Since the 1960s, Williams has asserted that the 20 parents of Briggs v. Elliott faced a second injustice: They were forgotten. Despite being the first of the five cases to make it to the Supreme Court, Briggs was not chosen as the lead case and was therefore relegated to the position of “et al.” in the seminal Brown v. Board’s name. This naming meant that despite the families’ sacrifices, their stories were removed from the foreground, according to Williams. For decades, he has been advocating for a correction, asking over 100 attorneys to take on a case that would challenge the ordering — and the naming — of Brown.
In some ways, Williams is a hidden figure among hidden figures, who took up the cause of renaming Brown even before Nathaniel Briggs, the 76-year-old son of the lead plaintiff in Briggs v. Elliott, Harry Briggs, came on board and before South Carolina attorney and civil rights organizer Tom Mullikin agreed to argue it pro bono.
Mullikin would spend years interviewing the families from the original Briggs case before filing his brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2023. Earlier this month, the justices denied the petition without comment.
“I would do it again,” Mullikin told The 74. “I would spend another four years doing it. And I’ll spend the rest of my life talking about it because it’s an injustice. Sometimes, there’s a price to being first. And in this case, there’s no denying that people lost their lives, their economic fortunes, and their livelihoods because of their courage and stepping out.”
While on its face a legal battle, the quest to rename the landmark Brown case lays bare how steep that price was and how lasting its painful legacy. For Nathaniel Briggs, it was the dissolution of his family. His father was fired from his job as a gas station attendant; his mother from hers as a motel maid.
His father began working at a family member’s farm but when he took his cotton to market, Briggs said, people refused to buy it because of the association with his last name. In 1957, out of options, his father moved to Miami. At the time, Briggs was 9 years old. He was devastated when his father was forced to leave the family behind.
“Once a month he would call. I’d hear my dad’s voice for a couple of minutes … I’d put those coins in the old, black dial-up telephone thing, and I’d hear my dad’s voice.”
South Carolina — and the stories of the Briggses and the other families in Clarendon County — have remained largely invisible, despite the notoriety of the titular Brown case, according to Nathaniel Briggs.