Ambiguous Legacy: Summerton, South Carolina, and Briggs v. Elliott
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY celebration of Brown v. Board of Education leads uncomfortably to a South Carolina country town named Summerton. With a population of barely one thousand, Summerton...
...The place was a backwater, and the case was unlikely to generate widespread public interest or, most important, financial support...
...In Summerton, a Briggs-DeLaine-Pearson association has been formed to recognize the petitioners...
...We are truly arguing this case for the disenfranchised...
...Is it a tale of the power of religious conviction...
...In Clarendon County, white students were provided with buses...
...But in the 1960s, although the reprisals against the Briggs signers continued, Clarendon County received no press attention...
...A phenomenon known as "reverse discrimination" has been recognized...
...The same Levi Pearson operated a timber business that was boycotted by whites after the Brown decision...
...Two thousand four cannot be 1950...
...To begin, there is the negative view: little has been achieved...
...I can show that among white students and black students of the same class, in South Carolina, there is consistently a higher degree of disenfranchisement among African American students...
...A warrant EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION for his arrest in South Carolina made any public return impossible...
...It is never the intent of progressives to force a choice between dignity and change...
...Isn't the point of the trial increased funding for education...
...These meetings were a hybrid of political rallies and church revivals...
...later he was secretly spirited away...
...The local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had already expressed interest in transportation issues...
...DARRYL LORENZO 'WELLINGTON is a poet and essayist living in Charleston, South Carolina...
...Sharecroppers slept on straw cots, their income was seasonal, they were always in debt to the landowners...
...I'm embarrassed to imply that it is...
...Why need there be discussion on race, this peculiarly American chestnut...
...The decision was made to proceed with a legal resolution...
...DeLaine in his sermons at the rallies frequently referred to "Judases" from the black community...
...Summerton has two traffic lights and a Piggly Wiggly convenience store...
...Specifically, NAACP spokesperson James Hinton had delivered a speech at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, daring his audience to challenge South Carolina's preposterously lopsided busing practices...
...Abbeville v. State is a difficult case to watch...
...Farmers' credits were denied...
...If there were, the insultingly abrupt transition would suggest "the other side of the tracks...
...Court cases traditionally bear the name of the first of the litigants in the alphabetical list...
...With a population of barely one thousand, Summerton seems too culturally unimpressive a place to have ever participated in a great historical moment...
...The police station is a Korean War Quonset hut, staple of the 1950s, a provisional edifice originally used as a war bunker...
...It is mere coincidence that Abbeville came to trial in Brown's anniversary year...
...It was probably expected that this convenient technicality would abrogate the social threat...
...But by then energy had been funneled in another direction...
...Relief efforts were organized by local churches, even national organizations...
...But dissatisfaction can remain sprawled, diffuse, lacking a consistent impe4 6 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 tus or direction...
...in this courtroom we're trying the vestiges of Brown v. Board...
...Levi Pearson v. the State was dismissed because of a legal technicality that may have been a trick of the powers-that-be...
...The suit eventually involved more than one hundred petitioners...
...Mortgages were called in...
...Finally, Brumit DeLaine warns us not to discount desperation as a motive...
...black students were not...
...The pity of Summerton—and the irony of too much black history in America—is that this impossible choice is so often imposed...
...When asked, Stephen Morrison emphasizes his mission to fulfill the intent of Brown v. Board...
...Briggs chronologically preceded the other suits...
...The man who firebombed the DeLaine residence in 1951 was a black man, supposedly a friend of the family...
...Clarendon County school districts 1, 2, and 3 are involved in a lawsuit alongside thirty-three other South Carolina school districts, Abbeville v. State of South Carolina, suing the state for failing to meet the barest educational needs of its citizens...
...Briggs v. Elliott's one hundred signers suffered reprisals: the loss of rights, privileges, and jobs...
...Energy and impetus were lost...
...Some decades ago the township stuck some windows in...
...Affirmative action—the child of Brown—is under attack...
...There were white people who supported us, and black people who we couldn't trust...
...Waring's dissent was the basis for the next step, an appeal to the Supreme Court...
...But, partly because of DeLaine, who had established contact with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and partly because of the arguments of the NAACP attorneys, most notably Thurgood Marshall, it was a daring challenge to the status quo...
