Chief Justice George Orwell writes for the majority

from Common Sense
Submitted by Rick Perlstein

Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.

I mean, do I really have to explain this? In 1955, the year after Brown, the Supreme Court specified the compliance language for the first decision: Southern school districts would have to comply "with all deliberate speed."

Instead, they did not comply at all. Instead, the region staged a self-consious movement of "Massive Resistance." Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by "all lawful means." In Virginia senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd's minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate. And in 1957 in Little Rock - well, has Justice Roberts never heard of this?

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