It is impossible for me to reflect on Brown v. Board of Education and its meaning these five decades later without revisiting in my mind’s eye the white Southern racist society of my youth and young adulthood.
That was a time when my hometown, Nashville, Tennessee, was as racially segregated as any city in South Africa at the height of Apartheid; when every city in the South, large and small, was the same; when African-American residents of those communities were denied access to any place and every place they might need or wish to go.
The legal myth of “separate but equal” had cunningly banned black citizens from every hospital, school, restaurant, trolley, bus, park, theater, hotel, and motel that catered to the white public. These tax-paying citizens were denied access to these places solely on the basis of their race by tradition, custom, local ordinance, state statute, federal policy, and by an edict of the United States Supreme Court fifty-eight years before Brown in Plessy v. Ferguson. In too many of these cities, black citizens were even denied access to the ballot box on election day.