...From Brumit's perspective, it is important to appreciate the absence of racial absolutes...
...Lawyers are attempting to shame South Carolina into taking action against conditions that resemble third world educational deprivation...
...Poked and prodded by DeLaine, Marshall relented and agreed to continue the case if its perspective was broadened to the entire educational system (not just transportation) and the number of plaintiffs increased to at least twenty...
...A younger son, Brumit DeLaine, remembers that "Dad used to hate for people to say 'God will take care of everything.' He couldn't stand that...
...Shall we suffer endless persecution just because we want our children raised in a wholesome atmosphere...
...Given the high rates of black imprisonment, of disenfranchisement, the disproportionate percentages of blacks dogged by poverty and poor schools, African American integration into the larger society still seems unfinished business...
...Let race be eliminated from discussion in cases in which it does not matter, but not because it makes us uncomfortable...
...Begun as a lawsuit over equal opportunity, Briggs was expanded into a challenge to the constitutionality of segregation itself—the first challenge against the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling...
...The powers-that-be underestimated J. A. DeLaine's tenacity...
...Look how the whites live, then at how the blacks get by...
...It seems a cliché to say that in the wake of Brown little has changed, but given its connection to the end of de jure segregation, Summerton could serve as a poster child for the emotionally charged feelings that go with the clich...
...recollects, " I would say there were three people in the community at that time, not only my father, who had the vision and who wanted change...
...It was not a challenge to segregation itself...
...Summerton has been described as "a land lost in time...
...Though the focus of the case is poverty, not race, the conditions have a particularly strong impact on African American students (as they did in 1954...
...Doesn't the present-day lawsuit, Abbeville v. the State, prove that...
...If the past was never racially essentialist, perhaps neither is equity synonymous with a blind rush toward color blindness...
...The NAACP would have preferred a more visible arena...
...In communities as sharply segregated as Clarendon DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 47 EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION County, DeLaine's meetings garnered the nervous, watchful attention of whites: this was brazen, illogical defiance...
...Eventually the bus broke down...
...DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 51...
...Briggs, like Brown, has its roots in dissatisfaction...
...The Nazi comment was not hyperbolic, for segregation was as much a political as a social arrangement, fascistic by nature...
...Isn't poverty a wider net than race...
...The years 1949-1955 were characterized by racial strife, tension, and mischief...
...If Thurgood could come back to Clarendon County in 2004, and see these African American schools with the worst facilities, and the lowest teacher pay, he'd say, what's happened...
...The state in turn argues that the thirty-six counties in the suit, among them Clarendon County, are overwhelmed by phenomena such as teenage pregnancy and high crimes rates—lamentable facts beyond the grasp of the educational system...
...Supreme Court...
...a short gun battle ensued...
...A small town slumps along with a case of the blues...
...The protest movement shifted elsewhere, to marches in Alabama, voting registration in Mississippi, riots in the inner cities...
...The historical facts are important in themselves, but is there a larger lesson...
...DeLaine was threatened, harassed, fired from jobs...
...In 1951, J. A. DeLaine wrote "Is it a credit for Summerton to wear the name of persecuting a segment of its citizens...
...It has, in particular, a lodestar: Joseph Albert DeLaine, a Methodist minister in the Summerton area...
...When you think, why Summerton and not someplace else...
...At the same time, due to the awfulness of segregation, there is a tendency to think of the racial problems of the period as conveniently one-sided...
...racial statistics cannot be used even to correct racial inequities...
...Many now say that poverty and economic issues should have played a more important role in earlier civil rights battles...
...Scotts Branch had four different principals within one year...
...Because he's got nothing to lose not to fight...
...Not that I'm calling the people of Summerton cowards...
...But the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board is awakening consciousnesses...
...There will be arguments about how the face of our democracy has changed and why and where DISSENT / Summer 2004...
...A high school student known as a leader in the protests at Scotts Branch, Reverdy Wells, had his high school record falsified...
...White merchants put signs in their windows exhorting 'Negroes keep out...
...How it was turned into decisive social action in Clarendon County is a complicated story, but it has its luminaries...
