July 3^rd

Thomas Sowell tell us that the “Supreme Court decisions could lead to disasters.” That certainly got my attention. I have lived through several disasters and I try to avoid them; there was the attack on Pearl Harbor, my attempt to pass engineering calculus and physics without studying for either of them, doing a paper on the evolution of the Christian religion for a Bible College professor, and several other disasters equally irrelevant to the issue at hand.

I looked very carefully at Sowell’s piece to find exactly what disasters he was talking about. He has managed to hide most of them very carefully. There was one instance that might qualify: He writes, “When any branch of government  can exercise powers not authorized by either statues or the Constitution, ‘we the people’ are no longer free citizens but subjects, and our ‘public servants’ are really our public masters.” But this begs the question; the issue is whether or not the Constitution does authorize SCOTUS to act as it has done in the various cases described. Obviously the judgment of the court is that it is so authorized, and for Sowell to simply claim that it is not begs the question.

He has more problems with SCOTUS decisions. He disputes claims that “statistical disparities imply discrimination. That notion has created a whole statistical shakedown racket, practiced by government and private race hustlers alike.” Of course some statistical disparities most certainly imply discrimination; the pay gap between equally well educated men and women employees is a good example. Sowell gives not a single example of this “statistical shakedown.” Indeed he gives no examples of any of the “abuses” he complains about…with one exception.

He claims that Justice Warren’s decision about separate educational facilities being inherently unequal was quite wrong. It was wrong because he has found an all black public high school in the city of Washington which has sent a higher percentage of its graduates on to college than any white high school there; moreover they scored higher on tests than two of the cities three white academic public high schools. It is interesting that Sowell keeps the name of this exemplary school from his readers.

If I weren’t charitable I might suggest that Sowell was cherry picking here. Could there be other black schools not so able to educate their students? Let’s look at Prince George County: Prince George County opened its first black high school in 1939. Unlike its counterpart for white students, Robert Russa Moton High School had no gymnasium, cafeteria, lockers, or auditorium with fixed seating. Built with a capacity for 180, it contained 450 students by 1950. To house the additional students, the school board built plywood structures covered with tarpaper and heated them with pot-bellied stoves. These “tarpaper shacks” became a symbol of all that was wrong with segregated education. The all-white school board promised to build a new school, but never followed through. Finally, an eleventh grade black girl, Barbara Johns, persuaded the students to simply walk out. These kids did not have even one microscope for their biology classes.

I guess Tom Sowell’s usual Republican blinders keep him from seeing anything that doesn’t support his agenda; but to ignore the deplorable condition of segregated education in the south before Brown v Board of Education is simply unconscionable. Sowell should be ashamed of himself!