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March 22, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
08:51
The Truth About Brown v. Board of Education
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
I'm sure you've heard of Brown v.
Board of Education.
It's the famous 1954 Supreme Court case that banned legally segregated schooling in the United States.
The decision is back in the news because the famous plaintiff in the case, Linda Brown, just died at age 76. That makes it a good time to re-examine the Brown decision.
The case was about whether it was legal to separate people by race, so long as facilities for them were separate but equal.
That was the standard for legal segregation that had been set in 1896.
Originally, the liberals on the court, led by Justice Felix Frankfurter, hoped to get the rest of the court to argue that separate but equal violated the 14th Amendment.
Which guarantees equal treatment under the law to all citizens.
But the liberals ran into a problem.
When Congress passed the 14th Amendment back in 1866, that very year it established segregated schools in the District of Columbia.
Congress at that time governed the district.
And so it would therefore be hard to argue that the 14th Amendment somehow banned segregated schools.
And throughout the South, School districts were taking the equal part of separate but equal very seriously.
By the 1950s, in Virginia, for example, spending, facilities, and teacher pay were essentially the same for the black and the white school systems.
Therefore, the NAACP, which brought the case for desegregation, decided to argue that separate systems simply could not be equal.
This wasn't a legal argument.
And the Supreme Court is supposed to decide matters of law, but the opponents of segregation didn't care.
Therefore, the new theory before the court was that segregation hurt the feelings of blacks and hurt them so badly that it could hold them back for the rest of their lives.
But how would you prove that?
The NAACP's lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, who later went on to become a Supreme Court Justice himself.
In his argument to the court, Marshall relied on the work of the black sociologist Kenneth Clark, who had become famous for research using dolls.
He showed children a black doll and a white doll and asked them which one they liked better.
White children almost always preferred the white doll, but Clark found that many black children attending segregated schools also preferred the white doll.
Thurgood Marshall claimed that this was proof that segregation harmed black children psychologically.
What Thurgood Marshall did not tell the court is that Clark had also tried his doll test on black children who attended integrated schools, and he found that even more of those black children preferred the white doll.
A black child who went to school with white children was more likely to prefer the white doll than a black child who went to an all-black school.
If preferring the white doll was proof of psychological damage to black children, then school integration must be worse for black children than segregation.
Clark was honest enough to publish his results, and Thurgood Marshall knew about them.
He deliberately deceived the Supreme Court.
Incredibly, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund brags on its website to this day about Marshall's use of the Dahl studies.
It notes that the Supreme Court used a study to conclude that segregation, and I quote, generates a feeling of inferiority that may affect hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.
Shameless. When the court announced its ruling, even the New York Times recognized that there wasn't any legal reasoning behind it.
The headline read, And, as Justice Robert Jackson said at the time, Thurgood Marshall's argument begins and ends with sociology.
And, as you now know, it was false sociology.
But there's worse.
The Justice Department was arguing for desegregation, and one of the government lawyers working on the case was Philip Ellman.
He was a former clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter, and he knew that Frankfurter was determined to get a ruling that would end segregated schooling.
Elmer and Frankfurter opened up a secret channel of communication in which Justice Frankfurter explained to Elmer the best arguments that the government could make to win over the other justices on the Supreme Court.
Years later, Elmer actually bragged in the Harvard Law Review about how he and Frankfurter rigged the outcome.
He concluded that what they did, quote, probably went beyond the pale.
Probably. It is absolutely forbidden for judges and lawyers to have secret conversations about a case before them.
That can lead to disbarment for the lawyers, impeachment for judges.
Lady Justice is blindfolded for a reason.
She is supposed to judge the evidence with complete impartiality.
Ellman and Frankfurter ripped off the blindfold.
Ellman even bragged that the two of them had so thoroughly stacked the deck for a desegregation opinion that the NAACP lawyer didn't have to do a thing.
In Ellman's words, quote, Thurgood Marshall could have stood up there and recited Mary Had a Little Lamb and the result would have been exactly the same.
So there you have it.
One of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century.
Some say the most important was based on phony social science and was a backroom deal.
Of course, the Brown decision then led to busing and forced integration, which drove whites out of the public schools.
Atlanta's a good example.
From 1968 to 1976, just eight years, 78% of the white students left the public schools.
Many urban schools became, well, urban schools.
Now, the irony is that a lot of blacks want to re-establish segregation.
How about these headlines?
Students demand University of Chicago fund race-specific housing.
Black students at Harvard to hold their own commencement.
And here's the website for Betty Shabazz International Charter Schools.
The staff are all black.
And so are the students.
Doris Wilkinson was the first black to attend University of Kentucky after the Brown decision, but she now calls integration, in her words, an absolute abysmal failure.
She wants black schools for black children, too.
The leader of the Black Student Union at Cal State Los Angeles explained the other day why blacks need segregated housing.
You see people that look like you.
That are going through the same things you're going through.
Well, what an idea!
Why didn't anyone ever explain that to Thurgood Marshall or Justice Frankfurter?
Brown was a rigged decision based on dishonest arguments.
It led to forced integration that nobody wants.
And yet, more than half a century later, we are still supposed to celebrate it as if it were a great triumph.
Why? Because admitting the truth about Brown would mean admitting the truth about race.
It would mean admitting that integration doesn't work, that multiracialism doesn't work, that the assumptions of the last half century were all wrong.
You can't build a country on dishonest arguments and backroom deals.
We need a country built on the truth.
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