...An initial suit was filed in 1947 (Pearson v. the State of South Carolina, named after Levi Pearson, who served for awhile as the volunteer driver of the late-lamented, brokendown bus...
...Unfortunately, the community underestimated the total expense...
...But the social vision rises before one's eyes...
...Alphabetically, also, Briggs precedes Brown...
...Behind the Piggly Wiggly, the lines are clear...
...Just as a nodding head, sagging shoulders, and lifeless eyes are reliable signs of depression, so the faded facades and closed storefronts along Summerton's main street signal economic gloom...
...Only in 1991 was Wells able to 48 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 obtain his true transcript...
...The community was encouraged by the support of a white man of influence, Judge J. Waites Waring of Charleston, S.C...
...This is what happened: a group of blacks living in or near Summerton filed suit against the local school board...
...The plaintiff's witnesses are teachers, social workers, and psychologists, describing substandard conditions, preposterously high dropout and teacher turnover rates, and the debilitating consequences for the students...
...It is in fact difficult to write about Summerton as it exists today without feeling that one is exploiting stereotypes...
...J. W. Seals were fired in December and January...
...The most appropriate image for Briggs v. Elliott is that of a school bus, a simple, basic need unanswered...
...If Brown v. Board was high modernism, Abbeville v. State is a postmodernist redux...
...There is another view...
...Fortunately the DeLaine family had already moved miles away to Lake City, South Carolina...
...For Briggs and Brown, sociologist Kenneth Clark testified on the pernicious psychological effects of segregation...
...Is the judge dancing around the race question, or moving the discussion to a higher plane...
...DeLaine organized a series of public meetings in Clarendon County to explain to the community that the suit now demanded full educational equity, that signers were needed among local parents, and that the risk was worth the potential gain...
...As a white Southerner, this is where you would have driven in the 1950s to pick up the family maid...
...most whites attend private academies...
...The plaintiffs lost, but they celebrated a dissenting opinion, written by J. Waites Waring...
...He's gon' die anyway...
...Morrison sees himself on a mission...
...He cannot discuss differences in performance along lines of race...
...A recently enacted 3 percent sales tax was proposed as a source of funds sufficient to equalize public educational facilities...
...Worse, black people have exhausted their quotient of national pity and concern for the debatable privilege of attending public schools with whites— who have by and large switched to private schools anyway...
...THIS LEADS US to the most important question: what can Briggs v. Elliott teach us about the future...
...it is arguably the birthplace of desegregation...
...On some off-shooting roads, there are pleasant estates, antebellum status symbols...
...Furthermore, the bus was an old, rickety affair, previously junked by the white school system...
...Still, it is frightening to consider the degree of casual power certain privileged whites commanded...
...It was their dogged Christianity that provided the white community of Clarendon County with its confidence and self-righteousness...
...Two thousand four cannot be 1954...
...His work has recently appeared in the Boston Review and World and I magazine...
...Economic disenfranchisement continues...
...By 1965, he was nearly ruined because trucking companies owned by whites refused to pick up his timber...
...Before the purchase, the walk to school for many black students was an arduous, and sometimes dangerous, ten mile trek...
...White backlash in Clarendon County differed from the nightmarish murders and lynchings of Mississippi—although there are rumors of murders during this period...
...Few would argue with the assertion that Summerton—and the surrounding rural communities of Clarendon County—remain by and large segregated...
...Several elements fused to bring the community to EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION this point...
...This is where the "Negroes" lived in books like Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit...
...The Story Briggs v. Elliott was the upshot of a social uprising in the most unlikely of times and places —a backward South Carolina county in the late 1940s...
...Isn't the judge's decision the beginning of a correction of that mistake...
...But of the three I would say my father was the most headstrong...
...Whatever its advantages for skillful individuals and black business owners, segregation was about power, a preponderance of power often used insidiously and to force a community into a straitjacket...
...Participants in these arguments should look back to the rural communities of Clarendon County...
...It not only lacks a college, it lacks a public library...
...Here, too, Briggs is educative...
...DeLaine was long gone...
...But everyone in the courtroom is conscious of history...
...But even a coward if he has his back to the wall to the point that it becomes an issue of basic survival, he'll fight...
...WHEN BROWN V. BOARD won the day in 1954, no one was more surprised than the Briggs petitioners that their desperate lawsuit had altered the course of history...
