May 17, 2019 was the 65th anniversary of the historic 1954 Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision of the US Supreme Court and should not be allowed to pass without recognition of its importance to the civil rights movement. Our young people should pause to learn the lessons of the oppressive apartheid practices in United States of America.

First, it must be told that the US is a country which openly practised post-slavery, institutionalized racism for over a century, with remnants still seen today. Ninety-seven years before Brown vs Board of Education was decided, the very same US Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case of 1857 that under the US Constitution, rights did not apply to African Americans, as they were not, and could not — enslaved or free — become citizens. It is against this background that Brown vs Board of Education — which ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (which prohibits the states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions) — came to be decided. The decision declared that separate educational facilities for white and African American students were inherently unequal.

In 1868, 86 years before the Brown case, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed into law, declaring that all persons born in the US are citizens, and no state shall make any law to deny them equal protection under the laws. Racist American institutions virtually ignored that constitutional amendment for decades. In fact, when the segregated laws were challenged, where black people could not share spaces with white people on buses, in restaurants, or at water fountains, the Supreme Court upheld the racist laws. It invented the “separate but equal” doctrine, advanced in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), according to which, laws mandating separate public facilities for whites and African Americans did not violate the equal-protection clause, if the facilities are approximately equal.

The importance of the Brown vs Board of Education case is that it lit a fire that could not be quenched, which saw the civil rights movement using the school case to demand desegregation of all public and private institutions. The movement gave rise to leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, both of whom paid the ultimate price for their opposition to the denial of equal rights for us all.

So let us recognise, 65 years later, the struggles of our sisters and brothers upon whom police officers set dogs and jailed because they dared to march for our civil rights in the 50s and 60s. This history explains why today the parents and grandparents of young African Americans warn their children about how easy it is for them to be shot and jailed by agents of the State in a country with a sad legacy of racial discrimination and the practice of apartheid.

Bert S Samuels is an attorney-at-law. Send comments to the Observer or bert.samuels@gmail.com.