place.
But
those opposed to equal rights found themselves out of step with a majority of
voters and unable to get their policies enshrined into law as courts continued
to uphold equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals,
and women.
The
backlash against the federal protection of equal rights based on the Fourteenth
Amendment entered a new era with the election of Donald Trump. In contrast to
his predecessors, Trump let the racist and sexist voter base of the party drive
policy. White evangelicals, especially, found in Trump an answer to their
frustration at being sidelined by the courts and a majority of American
voters.
Despite
his own lack of personal virtue, Trump was willing to smash through the laws
and court decisions that had supported equality since the 1950s, offering to
center the country on traditional religion and racial hierarchies in exchange
for power. Under him, traditionalists saw the courts stacked with extremists
who would prioritize their evangelical faith across society, including by
ending the federal protection of abortion rights.
Their
fight to return Trump to power is part of their fight to establish traditional
religion, rather than the equality promised in the Fourteenth Amendment, as the
nation’s fundamental law. As Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Ginni
Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as they plotted to
overturn the decision of voters in 2020 to reject Trump: “This is a fight of
good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings
triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked
my career on it.”
Today, almost
exactly seventy years to the day after Brown v. Board ushered in a new era of equality
and democracy in the United States, MAGA Republican lawmakers Andy Biggs
(R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt
Gaetz (R-FL), Bob Good (R-VA), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Anna Paulina Luna
(R-FL), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Andy Ogles (R-TN) traveled to Manhattan to
stand with Trump at his criminal trial for falsifying business records to
interfere in an election.
The
lawmakers made it clear that their determination to control the country has
made them give up not only on the equality promised in the Declaration of
Independence and defended by the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on
democracy.
Echoing
the promise of the right-wing Proud Boys to Trump before they stormed the U.S.
Capitol to install Trump into office despite the will of the voters, Gaetz
tweeted: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”
—Heather
Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/475
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046344738&seq=38
James
Jackson Kilpatrick, “Right and Power in Arkansas,” National
Review, September 28,
1957,
pp. 273–275.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/archival-video-barry-goldwater-speaks-1964-republican-national-40578479
Jane
Mayer, “Ways and Means Panel’s Tax-Overhaul Proposal Brings ‘Family’ Strife to
Conservative Coalition,” Wall Street Journal, November 27,
1985, p. 52.
https://www.kcra.com/article/texts-between-ginni-thomas-and-mark-meadows/39531243
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/matt-gaetz-lauren-boebert-appear-trump-trial/story?id=110319095
Twitter
(X):
acnewsitics/status/1791223441179238892