...Ironically, it is a need that, had it been answered, could have forestalled the lawsuit...
...There are many possible lessons, many possible interpretations...
...Waring quoted from the fourteenth amendment: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," and then added, "It seems to me that it is unnecessary to pore through voluminous arguments and opinions to ascertain what the foregoing means...
...William Ragin and Rev...
...Isn't it time we EDUCAT I ONAL SEGREGATION got over race...
...We have come full circle...
...Harry Briggs was forced to take work outside of Summerton in order to make ends meet...
...Education was held in high regard by sharecroppers, who saw immediate gain in the ability to do figures and challenge fraudulent debts...
...As the past mirrors the present, so too the Clarendon County school system then and now...
...But Morrison speaks from the vantage point of Brown's legacy to remind us there are instances when they may not be and that there are dangers in ignoring those instances, particularly if the motivation is fear...
...This was an immense sum in a community where cars were rare and many still traveled by horse and buggy...
...backbone was strengthened...
...For many, the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board seems an occasion for chagrin and embarrassment as much as celebration...
...Many suspected that the landowners' books were fixed, and many of them were probably right, but few could argue the point...
...Shortly before the Briggs trial, DeLaine's house in Summerton was firebombed...
...But it was a local leader, one of the black community's own, J. A. DeLaine, who provided the axis around which action wculd develop...
...I think I am only being allowed to argue one half of my case...
...Morrison presents witnesses to testify how poor education contributes to crime and teenage pregnancy...
...However, the judge, with the encouragement of the state, ruled that, for the purposes of Abbeville v. the State, "race and poverty are co-linear...
...Morrison shrugs...
...Along with the bus, they needed a regular driver...
...The African American residents of Summerton remain— by the standards of twenty-first century America—marginalized and educationally deprived...
...In what way does race matter...
...And one might ask why should this not be so...
...Furthermore, for Brumit DeLaine, the major lesson he took away from the Briggs years was that "You can't judge people by their color, white or black...
...Self-sufficient solutions preceded any effort at legal redress...
...To alleviate the effects of poverty...
...Morrison suggests, with all respect, that the judge may feel race is simply too controversial to introduce and hope for a constructive outcome...
...Blacks attend the public schools...
...Waring had alienated himself from Charleston's white community— and become the friend of South Carolina's black community—by ruling with the NAACP and forcing the Democratic Party to allow blacks to vote in primary elections...
...Think of a coward...
...He had also taken a public and vocal stance against Jim Crow laws generally, a stance that encouraged the general belief in legal solutions...
...There are no literal railroad tracks...
...This shame haunts educators and historians when they discuss a ruling that "ended segregation" in an America that, defying logic, remains in notable respects segregated...
...He cannot describe the districts he represents as having been in effect resegregated, without drawing an objection from the state...
...DeLaine's seventy-year-old son, Joseph DeLaine, Jr...
...This simple matter was nonetheless a fearful one...
...So Morrison can talk about South Carolina's poor high school graduation rate of 51 percent...
...Readers will now have to look at their own understanding of fairness and equity and ponder the degree to which it signifies a legitimate broadening of our social vision or, conversely, the degree to which it signifies an increase in our willingness to engage in a desperate denial of unpleasant truths—that for the purposes of this sequel to Brown v. the Board, the judge has disallowed a conversation about race...
...For a time in the 1950s the ongoing plight of the Briggs petitioners received publicity in black papers such as the Chicago Defender...
...I see this trial as a sequel...
...It has been suggested that in this sensitive social challenge to the American way of life the Supreme Court justices were reluctant to hear a case that appeared to be directed specifically against the South...
...One of the signers, Maize Solomon, would later remember that for her putting her name down was a simple matter...
...Of the enemies of progress—poverty, segregation, and a general lack of education—the black community was most likely to succeed in redressing the last...
...Given the authoritarian segregation of Clarendon County, this was an immense leap of faith and determination...
...Sharecropper...
...The very word carries associations from books and movies that suggest the harshness of a way of life...
...A case bearing South Carolina in its name could inflame passions...
...The stories are many...
...Brown has been overturned and the education system is segregated again...
...He cannot break that figure down by race...
