According to my parents and my birth certificate, I was born on January 12, 1953, at Orangeburg Regional Hospital in South Carolina.  At birth I became a citizen of the United States of America.  However there were those who thought that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution didn’t apply to me.  They were wrong.  On May 17, 1954, when I was one year and 74 days old the United States Supreme Court tried to correct the denial of equal protection experienced by Americans that came from the Plessy v Ferguson. The Brown v Board ruling should have communicated that “separate but equal” was illegal and morally indefensible, especially in education.  I obviously don’t remember that day, but it must have been a big deal.

The Brown family in Kansas, the Briggs family in South Carolina and, the Davis family in Virginia were brave enough to seek assistance from Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  Their position was that the equality and separation were mutually exclusive.   To go even further, separate but equal as a concept is insane.  

Before Brown v Board, my native state of South Carolina made some attempts to resolve the matter.  Freedom high schools were constructed in counties where no high schools went beyond the 10^th grade for Black Students.  School buses were purchased so that students didn’t need to walk ten miles.   My high school was among the first Freedom Schools.  The first Black twelfth grader graduated from John Ford High School in 1954.  Before Freedom Schools, thousands of United States Citizens in South Carolina were deliberately underprepared.  Through personal experience I know that John Ford High School didn’t received the resources allotted to St. Matthews High.  We were definitely separate and unequal.

Adults my children’s age and younger know little about school segregation.  They think schools were desegregated when on the day that Brown was decided.  Brown was decided when I was one year old.  I attended segregated schools until 1970, my senior year in high school.  I’m sure that there are some who would consider this editorial as Critical Race Theory.  But honestly, I don’t know what Critical Race Theory is.  However, I know what I personally experienced.  This editorial is about a landmark United States Supreme Court decision that attempted to correct an egregious error.  This editorial is my attempt to acknowledge the contribution of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund made on behalf of all Americans.