Anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for May 16.

Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.” 

She goes on to talk about the  passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the murder of the three voting rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in "Freedom Summer," 1964, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery and the violence when state troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (fracturing the skull of John Lewis). The vote in the Senate was 77-19; in the House, 333-85.

Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.” 

She concludes: 

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”