Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Dream
My most enduring image of myself, the one I still carry behind my eyes, animates everything that comes after. I am four years old and my father is at the kitchen table writing, his tall, lean frame bent forward over the law textbooks piled high around him. My mother is at the stove, still in the African print dashiki dress she wore to teach her junior high school science classes, her stockinged feet relieved of their chunky black platforms, her slim, sturdy brown arms a dance of grace as she seasons fish, dices vegetables, and measures out a portion of rice for our dinner. I am at the table opposite my father, legs dangling from a chair. I’m working, too, deep in concentration as I practice my letters, create stories, and make drawings to illustrate them, my coloring books and picture books in a little stack at my elbow, as respectable an approximation of my father’s tower of law journals as I have been able to assemble.
From the first moment I became conscious of myself, I aspired to be as purposeful as my parents. Johnny and Ellery Brown were salt-of-the-earth people whose core values, I would quickly come to understand, were hard work, a belief in the vastness of individual potential, and fierce pride in the journey and legacy of Black Americans. Though I didn’t yet have the words to express my dawning sense of the moral compass that guided my parents, I already knew that I wanted to be as warm and capable as my mother, our family’s sole breadwinner during those years when my dad, a former high school history teacher, toiled as one of a handful of Black students at the University of Miami’s law school. (Today, the terms “Black American,” “African American,” and “Black” are preferable when speaking of people of African descent in the United States. In this book, I use them interchangeably. I also sometimes use the words “Negro” and “Colored” in their historical context, reflecting the time periods and places referred to when these terms appear.)
I also knew that I wanted to be just like the ebony-skinned, gentle-voiced man who would sometimes look up from his textbooks to talk to me about his cases, to ask me what I thought, as if I weren’t four years old. The conundrums he described fascinated me; they were stories of people in trouble, conflict, or sorrow, seeking the even-handed recourse of the law. I would first encounter my calling in that tiny kitchen in a small family apartment on the far edge of the University of Miami’s campus. I dreamed of helping to resolve people’s problems. Like my father, I wanted to study law.
Of course, I was still far too young to grasp just how profoundly the law had defined and circumscribed my people’s very existence on American soil. To start, Black people were brought to this country in chains and subjected to centuries of legalized enslavement. And even after slavery ended, the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the doctrine of state-sanctioned racial segregation just before the turn of the twentieth century, consigning Black Americans to second-class citizenship by law for another six decades. My home state of Florida passed one of the first racial segregation statutes in 1887, when it mandated that Negroes travel in separate railroad cars from Whites, with the Negro cars located behind a partition at the back of the train. Within three years, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana had instituted their own separate railway car laws, and the rest of the southern states soon followed suit.
The legally enforced racial segregation that pervaded the South in the late nineteenth century had a direct predecessor: the infamous Black Codes. These state and local statutes were enacted wherever free Blacks settled after the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished the institution of slavery and guaranteed freedom for some four million Black people in the United States. After slavery, the Black Codes imposed a similarly oppressive legal status based on race. They prescribed where and how formerly enslaved people could be employed, how much they could be paid, where they could dwell, how they were permitted to travel, what establishments they were allowed to enter, and where their children could go to school. Black people’s ability to own property was also restricted, as was their right to engage in business enterprises that might help their families progress economically. And Black men, who had been granted the right to vote following Emancipation, found themselves once again disenfranchised under the Black Codes, which required them to pass various tests to register.
Many northerners opposed the Black Codes, asserting that such state laws violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s grant of freedom. Congress responded in 1867, undertaking several legislative actions aimed at protecting the rights of Black Americans, including passing the Reconstruction Act. This statute required southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted equal protection to all persons under the law. Three years later, the Fifteenth Amendment, stating that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” was also ratified. But despite these legal interventions, a committed cadre of White-supremacy proponents continued the subjugation of Black citizens through extrajudicial means. In the South, Ku Klux Klan violence and lynchings escalated, prompting waves of African Americans to flee the countryside and amass in large urban centers, where they hoped to find safety in numbers.
And for a while, they did. In fact, Black and White citizens mingled freely in the public spaces of major southern cities like New Orleans, reflecting their equality under federal law. African Americans made remarkable strides in commerce, education, and politics during this era. Over time, however, new rules that reinforced Black subjugation through the physical separation of the races emerged, beginning with laws like the 1887 Florida statute that required segregated train cars. States passed similar laws concerning almost every area of daily life, once again closing off opportunities for Black people throughout the South. This time, the race-based edicts were named after Jim Crow, an insulting minstrel caricature of a Black man, performed by a White actor in blackface.
