May 12, 2004

After 50 Years, Looking Back on Brown v. Board

By Greg Licamele

Fifty years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, a panel of experts convened at GW to discuss the impact of that court ruling in Topeka, KS, on American society, the media, schools and other institutions.

Robert Cottrol, GW’s Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law, outlined some of the history leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, noting the heart of the ruling was steeped in labels.

“At the heart of that decision is that segregation stigmatizes,” Cottrol said. “That segregation is unconstitutional and impermissible, not simply because the tangible facilities may be unequal — they certainly were.”

Samuel Yette, a former journalist who covered the civil rights movement for Ebony and Newsweek magazines, author of “The Choice: The Issues of Black Survival in America,” and former faculty member at Howard University, discussed the media and how it has not advanced in the last 100 years.

“Had it not been for the black press, there was some evidence that the Brown case might have been ignored all together,” Yette said. He supported his point by reading a few paragraphs of a 1968 riot commission report, which described the white media as “a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, fraternalism and indifference of white America. This may be understandable, but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.”

Commenting on the discussion President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg looked forward and cited recent Supreme Court rulings that could help fulfill the promises of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I pray that in the next 50 years, we actually get to the point that the Supreme Court, in their recent decision about affirmative action, hinted at — their expectation that we would not only improve this country in the next quarter century, but actually heal it.”

These panelists were joined by other distinguished colleagues, including Dorothy Gilliam moderator of the panel, School of Media and Public Affairs Shapiro Fellow, past president of the National Association of Black Journalists and former Washington Post columnist and director of the paper’s Young Journalists Development Program; Jacqueline Comas, assistant professor of education at GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development; and Claudio Sanchez, education reporter for National Public Radio.

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