This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Sadly, it is only the 63rd anniversary of the National Education Association’s embrace of the decision.
Brown ended the noxious “separate but equal” doctrine and held that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. To its credit, the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s leading public school teachers unions, supported the litigation effort, including by filing a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Linda Brown and the other black students.
The NEA, now the nation’s largest teachers union, did not. In fact, when the court handed down its historic decision, the NEA reproduced the opinion in its journal with no comment. It was not until 1961, seven years after Brown, that the NEA came around and expressed support for the decision.
Why did the NEA refuse to stand up against segregation in public schools? Because it wanted to accommodate its southern affiliates, which supported segregated public schooling.
In the wake of Brown, many in the South’s public education establishment devised reprehensible schemes to evade the decision. These schemes included shuttering many public schools, turning over the facilities to hastily created private schools that discriminated, and providing vouchers that white children could use to attend them. Often, these new “segregation academies” were staffed by the former public school teachers and administrators.
Some public education officials in the South argued against vouchers but not always for the reasons you might expect. Robert Williams, president of the NEA-affiliated Virginia Education Association, urged a repeal of Virginia’s voucher law because, as Williams explained, some parents were using vouchers “to send their children to integrated schools, which the entire purpose of the legislation was to avoid.” He accused such parents of engaging in a “patent abuse” of the system.
Williams also opposed vouchers because they interfered with so-called containment measures, such as enrollment caps, designed to prevent “negro engulfment” of the public schools. He feared that white children’s use of vouchers to leave the public schools would open up seats for black children.
Eventually, the NEA endorsed Brown and its mandate to desegregate the public schools. But during the seven years it took the NEA to do so, the Southern public education establishment was able to implement measures that would delay, for many more years, any meaningful progress toward compliance with Brown’s mandate.
Should today’s NEA be judged by the sins of the organization 70 years ago? I believe not. But neither should the NEA judge today’s education choice supporters by the sins of those who used vouchers for evil ends 70 years ago.
And yet the NEA and its affiliates do precisely that. When education choice programs are enacted today, often with the support and leadership of black activists and legislators, the programs are commonly challenged in court. Increasingly, these legal challenges involve arguments that education choice policies are racist in origin and segregative in effect.
Neither claim is true, yet the NEA and its affiliates actively support such challenges — for example, by funding the litigation or filing friend-of-the-court briefs of the kind they refused to file in Brown. For example, in an ongoing challenge supported by the NEA’s Ohio affiliate, a group of public school districts argued that Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program “amounts to state-sponsored discrimination, leading to white flight and racial isolation in affected districts.”
Perhaps the NEA is blind to the irony of invoking its own past sins to smear today’s education choice supporters. More likely, it is hoping that no one will notice that this is exactly what it is doing. It is time to take notice.
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Michael Bindas is a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice.