The oral arguments began at 10:03 a.m.; they ended at 2:55 p.m. Throughout the nearly five hours of debate, I felt the specter of another day in this same courtroom, almost 70 years ago. Brown v. Board of Education was unanimously decided here in the spring of 1954, declaring segregation to be an unconstitutional “denial of the equal protection of the laws.” The case was a first step toward overturning segregation in every area of American life.
Brown led to my own first awareness of race. I was in elementary school in rural Virginia and lived in the home county of Senator Harry Byrd, who led the South’s opposition to the ruling. His plan for “massive resistance” pressed Virginians to close their schools rather than integrate them, and in several counties, including one adjacent to my own, they did. Even as a young child, I became aware of the flurry of concern among my family and neighbors about what they saw as the Supreme Court’s overreach and its challenge to the so-called southern way of life. But for me, the controversy over Brown had a different meaning. I had not yet understood the unspoken rules of my Virginia world; I had not yet realized that Black children were purposefully excluded from my school. Now, because of the Court’s decision, race was being explicitly talked about. If I painted my face, I asked a Black man who worked for my parents, would I not be allowed to go to my school? Suddenly I recognized myself as white and understood that this accident of racial identity came with privileges others were denied. I was not yet 10 years old, but I saw that race, in fact, said a great deal about who I was and who I was allowed to be.
In 1896, the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson had affirmed the doctrine of “separate but equal,” enshrining Jim Crow in American law. Fifty-eight years later, Brown overturned Plessy. Separate could not be equal. The impact of racial segregation on Black children threatened the very foundation of the American creed. Yet Students for Fair Admissions, in what the Supreme Court journalist Linda Greenhouse has called a startling “double bank shot,” seeks to claim the aura of Brown, a revered civil-rights landmark, to support an interpretation of color-blindness that would serve as an instrument for racial exclusion. Patrick Strawbridge opened his argument by insisting that “Brown finally and firmly rejected the view that racial classifications have any role to play in providing equal opportunities.” Affirmative action, SFFA claimed, was antithetical to Brown.