Liam Conner
President Biden this week marked the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned institutionalized racial segregation in public schools by welcoming plaintiffs and families in the landmark case to the White House.
Oval Office visits Thursday to commemorate 1954 Brown v. Board of Education The decision to desegregate schools comes as Biden steps up efforts to highlight his administration’s commitment to racial equality.
The president courted black voters in Atlanta and Milwaukee this week with two black radio interviews in which he promoted his record on jobs, health care and infrastructure and attacked Republican Donald Trump.
Biden is scheduled to give speeches Friday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and — along with Vice President Kamala Harris — meet with leaders of the Divine Nine, a group of historically black sororities and fraternities. And the president on Sunday will deliver the commencement address at Morehouse College, the historically black college in Atlanta, and speak at an NAACP gala in Detroit.
During Thursday’s visit by litigants and their families, the conversation largely centered on honoring the plaintiffs and the ongoing battle to bolster education in black communities, according to participants.
“He commended them for changing our nation for the better and committed to continuing their fight to bring us closer to the promise of America,” White House senior adviser Stephen Benjamin told reporters after the meeting.
Biden faces a tough re-election battle in November and aims to repeat his 2020 success with black voters, a key bloc in helping him defeat Trump. But polls from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research throughout Biden’s time in office reveal a widespread feeling of disappointment with his performance as president, even among some of his staunchest supporters, including black adults.
“I don’t accept the premise that there is any erosion of black support” for Biden, said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who participated in the Oval Office visit. “This election is not about candidate A versus candidate B. It’s about whether we have a functioning democracy or something less than that.”
Among those who attended the meeting were John Stokes, a Brown plaintiff; Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father, Oliver Brown, was the lead plaintiff in the Brown case; and Adrienne Jennings Bennett, plaintiff in Boiling v. Sharpe, which was discussed at the same time and banned school segregation in Washington, DC. The meeting was attended by plaintiffs and families of litigants from five cases that were consolidated into the historic Brown case.
The Brown decision overturned an 1896 ruling that institutionalized racial segregation with so-called “separate but equal” schools for black and white students by ruling that such accommodations were anything but equal.
Brown Henderson said one of the meeting’s participants asked the president to make May 17, the day the decision was handed down, an annual federal holiday. She said Biden also recognized the courage of the litigants.
“He recognized that in the 1950s and 1940s, when Jim Crow was still raging, the people you see here were taking a risk when they signed on to be part of this case,” she said. “Anytime you rejected Jim Crow and segregation, you know, your life, your livelihood, your homes, you were taking a risk.
The announcement last month that Biden had accepted an invitation to deliver Morehouse’s commencement address triggered peaceful student protests and calls for the university administration to overturn the president’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.
In recent days, Biden dispatched Benjamin to meet with Morehouse students and faculty.
Benjamin told reporters on Thursday that the situation in the Middle East was among the issues he discussed with students and faculty during the visit.