The Supreme Court weighed in on this state of affairs in the mid-1890s, after Black activists in New Orleans turned to the courts to challenge Jim Crow segregation and assert their constitutionally encoded civil liberties. The activists aimed their legal challenge at Louisiana’s separate railroad car law, arguing that state-sanctioned segregation of Whites and Negroes in public transportation was “coincident with the institution of slavery” and rooted in assumptions that Black people were “of a servile character.”
These claims were made in legal briefs filed on behalf of one Homer Adolph Plessy, a Black man who had been arrested for refusing to remove himself from the “Whites Only” train car when requested to do so. As Plessy’s case worked its way through the legal system, the matter became known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the latter name denoting the judge who had first rejected Plessy’s claim that the Separate Car Act was unconstitutional.
The brief Plessy eventually filed in the Supreme Court argued that “slavery was a caste, a legal condition of subjection to the dominant class,” and even though slavery had been outlawed, the caste system it had created had essentially persisted through laws that mandated legal separation of the races. Jim Crow was merely another vestige of that unlawful servile state, the argument went, and one that was in no way redressed by the notion that the separate Negro train car was “equal” to that of the White car.
After considering both sides of the argument over the constitutionality of racial segregation in American society, the justices determined that the question before them turned solely on whether “separate but equal accommodations” violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s Jim Crow law, ruling that separate quarters did not have to be the same in every respect to be considered equal, and that it was not unconstitutional to provide “separate but equal” accommodations for Blacks and Whites because the Fourteenth Amendment simply required “equal protection” under the law.
My becoming a justice, sitting on the same court that long ago sanctioned the trying conditions that marked the life experiences of my parents, is perhaps a fitting bookend to my story thus far, and to that of the generations of my family that immediately preceded me. When my parents were coming of age in Florida in the 1950s and 1960s, they wrestled with the realities that the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling had wrought. Just as it had for my grandparents, the legally enforced separation of the races limited their access to workplaces, restaurants, theaters, hotels, transportation, and other public goods and services that White citizens enjoyed. Thus, the economic and life prospects of my parents’ generation were significantly curtailed by laws designed to keep Black people in their place, which is to say, in a subordinate position to Whites.
But I come from resilient stock. One expression of my forebears’ tenacity was their determination to model that we should never define ourselves by statutes designed to quash our potential and diminish our humanity. Still, with Jim Crow laws relegating African Americans to the lowliest work and living conditions, and consigning their children to woefully underresourced public schools, my ancestors, like so many Black people in the South, struggled to rise out of poverty.
• • •
Horace and Euzera Ross, my maternal grandparents, both started life in the early 1900s in Edison, Georgia, a rural community in the southwestern part of the state. Horace was the youngest of three boys born to a homemaker mother, Daisy Reese Ross, and a father, Jim Ross, who dug wells. Horace never finished school. Instead, he and his brothers went to work with their father in his well-digging business. Horace would later tell his own sons stories of how, as the smallest boy, he would be lowered in a bucket by his father to the depths of a well so that he could clear leaves, dig out sticks, and shovel away mud and other impediments to the groundwater’s free flow.
Not far down the road from the Ross home, my grandmother Euzera was growing up feeling deeply alone—her mother had died from an unknown illness when she was no more than four years old. Little Euzera had been taken in by a cousin, Trudie, and her husband, Hassie Jones, while her older siblings went to live with other relatives. Trudie and Hassie were sharecroppers who cared for the fields and farm animals belonging to a White landowner. In return, they were allowed to occupy a whitewashed wooden cabin on the property, in which they were raising Euzera alongside their own three daughters.
A delicate and extraordinarily beautiful child, Euzera was soft-spoken in all her dealings. But her graciously smiling demeanor hid the heartache she carried at her core. Even though she did not report being ill-treated by her relatives, she was aware of being an outsider in a home where her cousins always came first and she was the quiet girl who didn’t truly belong. Her father, Samuel Greene, lived across town, and she saw him from time to time, but their bond was never close, especially after he married again and started another family.
Many years later, my grandmother described to her daughters how, when school let out and her chores were done, she would walk in the fields around Edison, the sky overhead blue with promise as she prayed, “God, if I ever have my own children, if you bless me with my own family, I am going to love them so much.” My grandmother wanted nothing more than to be a mother, to heal her own sense of being adrift in the world by giving her future offspring the feeling of rootedness and worth that she herself had craved.
As it happened, my grandmother’s prayers were already in the process of being answered. In that small community, my grandparents’ families knew one another, as Horace’s father had dug and regularly maintained a well on the property where Euzera lived. Horace’s mother, Daisy, and Euzera’s guardian, Trudie, also sometimes visited each other as friends, and it was Daisy who introduced the girl who would eventually become my grandmother to the youngest of her three sons.
