Daughter Of Civil Rights Leader Speaks On Inequality
Ophelia De Laine Gona speaks at the Robert H. Jackson Center on Tuesday. P-J photo by John Whittaker |
By JOHN WHITTAKER
The United States Supreme Court has twice ruled on the issue of segregation in Summerton, S.C.
That doesn’t mean the fight for equality in Summerton is over, however.
For Ophelia De Laine Gona, the daughter of the civil rights leader who provided the spark for a group of poor farmers to push a case all the way to the Supreme Court, inequality is as evident in Summerton now as it was 50 years ago.
‘‘All of the people who were forward-looking people left,’’ Dr. De Gona said. ‘‘They were forced out. ... And, so, things went down.’’
Many of the people who pushed for the Summerton school desegregation case — Briggs v. Elliott — moved away after the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II in 1955. They’ve now returned to push for more reform. Most white school students go to private schools or outside the Summerton school district.
Her criticisms of the ‘‘all deliberate speed’’ ruling second those of many scholars through the years. Because of the language used in the Brown II ruling, a third lawsuit had to be filed in 1965 for Summerton High School to be segregated.
The weak language and the time that passed gave too much time for those pushing for change to be persecuted and move away, allowing the status quo to remain 50 years after the Brown II ruling.
A third of the students at the largely-black school remaining didn’t graduate because they couldn’t pass the state’s exit exams. The school averages a 761 SAT score, a figure that pales in comparison with the 989 in the rest of the county and 1,061 national average.
For Dr. Gona, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown II, in which the justices decreed segregation must be wiped out with all deliberate speed, didn’t use the judiciary’s power nearly enough. The Summerton consolidated high school closed after only one year of segregation. One black student graduated from the school.
‘‘This was all probably because, in 1955, some old men sat in the Supreme Court in Washington and decided they didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of people in the South and told them to do it ‘with all deliberate speed,’ ’’ Dr. De Gona said.
Dr. Gona’s father, the Rev. Joseph De Laine, spent years helping his parishioners navigate the legal waters to get their children a bus ride to school. The first case De Laine filed was thrown out on a legal technicality.
Judge J. Waties Waring, the judge in the second case, told De Laine and his parishioners that the case needed to be reworked before it could be heard because the case didn’t challenge the South Carolina segregation law’s constitutionality. The third case was the one that ended up being heard by the Supreme Court.
‘‘One of the myths is that Brown is something that only came from Topeka, Kans.,’’ Dr. Gona said. ‘‘The fact is that Brown came, first of all, from South Carolina, and from Virginia, and from Delaware, and from Kansas. These four states had cases saying the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment were being denied. ... Those five cases are now known as Brown v. Board of Education.’’
The aftereffects of the segregation battle aren’t seen only in Summerton, however. De Laine was shot at, received death threats, had his home burned down and eventually fled to New York. Dozens of black citizens lost their jobs for signing the Briggs petition or simply for their skin color.
Judge Waring, the judge whose dissent in the third Briggs case foretold parts of the Supreme Court’s initial Brown opinion, was shunned. He eventually moved to Chicago. He was buried in South Carolina. Only 15 white people attended his funeral while hundreds of blacks paid their respects.
Still, Dr. De Gona said, the Brown cases showed the power a few dedicated people can have when pushing for change. There were more than 200 plaintiffs listed on the cases that made up Brown v. Board of Education. While the cases are famous for the first man on the list — Oliver Brown — hundreds of people had to work for years behind the scenes to push the cases to the Supreme Court.
‘‘What you had was a lot of people having a lot of courage to speak up and to write their names on the petition,’’ Dr. De Gona said.