No doubt as part of Black History month, the Maggie Walker historical site right here in fabulous Jackson Ward, is showing culturally relevant films all month.
Today's drew enough of an audience to require moving it to Club 533, just around the corner (and the site of the annual Jackson Ward Christmas party), something another attendee and I found out only when we arrived at the original site.
After getting in our respective cars and motoring the block and a half to 533, we agreed that we'd have been better off walking together in the snow shower.
Inside, we joined several dozen people for a screening of "The Road to Brown," about the brilliant legal campaign that led up to the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case.
Amazingly, I had never heard of Charles Hamilton Houston, the go-getter responsible for being part of every major civil rights case that went before the Supreme Court for a quarter of a century leading up to the Brown case.
He went around the south taking pictures of the deplorable conditions in "separate but equal" colored schools.
And while I'd heard and read about the joke that was "separate but equal" facilities, I was amazed at how far that doctrine had been taken to enforce the so-called Jim Crow laws.
Separate Coke machines for blacks and whites.
Separate phone booths.
Separate textbook storage facilities.
Think about that. We had to separate black and white textbooks that weren't even being used?
But Houston had a plan.
While dean of the Howard University Law School, he began attracting and teaching a cadre of black lawyers who would help him fight the battles necessary to dismantle the Jim Crow laws.
He decided the first area of attack would be education, taking on equal pay for black and white teachers and equal facilities.
As in no more tar paper shacks for the colored schools.
And one by one, Houston and his talented group (including Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill) won cases that set precedents.
So when Brown v. Board of Education came along, they had enough precedents to use to win a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court.
But as we all know (or should know), just because it's law doesn't mean the states choose to obey it.
No, if you're like Virginia, you just circumvent that law with state laws that allow you to continue with the embarrassment of separate but equal.
And it was from that era that the post-film speakers were pulled.
Three former students from the all-black Moton High School in Farmville spoke about the student-led walkout they participated in on April 23, 1951.
The all-white school board had denied Moton funds, despite it then housing 400 kids instead of the 180 it was built for.
One, a fifteen-year old when it began, said she was asked by the organizer, Barbara Johns, to spread the word about the walkout to all the other 8th graders.
And not to tell her parents a word about it.
But being a good girl, she did choose to tell her father.
"He was surprised, but he didn't tell me not to do it," she said.
All three former Moton students spoke of the deplorable conditions at their colored school, rooves that leaked so badly some kids needed an umbrella in class, a pot-bellied stove for warmth, although unless you were near it, you still needed your coat to prevent shivering.
It was a history lesson of the very best kind, courtesy of students who had not only lived through it, but been willing to stand up to make a difference for others.
While I'd gone to the film because
And I say that as one who was actually bussed to a black high school in the lingering years when everyone still acknowledged that we had not yet reached educational equality and thought I knew more than most about the subject.
Yet I'd never heard or read a word about the "man who killed Jim Crow," Charles Houston.
Miss Maggie's matinee changed all that today.
Best Houston quote: "Lawyers are either social engineers or a parasite on society."
Amen, brother.
We all owe you a world of debt.
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