Sixty Years After Brown
Have you ever wondered what happened to the men and women who sued to end school segregation in the 1950’s? Or stopped to think about the courage it must have taken to challenge a practice that had been blessed by the United States Supreme Court, written into state laws and zealously adhered to by local traditions? Here’s one story:
Harry Riggs was a garage attendant, and they fired him. And they fired another man whose name was Stookes after–he was working at a filling station also. After they fired him, he attempted to try to work in his backyard, and so he was working on a car and, not having the proper things to use for the car, he had jacked the car up on a homemade shift, and the car fell on him and killed him. And James Brown was working for a trucking company. I don’t recall the trucking company. They fired him.
And they fired teachers who they thought had signed it. My husband had two sisters working in the district. They were fired. He was fired. And I was fired. And even the parents who signed the petition, they wouldn’t let them have loans to–for their crops the following year. And of course the (white) people stopped buying groceries, some of them, and they’d even go to Sumpter and Columbia and other places to buy groceries, and they would cut off everything that they thought was helping the petitioners.
That’s what Mattie de Laine, the widow of the Reverend Joseph De Laine[1] (who helped bring the lawsuit in Clarendon County, South Carolina), told me when I interviewed her in 1979, 25 years after the historic Brown v Board Supreme Court decision of 1954.
The negative reaction was not confined to the white community. All Sarah Bulah of Wilmington, Delaware wanted was to have the bus that took white children to school pick up her daughter, Shirley, Sixty Years After Brown | Taking Note: