I’d come to law school with the idea of fighting for education as a civil right. Since college, I’d admired the civil rights lawyers from the 1950s and 1960s, who had risked their lives to desegregate schools in the South. I’d had my sights set on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and interned there the summer after my first year of law school. But I discovered that schools were no longer the battleground for civil rights lawyers. Judge Robert Carter, formerly a leading attorney for the LDF in the Brown litigation, reflected on the iconic victory in an essay published in 1980.
A primary mistake lawyers had made, he wrote, was that they assumed an integrated education meant an equal education. They could not be blamed for thinking so: Until Brown, school districts in the South publicly, openly, and shamelessly shortchanged black schools, and a bulk of the evidence compiled by Brown lawyers showcased the glaring disparity in per-pupil allocation of funds, dismal salaries for black teachers and principals, and decrepit facilities. But it was only after Brown that they understood the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation itself; that this was a mere by-product, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease—white supremacy. Needless to say, white supremacy is no mere regional contamination.
In the North, affluent whites fled to the suburbs to avoid being in the same schools as black people. Residential segregation was and remains the most common cause of racial isolation among children: It is why white children go to schools with white children, black children with black children, and why schools are more segregated today than in 1954, the year Brown was decided. Meanwhile, in the South, the governor of Arkansas blocked the schoolhouse door with state militia. In rural areas like the Delta, a slew of small private schools opened. By 1980, Judge Carter had already seen the writing on the wall: Integration would not happen in his generation. For the present, however, to focus on integration alone is a luxury only the middle class can afford. They have the means to desert the public schools if dissatisfied. For the sake of children’s education today—for the sake of real life, as he put it—people should concentrate on having quality education delivered to the schools these blacks are attending. W. E. B. Du Bois’s words in 1935 seemed prescient: There is no magic to either segregated or mixed schools, he warned. The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.
Others held to the dream of school integration. The point was not that black children needed the presence of white children to learn. Rather, as sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote, integration brings Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans together at a time when their life-long attitudes are being formed. Studies showed that whites who went to school with black people tend to be more tolerant and more in favor of greater educational and economic opportunities for Afro-Americans. Black children, in turn, acquired access to social capital and valuable networks to broader groups. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.
I stood somewhere between these two views, but I was rapidly learning that my view, and anyone’s views on the matter, had been made irrelevant by the Supreme Court. On a hot day at the end of June 2007, I climbed the steps of the Supreme Court with the entire staff of the LDF to hear its decision on a landmark case. In a hushed, packed room, Justice Roberts read an opinion that prohibited the school districts in Seattle and Louisville from taking race into account when assigning students to schools. Justice Roberts called the systems racial balancing, and wrote that Brown stood for the proposition that schools could not assign students by race. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, he opined. Dissenting, Justice Breyer remarked from the bench, “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” Dissenting as well, Justice Stevens said that the majority, in rewriting the history of Brown, was a cruel irony.
I, too, felt deflated. I’d come to law school thinking I was somehow closer to the levers of power. But the Supreme Court ruling essentially signaled to civil rights lawyers that the issue of school integration was a dead end. Here were two local school districts that had confronted their histories of segregation and voluntarily attempted to integrate. But the Supreme Court had called their systems unconstitutional. As education-law professor James Ryan wrote, many who believe in the goal of integration, including myself, cannot help but feel a sense of loss and betrayal.
The next summer I worked at the law firm and at The Door, two places that could not be more different. I was shooting darts, trying to figure out where I belonged. By the beginning of my third year, I had decided that if I could get one thing out of law school, it would be the acquisition of basic skills that could be useful to poor people in crisis: What do you do if your landlord tries to evict you? If your boss doesn’t pay you for your work? If the government deports your father or mother? I applied for a fellowship to work at Centro Legal de la Raza, a nonprofit in Oakland, California, in a neighborhood called Fruitvale, which would later be made famous as the place where Oscar Grant was killed by police. My clients would be mostly undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants. “It’s not glamorous work,” a lawyer there said, winning me instantly. “But it’s one of the few places where people feel safe to come and ask for help.”
I got the fellowship. Money would still be tight—less than what I had made as a teacher in Arkansas, cost of living adjusted, and less than some California public school teachers. But the tiny salary seemed like proof that my conscience was intact.
—
THEN DANNY CALLED me from Helena with some bad news. “You had Patrick Browning as a student, didn’t you?” he began. I thought he was going to tell me that Patrick had died.
But it wasn’t that. Patrick had killed someone. He was in jail. He had gotten into a fight and then stabbed the person three times.
I was stupefied. It had to be a mistake. Patrick could not have killed someone.
I talked to Danny some more. Did he know, I asked, the visiting hours for the jail? Was it open on Saturday? I wrote professors to say I would be absent.
—
SATURDAY MORNING, THREE days after Patrick was arrested, I made it to the Phillips County Jail before visiting hours ended. It looked like a benign structure from the outside: brick, stout and short, two stories.
The lobby had a low ceiling, stained with water marks. Its lone decoration was a framed black-and-white photograph of a sheriff sitting on a horse. A sign instructed visitors to give all valuables to the guard at the desk. The only other person waiting with me was a boy who looked like he was in middle school. He handed over his bag of Doritos.
The guard walked me through a narrow hallway. He looked sideways at me, puzzled. “You know what he did, right?”
“Patrick was a wonderful student,” I said simply.