The 70th Anniversary of Brown V. Board of Education

Floor Speech

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank the honorable Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick from Florida and the co-anchor of this Special Order hour for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, tonight just a few of my colleagues and I gather in this place and at this time to remind the Members of this body and the American people of the cost of progress in this country. I submit to you that there are too many people who have come to believe that progress is inevitable, that history is slanted upward, and that if left to its own devices, this country will magically always do the right thing.

It is not ironic that those are usually also the same people who believe that marches and demonstrations are untimely and excessive. In a very real sense, these are the people who said that Reverend Martin Luther King was a rabble-rouser; that Thurgood Marshall was delusional; that college protests are inconveniences and not to be taken seriously; that the preservation of the status quo is of more social value than is the expansion of opportunity and liberty.

They do further believe that public demonstrations of discontent are more about law and order than about the irrepressible yearning in every human being to unapologetically be free.

What they miss is that all of us want and deserve to be treated with respect and have our dignity intact. What they fail to realize is that all of us want to see our children live in communities where they are safe and valued and have opportunity. Regrettably not all of us have access to the things that make for peace.

In the words of Reverend Martin Luther King, peace is not the absence of noise, but it is the presence of justice. Not all of us are judged by the content of our character nor simply the color of our skin. As long as a child in Brooklyn cannot read and a child in Atlanta and Appalachia may not have a desire to learn, we cannot be complacent in a Nation of great wealth.

What the purveyors of inevitability fail to understand is that freedom and justice have never come to those who waited for someone else to decide it was time for them to be free. Even in this body, there are far too many individuals under the impression that this Nation will become a more perfect Union if we just leave things alone, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, and this week, we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. What made this a landmark decision was not just that it undermined the fallacious reasoning that made segregation possible in this country, but also the fact that the decision itself was the result of generations of American citizens working diligently in the shadows of American history to push this Nation forward.

Brown v. Board of Education didn't just happen 70 years ago. An entire movement made it possible for the Supreme Court not to ignore the arrival of an idea whose time had come. We are only able to have this commemoration because Black people and honorable White people in this country refused to wait another generation before we could enjoy some of the promises of America.

What happened in that courtroom in 1954 in Arkansas cannot be understood apart from what is happening in the streets of America today.

Progress in America is a fact that cannot be denied, but it did not happen because America wanted to change. This Nation is not a better place to live in because southern segregationists changed their minds. Change happened in America because, though the wheels of God grind slow, they grind exceedingly small but go forward.

That is to say it was nothing but the righteous indignation of ordinary people doing extraordinary things that made justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Just the other day, not far from here in the Capitol in Statuary Hall, we celebrated the statue of Daisy Bates taking her rightful place in Statuary Hall.

As a child, I grew up in Chicago and Mrs. Bates oftentimes came and shared the holidays with my family. It was indeed an honor to be a Member of the 118th Congress and to see the unveiling of her statue, an African-American woman, who at the age of 8, had lost her mother to men that had raped her and killed her and put her in a mill pond in Arkansas never having faced justice, but then to see President Bill Clinton and Governor Mike Huckabee unveil a statue and a highway, a road in her honor, was truly an honor in 1998.

As we celebrated the valorization and veneration of her likeness, I would remind us of how many different kinds of people it takes to move a nation forward in the direction of its principles on paper.

Daisy Bates was a publisher and an activist who gave counsel to the Little Rock Nine, nine children who were denied access to a public education under Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas.

She was someone instrumental in the effort to undermine the Nation's separate but equal law, a Jim Crow-era law that still remained. She didn't come out of her mother's womb wanting to be an activist, but she lived in a country where activism was as much a necessity as breathing. When our young children are gathering up on the campuses today, they yearn for freedom.

She did what she had to do for herself and her progeny. This Nation owes her our deepest gratitude for laying such a costly sacrifice upon the altars of equity and equality in America.

To each and all of the remarkable trailblazers who dedicated their lives to the possibility of unbridled opportunity in this country, we owe you and Miss Daisy Bates our devotion, and we owe our children common sense.

Do not be deceived. We still need people who are willing to do extraordinary things in the cause of freedom and justice because when a Black United States airman can be murdered in his house for expressing his Second Amendment right to bear arms while Kyle Rittenhouse can shoot three people and walk down the streets with an AR-15 in his hands and nobody even asks him a question, clearly there is work that still needs to be done in our country.

Be not deceived. As long as women do not get equal pay for equal work, we have work to do. As long as anti-Semitism is taking on a life of its own while anti-Blackness has never truly subsided, there is still work that must be done, and we are the ones to do it.

Let us continue the work. Let us continue to fight for what is right.

Let us challenge our friends to do more, our enemies to do better, and ourselves to never give up. God bless the memory of all of those who kept America strong and made America better.

We commemorate this day for Miss Daisy Bates, the children of Little Rock, and those who brought in a new era of desegregation.

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