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May 21, 2004/Sivan 1 5764, Vol. 56, No.35
Accidental beneficiary of landmark court decision
PAUL ECKSTEIN
Contributing Editor
The author delivered the following remarks at a 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education at Arizona State University on May 1.
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I have lived in Phoenix for 60 years - nearly all my life. I was born in Georgia in a place that had perfected the art of hatred. While the Arizona I moved to in 1944 could not rival Georgia and other places in the South for prejudice, fear and violence, Arizona was nevertheless a place where people knew their place.
Arizona was a place where Jews knew that resorts like the Camelback Inn and Jokake Inn were "restricted," as the euphemism went. Arizona was a place where Native Americans living on reservations knew they were prohibited from voting in state elections. Arizona was a place where Mexican-Americans knew that they were limited to using public swimming pools to the day before these pools were drained for cleaning and refilling.
Arizona was a place where white school children such as I participated in minstrel shows - black face and all. It was a place where blacks knew they were not welcome at hotels like the Adams Hotel and restaurants like the Sky Chef Restaurant at Sky Harbor Airport.
Arizona was a place where the black baseball players for the Chicago Cubs and the then New York Giants were forced to rent homes in south Phoenix during spring training because they were not allowed to stay in the hotels where the rest of the team stayed. At the few movie theaters where blacks were welcome, they were consigned to the balcony, disparagingly referred to as the "crow's nest."
Religious, racial and ethnic epithets were unabashedly pronounced and often heard at all levels of society - from the nation's schools, factories and farms to the White House, where no less a person than President Harry Truman - the man who issued the executive order in 1948 desegregating the Armed Forces - repeatedly used the "N" word when referring to blacks. Such was the vocabulary of the day.
As awful as these indignities were, the ancient plates of prejudice and constitutionalized racism began to move after World War II - even for blacks. The color barrier was broken in baseball in 1947, in the Armed Forces in 1948, and in graduate and law schools in 1950.
Just as it was said in the 1960s that Atlanta was a city "too busy to hate," it might have been said in the 1950s that Phoenix was a city "too indifferent to care." It was easy to accept the social mores of the past. Blacks were told to be patient and wait their turn. Change would come gradually. While attitudes were slowly beginning to change in Arizona by 1950, it took action in the courts to change the status quo.
As of 1950, the Arizona statutes required segregation of "pupils of the African race from pupils of the Caucasian race in all schools other than high schools" and allowed for segregation of black and white races in high schools with 25 or more registered black students. Those statutory provisions were the subject of a 1950 ballot initiative that was designed to prohibit segregation in Arizona public schools. That 1950 initiative was defeated by a vote of nearly 2 to 1.
Two years after the people rejected the initiative that would have ended segregation in the Arizona public schools, the Arizona Legislature amended state law to allow individual school districts to decide for themselves whether they wanted segregation in their districts. In the next two years - before the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education - a small group of Arizona lawyers led by Hayzel Daniels, Herb Finn, Carl Muecke and Stuart Udall challenged the Arizona segregation statutes in two cases - one against the Phoenix Union High School District and the other against the Wilson School District.
These cases were presented to Judges Fred Struckmeyer and Charles Bernstein, judges of the Arizona Superior Court, and were decided in 1953 and 1954. Both judges, who were later to enjoy distinguished careers on the Arizona Supreme Court, held the practice of segregation in the Arizona schools unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Struckmeyer issued his opinion in February 1953, and Judge Bernstein issued his opinion in May 1954, 12 days before the decision in Brown v. Board of Education was rendered on May 17, 1954.
We celebrate Brown v. Board of Education today as the most important and far-reaching decision of the United States Supreme Court in the last century. But it was not universally celebrated 50 years ago.
A young William Rehnquist, who was serving as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson when the school desegregation cases were before the Supreme Court, urged Justice Jackson to reject the arguments being advanced by Thurgood Marshall that the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson be overruled.
In his 1960 book "Conscience of a Conservative," our own junior Senator Barry Goldwater proclaimed:
"(T)he federal Constitution does not require the states to maintain racially mixed schools. Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am firmly convinced - not only that integrated schools are not required - but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education (emphasis in original)."
In fairness, Goldwater was no bigot in his personal or business life. He had hired blacks at his family store, and he desegregated a unit of the Arizona National Guard in 1946, two years before Truman's executive order. He was a longtime supporter of the NAACP and the Urban League. And yet, had Goldwater's crabbed view of the U.S. Constitution prevailed, legal segregation of schools and other facilities in the south would have been part of the social fabric of our nation for decades longer.
In his book "The Fifties," David Halberstam assessed the importance of Brown v. Board of Education:
"The Brown v. Board of Education decision not only legally ended segregation, it deprived segre-gationist practices of their moral legitimacy as well. It was therefore perhaps the single most important moment in the decade, the moment that separated the old order from the new and helped create the tumultuous era just arriving. It instantaneously broadened the concept of freedom. ... Brown v. Board of Education was the beginning of a startling new period of change, not just in the area of civil rights, but in all aspects of social behavior. One era was ending and another beginning."
Permit me to conclude with a personal story. When segregation in the Phoenix Union High School system ended as a result of the Arizona case decided by Judge Struckmeyer, teachers at the all-black George Washington Carver High School were dispersed to the other high schools in the system. Three were transferred to West High, where I was a freshman in the fall of 1954.
One of the three teachers was Joseph Flipper, who was the head basketball coach and a mathematics teacher at Carver. There was no room for Mr. Flipper on the West High basketball court, even though he had taken Carver to the championship in its division several years earlier. But there was room for him in the mathematics department. Among the courses Mr. Flipper taught was freshman algebra. I was fortunate enough to be one of his students.
Algebra did not come easy to me, but thanks to the patience and personal attention of Mr. Flipper I managed to become a reasonably good algebra student.
Without appreciating it at the time, I was an unintended beneficiary of the desegregation orders issued by judges Struckmeyer and Bernstein. With the passage of time, I now understand that those desegregation orders benefited me every bit as much as the students at Carver High.
So with the benefit of 50 years of perspective, I say "thank you" to those in Arizona who had the courage to desegregate the schools in time for me to learn from a master teacher, and to Mr. Flipper for his patient, gentle, guiding hand.
Paul Eckstein is chairman of Brown & Bain, a Phoenix law firm, and co-owner of Jewish News of Greater Phoenix.
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