Brown v. Board of Education

A cartoon-style mural of women portrayed as a rainbow of elongated silhouettes, who are marching in a procession with books in hand.

beastfromeast / iStock

THREE YEARS AGO, I joined a struggle for what I view as the most transformational justice reform today: change to the U.S. Constitution. The change I advocate is at once unbelievably simple and profoundly radical: for Americans to agree that all citizens enjoy equal rights under law, whatever their gender or sexual orientation. It’s time to recognize the Equal Rights Amendment. Equality is central to most contemporary theories of justice. A majority of Americans puzzle why our nation has failed to live up to the promise of equality in our democracy. So why aren’t women protected equally?

“The ERA is dead,” opponents argue, laid to rest by an arbitrary time limit that was negotiated into the prelude of the bill Congress passed in 1972. A procedural objection seems a weak theory to lead with, in response to the unrequited aspirations of half the citizenry for basic human rights. Whatever the amendment’s merits, many claim, it cannot be revived. And yet miraculously, it has been. And women everywhere are testifying to this resurrection.

This is fitting, isn’t it? It was women, after all, who first testified to the resurrection. This Easter, we read how Mary Magdalene and the other Mary meet an angel at Jesus’ tomb, who commissions them to tell the disciples he is risen. The guards are too terrified to move, but the women rush to fulfill their divine calling (see Matthew 28).

Da’Shawn Mosley 8-30-2016

Thurgood Marshall / Wikimedia Commons

On Aug. 30, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was confirmed by the United States Senate as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Throughout his tenure as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and even prior to his nomination to the court by President Johnson, Marshall left his mark on various cases that have proved pivotal to pushing America closer toward being a fair and just society for all.

Here are five Supreme Court cases in which Marshall fought for justice—often while he was on the other side of the bench—and won.

Anna Paulina Murray. Image via Carolina Digital Library and Archives / Yale / RNS

A new residential college at Yale University has been named for an Episcopal saint who was the first African-American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.

Anna Pauline Murray, known as “Pauli,” was also civil rights activist who helped shape the legal argument for the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. She was the co-founder of the National Organization for Women and received an advanced law degree from Yale in 1965 and an honorary doctorate from Yale Divinity School in 1979.

Tom Ehrich 5-20-2014

This 1961 archival photo shows “Integration in schools” (location unknown). Religion News Service file photo by Bruce Bailey.

Not long ago, I visited Topeka, Kan., to teach at one of those grand old mainline churches that got caught in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.

It was around the corner from the modest home of a railroad worker named Oliver Brown who decided his daughter Linda shouldn’t have to attend an elementary school far from home just because the neighborhood school was for whites only.

The Supreme Court agreed and, in 1954, struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had allowed segregation in public schools. That decision set in motion the mass exodus of whites from urban neighborhoods.

So-called “white flight” suburbs sprang up just outside the borders of newly integrated school districts. New schools went up to attract white families, as did housing developments promising a better way of life, code for “whites-only.”