Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision - Softcover

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Peter Irons is emeritus professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five previous award-winning books. The most recent, A People's History of the Supreme Court, was awarded the Silver Gavel Certificate of Merit by the American Bar Association. His work has also been published in numerous law reviews and presitigious journals. In addition to his extensive academic contributions, Irons has also been very active in public affairs. For example, he was elected to two terms on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union and was a practicing civil rights and liberties attorney. In the latter role, he notably served as lead counsel in the successful effort to reverse the World War Two criminal convictions of Japanese-Americans who challenged the curfew and relocation orders.

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Chapter 1

"Cut Yer Thumb er Finger Off"

"None of us niggers never knowed nothin' 'bout readin' and writin'. Dere warn't no school for niggers den, and I ain't never been to school a day in my life. Niggers was more skeered of newspapers dan dey is of snakes now, and us never knowed what a Bible was dem days."

These are the words of Georgia Baker about her life as a slave, growing up on a Georgia plantation before the Civil War. Both the land and her body were owned by Alexander H. Stephens, a planter who became vice-president of the Confederate States of America. Like most black people who were born into slavery, Georgia was illiterate, because it was both illegal and dangerous for a slave to learn how to read and write in the days before Emancipation.

Arnold Gragston told of his master in Macon County, Kentucky. "Mr. Tabb was a pretty good man," Arnold said. "He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did." When the master suspected that his slaves were learning to read and write, he would call them to the "big house" and grill them. "If we told him we had been learnin' to read," Arnold recounted, "he would near beat the daylights out of us." Sarah Benjamin, who was born on a Louisiana plantation, recalled the fate of fellow slaves whose masters discovered that their "property" had secretly learned to read and write: "If yer learned to write dey would cut yer thumb er finger off."

But some slaves took the risk of beatings or amputations. Mandy Jones described the way that slaves in Mississippi would educate themselves. "Dey would dig pits, and kiver the spot wid bushes an' vines," he said. "Way out in de woods, dey was woods den, an' de slaves would slip out of de Quarters at night, an' go to dese pits, an' some niggah dat had some learnin' would have a school." But not all learning took place in "pit schools" in the woods. The children of slave owners sometimes became the teachers of slave children. "De way de cullud folks would learn to read was from de white chillun," Mandy Jones recalled. "De white chilluns thought a heap of de cullud chilluns, an' when dey come out o' school wid deir books in deir han's dey take de cullud chilluns, and slip off somewhere an' learns de cullud chilluns deir lessons, what deir teacher has jes' learned dem."

Too much learning, however, could give a slave the tools to escape from bondage.

William Johnson told the story of a "smart slave" on his Virginia plantation, a coachman named Joe Sutherland. "Joe always hung around the courthouse with master," William said. "He went on business trips with him, and through this way, Joe learned to read and write unbeknownst to master. In fact, Joe got so good that he learned how to write passes for the slaves. Master's son, Carter Johnson, was clerk of the county court, and by going around the court every day Joe forged the county seal on these passes and several slaves used them to escape to free states." But Joe was betrayed by another slave, William said, "and Joe was put in shackles until he was sold to a man in Mississippi." Helping another slave to escape was a capital offense in the South, and Joe Sutherland was lucky to survive.

Freedom finally came for the slaves, first announced by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only a handful of slaves could read that document, but those who could spread the news to others. Mary Bell talked about her father, Spotswood Rice, who supervised his owner's tobacco plantation in Missouri. "His owner's son taught him to read," Mary recalled, "and dat made his owner so mad, because my father read the emancipation for freedom to de other slaves, and it made dem so happy, dey could not work well, and dey got so no one could manage dem, when dey found out dey were to be freed in such a short time."

These stories of former slaves, recorded in the 1930s by interviewers from the Federal Writers' Project, tell in poignant words of the struggle for education of people the Supreme Court described in its Dred Scott decision of 1857 as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race." Perhaps the main reason that blacks were "inferior" to whites, both in the days of slavery and after their emancipation, was that educated blacks were likely to aspire to more than plantation life, an enforced regimen of plowing, planting, weeding, chopping, and picking crops. "They didn't want us to learn nothin'," Annie Perry recalled of her childhood as a slave. "The only thing we had to learn was how to work."

The full impact of depriving blacks of education can only be measured against the historical record of slavery and segregation. From the very first importation of blacks into the British colonies, initially as indentured servants but soon as slaves, education of this servile class was both feared and forbidden. The Virginia legislature enacted a law in 1680 that prohibited gatherings of blacks for any reason, punishable by "Twenty Lashes on the Bare Back well laid on," a law designed to keep slaves from holding clandestine schools as well as meeting to plot rebellion against their masters. In 1695, Maryland imposed a fine of one thousand pounds of tobacco on teachers who instructed blacks. As time passed, other states followed suit. South Carolina made it a crime in 1740 for anyone "who shall hereafter teach, or cause any Slave or Slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any Slave as a Scribe in any manner of writing, whatsoever."

The legal bans on teaching slaves to read and write did not completely prevent all blacks from becoming literate, at least at a basic level. Some masters found it advantageous to have a few slaves who could read instructions and keep records of production. On many plantations, trusted and favored slaves acted as overseers of "field slaves" and needed to keep records of who worked, became ill, or was injured. One former slave recalled that his master had a "special slave" who could "read and write and figger." Other masters believed in converting their slaves to Christianity, and felt that teaching them to read the Bible would not only save their souls but make them more amenable to their state. Christian missionaries sent teachers among the slaves, particularly in cities like Charleston, South Carolina, with support from their owners. And as Mandy Jones recalled of his early life in slavery, white children on plantations often taught the black children of "house slaves" to read and write as they did their lessons.

The successful revolution against British rule, and the adoption of the Constitution by the newly independent states, did nothing to alter the system of slavery. The "Great Compromise" that kept the slave states from bolting the Constitutional Convention included three provisions in the final charter that explicitly recognized the lawfulness of slavery: the clause that counted slaves as "three fifths" of a person in apportioning House seats; the "fugitive slave" clause that required northern states to return escaped slaves to their
masters; and the clause that prohibited Congress from banning the further importation of slaves before 1808. But the winds of freedom and independence that blew across the new nation stirred the yearnings of some slaves for their own freedom from bondage. And the most powerful tool they could use to unlock or break their shackles was literacy; slaves who could read and write could also reach other literate slaves with letters and pamphlets.

Frederick Douglass, born on a Maryland plantation in 1817, was separated from his slave mother as an infant and sent by his owner at the age of eight to live in Baltimore as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching her young servant to read. When Auld learned of this schooling, he snatched books and newspapers from the boy's hands and ordered his wife to end...