Episode Details

In this episode, we explore why brown v board targeted equal schools. If you're trying to win, like, a massive landmark lawsuit claiming that segregated public schools are fundamentally unequal, Common Sense says you should probably go out and find the absolute most rundown, underfunded, just neglected school possible to make your case right. Right. You have a glaring, undeniable visual of injustice. Exactly. But in the early 1950s, civil rights lawyers did the exact opposite. They went completely out of their way to find a segregated school district in Kansas, where the black schools and the white schools were perfectly equal. Which just sounds so counterintuitive at first. It really does. So today, we are taking a deep dive into the complex history and the massive ripple effects of the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. And for anyone who wants to be truly well -informed on this, that standard one sentence textbook summary, the case that ended went to the Supreme Court and argued that domestic racism was a national security threat. That is precisely what he argued. Attorney General James P. McGrannery explicitly wrote that racial discrimination furnishes, quote, grist for the communist propaganda mills. Grist for the mills. Wow. Yeah, and the brief even included a letter from Secretary of State Dean Acheson complaining that the U .S. was under constant humnack in the foreign press. The Soviet Union was literally taking stories of American segregation and broadcasting them across the globe to highlight American hypocrisy. And it wasn't just like abstract political theory happening in Washington either. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, literally the very first question he was asked by the press there was, why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes? It was inescapable. Chief Justice Earl Warren later echoed this exact sentiment. He stated