When I started elementary school in 1949, I lived in Alexandria, Virginia. Charles Barrett Elementary School was racially segregated: for whites only. My father was an Air Force colonel, and four years later, we moved to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. The base had its own school, which was integrated. The entire U.S. military had been desegregated in 1948.
In 1954, my father was assigned to Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Schools had never been segregated in Wyoming, though racial issues popped up occasionally. I went to junior high there for two years.
Then, we moved back to Virginia in 1956. My father had been assigned to the Pentagon. Virginia hadn’t changed: Public schools were as racially segregated as ever. I spent a year in junior high and three in a private school, which was also all-white.
Writing about race and segregation is risky. But I think I’ll take a stab at it anyway. You’ll have to forgive the reference to my school days. They weren’t significant by themselves, but I had a reason for mentioning the different schools I attended in different states. They’re examples of the complicated pattern that helps explain why the integration of schools across the nation took so long – not months, but years and years.
The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision had ruled in 1954 that racially separate schools in Topeka, Kansas, were unequal and unconstitutional. But many states, mostly in the South, balked at integration and refused to go along. And these states and schools had to be dealt with individually in court case after court case. This problem also existed for race-based disputes over voting rights, public accommodations, racially mixed marriages, job discrimination, and fair housing. And those were just for starters.
This seemingly endless legal process points to why the task of ending racial barriers to equality is still with us. Slavery was buried after four years of war. But it’s taken more than a century to get where we are today — with segregation and inequality on the path to defeat, racism greatly diminished, and the notion of “systemic racism” in America fading.
Who’s responsible for this progress? Black leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown v. Board case before the Supreme Court, and Martin Luther King Jr. had the foresight and endurance to play a long game with skill. They stirred broad national support. They never let up.
And there were white leaders such as President Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock in 1957 to escort black students into the segregated Central High School, and Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Republican champion of civil rights. They joined black leaders to enact the historic civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in public places, banned hiring and firing based on race, and bolstered fundamental civil rights. Some conservatives questioned its constitutionality. Nonetheless, it has woven its way deep into life in America.
The effects of the Voting Rights Act, which became law a year later, remain highly visible today. It wiped out laws and practices in Southern states that minimized voting by African Americans. The result: the rise of an influential black voting bloc in cities nationwide and across the South.
That’s not all. Black people often vote in higher percentages than white people now — and not just in the South. Their clout in the Democratic party is reflected in Joe Biden’s consideration of two black women to be his vice presidential running mate.
No country in the world has gone to extremes such as this to advance the political power of a racial minority. Indeed, it’s extraordinary what the alliance of black and white people has achieved. Biden talks of a racial “open wound” in America. If there is one, it’s gotten an awful lot smaller.
