A continuation of the introduction from page five of the report and the perceived problem identified by the commission regarding the Supreme Court Decision of 1954 in Brown v Board of Education Topeka, Kansas. The introduction further presents the concern for the Supreme Court's disregard for states' and citizens' rights.
Tag
states rights'; Article V; Constitution; damage to school system by judicial decree; educational institutions and churches as social institutions in Virginia; rebuilding education since 1865
provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia. For nearly
a century this interpretation was adopted by many state courts and by
the Supreme Court of the United States, and accepted by the people of
this country and their legislative representatives. It was the law of the
land as firmly as anything can be the law of the land.
In the Davis and companion cases the present Court has uprooted
the law long laid down and followed by eminent judges. In doing so, the
present Court abandoned all legal precedent and based its conclusions
upon the conflicting evidence of psychologists. It relied “generally” upon
a lengthy treatise edited by Gunnar Myrdal, a European sociologist of
slight experience in the United States, consisting of a number of over-
lapping contributions made by a number of writers, many of whom were
given their golden opportunity to voice their own preconceptions and
prejudices. This treatise seems, however, not to have been closely read by
the justices of the Supreme Court; otherwise, they would have observed
that the author suggests that the adoption of the Constitution was in its
inception a fraud upon the common people and that in his opinion it is now
an outworn document.
With this decision, based upon such authority, we are now faced.
It is a matter of the gravest import, not only to those communities where
problems of race are serious, but to every community in the land, because
this decision transcends the matter of segregation in education. It means
that irrespective of precedent, long acquiesced in, the Court can and will
change its interpretation of the Constitution at its pleasure, disregarding
the orderly processes for its amendment set forth in Article V thereof.
It means that the most fundamental of the rights of the states and of their
citizens exist by the Court’s sufferance and that the law of the land is
whatever the Court may determine it to be by the process of judicial
legislation. :
THE PROBLEM BEFORE US
The Commission, realizing that the problem before it is the gravest
to confront the people of Virginia in this century, has not been willing to
take hasty actions which might tend to add to the damage already done to
the school system by judicial decree.
The public schools are not only educational institutions together with
the churches they are the dominant social institutions of the people of
Virginia, and of the two, the schools occupy the greater part of the
thought and energy of our children.
The public schools have been built up slowly and painfully from the
ashes of 1865. Within the memory of members of the Commission, public
schools, especially in the rural areas, were pathetically inadequate for both
races. Until recent years the people of Virginia struggled to establish
primary schools in order to meet the minimum needs of our children. At
the end of the century only a little more than 10,000 white and a little more
than 1,000 Negro pupils were taking high school subjects in Virginia,
which was only 4% of the white pupils and only .7% of the Negro pupils
then in the schools. Since then our public schools have made enormous
progress. In the high schools we now have 135,425 white and 88,740
Negro pupils enrolled. The pay of Negro and white teachers has been
equalized and many millions of dollars have been expended in school con-
struction. The number of Negro teachers—more than 6,000—employed in
the public schools of Virginia today exceeds those in all of the non-
segregated states combined at the time the Supreme Court had the school