what are the Ultimate Meaning and Significance of Brown v. Board of Education?

Abstract

Introduction Much of the country has participated in the 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, a decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954. This historic, landmark, controversial, and revolutionary case nullified and reversed so much of the content, character, and spirit of American constitutional history, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy on the status, rights, and privileges of blacks and helped to catalyze, mobilize, and energize the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Revolution. It was fraught with deep and heavy symbolism and significance-moral, social, constitutional, political, and cultural. It is not easy to grasp the full dimensions of the "radical" and "revolutionary" decision. A completely new legal era, with fresh ethical and constitutional presuppositions and juristic vision, integrity, and higher possibilities, was born. The crowning jewel or element was the discovery or rediscovery and application of the great, precious, basic, and perennial ideal and sense of justice in the context of the African-American journey. Equality is the cornerstone of the edifice of justice. A distinguished professor of constitutional law and law school dean, Gene R. Nichol, makes the following observation on the uniqueness and far-reaching significance of Brown: Brown is surely the most central, defining, culture-altering decision ever handed down by a U. S. court. It not only bolstered an unfolding, muscular civil rights movement; it provided direct lineage for the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It initiated a framework of constitutional equality that has dealt steady blows to formal, legal discrimination across an impressive array of fronts in our national life. ... The Supreme Court's powerful rejection of state-imposed racial apartheid helped change the nation (Nichol, 2004). Justice and the Human Person Justice is one of the most precious, primordial, luminous, unique, and universal claims of the human person. It is, the ancients taught us, one of the most basic and perennial values of civilization and indeed the rational, moral, and natural order and structure of being. Whatever the definition, no one wants to be treated unjustly. Justice may be defined, for example, in Aristotelian terms as the disposition to give each person his due or proportion, or as a contemporary philosopher, John Rawls, as "fairness," or in an endless variety of other ways, but whatever definition is offered, each person wants "justice." There are aristocratic and democratic as well as oligarchic and hierarchical conceptions of justice. Ultimately, the moral claim to justice is generally rooted in the doctrine of the intrinsic dignity and value of the human person, each and every person-an inheritance of his/her common humanity. This is the democratic and humanistic ideal of justice. Equality is a regulative principle of justice, and so is liberty or freedom. A higher and more creative justice is always a more equal and inclusive justice. Thus Reinhold Niebuhr asserts in Moral Man and Immoral Society that the "conclusion which has been forced upon again and again in these pages is that equality, or to be a little more qualified, that equal justice is the most rational ultimate objective for society" (Niebuhr, p. 234). Equal justice entails both formal and material conditions. "The whole world," asserted Emil Brunner, "is crying out for justice. All suffering is bitter, but unjust suffering is doubly bitter. The suffering which is fate unites men; unjust suffering breeds strife." (Brunner, p. 4) Injustice not only divides but tragically polarizes and corrupts groups, societies, and cultures. 1. Blacks in the Constitutional System and Framework The institution of slavery reduced blacks to property, chattel, and things. Blacks were deprived of their humanity or at least their essential humanity. One is reminded of Paul Tillich's compelling assertion that a "wrong, unjust, power relation may destroy life" (Tillich, p. …