...Is it a tale of white arrogance and battered black pride...
...DeLaine's career in Clarendon County ended in 1955 when the family house in Lake City was fired upon...
...There is no testimony on the dire effects of race segregation, but there is testimony on the depressive effect of having the children of poverty segregated rather than dispersed among students of higher economic standing...
...But for the legal or political move that changed the name of the case to that of the second of the litigants, Brawn v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas would have been known instead as the case of Harry Briggs v. R. M. Elliott, chairman of the board of education of the Summerton district public schools...
...DeLaine died in 1974, at age seventy-six...
...Poverty and race: co-linear or not...
...He is described as a man who never learned to read and write, but who regularly had his children read to him from the black press...
...If the state has to look specifically at the special needs of African Americans in order to fulfill the intent of Brown v. the Board, then so be it...
...The Legacy What can we learn from the story of Briggs v. Elliott...
...Abbeville v. the State is a blip on the radar screen of current events, but fifty-four years earlier a suit having to do with education originated in Clarendon County...
...whereas for Abbeville, there is educator Joanne Anderson testifying on the psychological needs of children of poverty who often begin grade school knowing thousands fewer words than middle-class children...
...No racespecific evidence need be introduced (or if introduced, will receive no consideration in the verdict...
...In the mid-1940s, Negro parents in the Summerton area pooled their funds to buy a school bus...
...The beaten up roads behind the Summerton Piggly Wiggly prove the point...
...Morrison had originally planned to argue his case partially along racial lines...
...In his opening statement, plaintiff's lawyer, Stephen Morrison, said "Here we are, fifty 50 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 years after Brown v. Board, in the very county where Brown was started, still battling for equal education in South Carolina...
...Is this coincidental...
...What some of us have suffered is nothing short of Nazi persecution...
...As a black man or woman you would have lived here— not by choice, rather, by law and legally enforced tradition...
...A bus was purchased at a cost of $400...
...they didn't have desks...
...The wide trailer homes, the tin roof houses, and the empty tracts of land indicate a lack of new construction...
...Nowhere is this embarrassment felt more palpably than in the courtroom during sessions of Abbeville v. the State...
...The plaintiff Levi Pearson's home straddled two school districts...
...For the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall were no longer interested in equalizing segregated facilities...
...He said, 'God gave you a mind to use for you to take care of yourself...
...He describes the relationship between Abbeville v. State and Brown as follows "Imagine this...
...He had no rights in the district in which he had filed suit...
...4 5 EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION disfiguring pockmarks remain...
...On the other hand, the districts represented are overwhelmingly African American...
...At the same time as the rallies were being held, drumming up support for a lawsuit, students at Scotts Branch, the black high school in Summerton, formed a committee to protest shady practices and racist policies...
...the case, Briggs v. Elliott, rose to national significance...
...It is impossible to think about Summerton without appreciating the miracle that de jure segregation is over...
...DeLaine returned shots...
...houses sink feebly into the muck underneath...
...DeLaine exceeded Marshall's requirement...
...In 2003, J. A. DeLaine, Harry and Eliza Briggs, and Levi Pearson were posthumously awarded congressional gold medals...
...Soon Summerton and the surrounding communities spiraled into chaos...
...In the 1960s, DeLaine thought about turning himself in to the South Carolina police and forcing a trial, but abandoned the idea...
...If the cotton crop from plaintiffs or their sympathizers was accepted at gins at all, it was priced down...
...At that time things had gotten so bad that people were willing to try about anything...
...But black residents of the Summerton area had suffered already for their support of change...
...Racial equality is with increasing success taken to mean color blindness...
...And while it is true we have had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of legal opinions outlining and defining the various effects and overtones on our laws and life brought about by the adoption of this Amendment, one of ordinary ability and understanding of the English language will have no trouble knowing that when this Amendment was adopted, it was intended to do away with discrimination [and] refers to all persons...
...This fiftieth anniversary year will see much discussion of the aftereffects of Brown...
...Then you're on the road out of town...
...In his experience, Christianity was a primary force for racism...
...I suggest, with all respect, that, politically speaking, the judge may be right...
...When Briggs v. Elliott convened, the state's attorneys expressed a willingness to equalize resources...
...But this is only part of the story...
...The statistics that I can't introduce are important...
...Debts were called in right before Christmas...
...There are doubtless many instances in which race and poverty are co-linear...
...Economic conditions were hard for whites, and harder for blacks...
...That's a sham...
...The judge's ruling may be influenced by the tenor of the times, the post-civil rights era, where color-blind arguments are more welcome than racialized ones...
...Doubtless many people of Clarendon County are unaware of the region's place in history...
...In a town this small, the social lines stand in stark relief...
...He is attempting to fulfill the mandate inspired by Brown v. Board: an equal education for all, regardless of poverty or race...
...In Julie McGruder Lochbaum's The Word Made Flesh, she records the various stratagems used to discourage the petitioners...
...He lived the rest of his life in New York City and Charlotte, N.C...
...The most telling difference between past and present is that in this "sequel" to Brown v. Board there is a strict limitation on the permissibility of evidence pertinent to race...
...Of those five cases, tried collectively as Brown v. Board of Education, Briggs and Brown were the first to wind their way through the appellate system...
...When the "blacklist" was forgotten, sometime in the late sixties, the county returned to its quiet and unprogressive past...
...This is the pathos and irony of Summerton...
...What if it could be shown that race is pertinent to their condition, or to its resolution...
...In James T. Patterson' s Brown v. Board, he reports that "when Harry Briggs was asked in 1979 what [the petitioners of Briggs vs Elliott] had accomplished, he replied `Nothing!' He then reflected a minute and reconsidered, but only slightly...
...After the initial setback, Marshall was unenthusiastic about continuing with Clarendon County as a civil rights test case...
...The general level of mathematical knowledge or simple literacy was low...
...Regarding the first assertion, Brumit DeLaine DISSENT / Summer 2004 . 49 EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION insists, "Christianity was what we were fighting against...
...Whatever his motivation, the judge's ruling may represent a legitimate broadening of social vision...
...The college he applied to received a transcript falsely indicating that he was a failing student (and consequently rejected him...
...Eight school districts are serving as representative districts in the case, and those eight are 88 percent minority (the state average is 48 percent...
...Testimony regarding education within the thirty-six rural school districts has described woefully inadequate facilities, untrained teachers, and classrooms without books...
...it simply challenged the immense discrepancy between white and black funding for transportation...
...We are in this courtroom pretending that the school districts I represent aren't overwhelmingly African American...
...Reality seemed flimsy...
...certainties were abandoned, and threats were constant...
...THERE ARE TWO ways to look at this...
...In the late 1940s, Levi Pearson, of Pearson v. the State, volunteered to drive the bus so that local children, among them his own daughter, could attend school...
...Briggs v. Elliott was decided by a panel of three judges...
...Their bone of contention was the board's failure to provide basic, much less equal facilities...
...After DeLaine and Marshall visited them at home, Harry and Eliza Briggs became the first signers of Briggs v. Elliott...
...That was a suit over equal access and equal facilities...
...In the late 1940s, the bulk of the black population of Clarendon County subsisted either as tenant farmers or sharecroppers...
...The past was racially essentialist, in contrast to the confusions of today's conflicts...
...Our children didn't have a bus...
...Suddenly the roads are beat up, the potholes deep...
...Fifty years ago, Briggs was argued jointly with four other lawsuits calling for the desegregation of public schools before the U.S...
...information was passed out...
...He concluded 'You got to take some pride, it's better.' " As an old man, seeing Clarendon County still stuck in time, perhaps Harry Briggs was saying that more had been accomplished in terms of striking a blow for dignity than for substantive change...
...The main speakers were mostly preachers...
...The Summerton of today resembles the Summerton of the sixties or worse, the Summerton of a time before that...
...But whether the state would have made a good faith effort to improve facilities or whether these were false promises was by then a moot point...
...Clarendon County whites resisted integration and created private academies that exist today...
...Two World War 11 veterans who signed the petition, Harry Briggs and William Stukes, were denied admission to those hard won GI classes held at Scotts Branch, with the excuse that classes were filled...
...DeLaine believed passionately that Marshall was abandoning him and the people of the community in midstream...
...If I have evidence to that effect, that should be of interest to the state...
...In the first challenge to legalized segregation, they argued that the status quo was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
