During a ceremony in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in the
early 1970s, former UCLA student and freedom rider Steve McNichols
felt like his journey for civil rights had come full circle.
McNichols, an undergraduate student from 1958 to 1966 who had
been arrested and beaten on a freedom ride to Houston, Texas, had
an opportunity that day in the renowned library to meet former
Chief Justice Earl Warren and personally thank him for the landmark
Supreme Court ruling that his court had made two decades earlier
calling for the desegregation of all public schools.
The decision was Brown v. The Topeka, Kan., Board of Education,
and on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court overturned the
“separate but equal” doctrine that had been established
in a 1892 ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson. The high court ruled that
segregation in schools violated the 14th Amendment.
Exactly 50 years later, McNichols recalls and treasures his
meeting with Warren as a significant moment in his life, though the
retired attorney forgot to mention it in an initial phone
interview. But within five minutes of hanging up, McNichols called
back and related the anecdote, calling it something people would
appreciate.
“I introduced myself as a freedom rider and told him that
even when we were in jail, one of the things that inspired us was
the Warren Court, and he of course was delighted,” McNichols
said, also emphasizing that the only reason he had been an
undergraduate for nine years was because he was so involved in the
Civil Rights Movement.
Today, on the 50th anniversary of the monumental decision,
numerous rallies and celebrations are scheduled to commemorate the
ruling that triggered a tidal wave of change in how race was
treated throughout the country. A rally coordinated by the African
Student Union is scheduled to take place today at noon, beginning
in Bruin Plaza and progressing to Murphy Hall to address the
decision’s relevance to current education issues.
The case was brought to the courts by the family of Linda Brown,
an 8-year-old girl who had to attend an all-black elementary school
that was one mile away from her home, when an all-white school was
seven blocks away. Brown’s father attempted to enroll her in
the all-white school and was refused admission. With support from
the local NAACP chapter and other parents who believed that
separate facilities were inherently unequal, the case was
eventually brought to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court unanimously ruled in favor of the Brown family.
There’s no question that the case’s significance was
huge, but change was still slow to ripple through the
nation’s education system, says UCLA history Professor Brenda
Stevenson.
Until 1969, 15 years after the call for desegregation was made,
the University of Virginia was both gender- and race-segregated.
When Stevenson was an undergraduate at the university as a black
female student in the late 1970s, she said it was a time when
everyone still remembered segregation.
It was an adjustment, Stevenson said, adding that she would hear
about university police questioning some non-white male students
about why they were on the campus.
But this slow change was not surprising, Stevenson said.
“To have immediate change is something no one
anticipated,” she said.
Though the implementation process was slow, the standard set by
the case was immeasurable, said State Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los
Angeles, who was the upper division women’s representative in
the UCLA undergraduate student government or what was then known as
the Student Legislative Council in the 1958-1959 school year. Kuehl
was also the founder of FEM, one of Student Media’s
newsmagazines.
“It set the standard for equality in education; it set as
its goal an integrated education and imagined as its goal equality
in education,” Kuehl said, adding that the case also called
for this goal to be accomplished with “all deliberate speed,
not even imagining how very slowly, slowly we would go.”
Still, student activists at UCLA and other universities worked
to realize this change in the years following the court ruling.
McNichols was a student at UCLA in a different era, an era that
saw the implementation of Brown v. Board to be painfully slow and
saw a campus community ““ though never officially segregated
““ that had its share of racial tension and
discrimination.
“When I first started in 1957, there was little
consciousness about race issues,” Kuehl said of her
undergraduate years at UCLA. “My generation was notoriously
dumb and silent about the issues that were going on.”
Many students hoped to change this situation and confront the
issues head-on.
During the 1950s and ’60s, there were a tremendous amount
of problems on campus, said Bob Singleton, a black student activist
during the time, who is now the chairman of the economics
department in Loyola Marymount University.
“The black students on campus couldn’t get haircuts,
couldn’t get jobs, couldn’t get housing. … We were
told to go to Santa Monica and Inglewood; I didn’t accept
that,” Singleton said. “There were many who
didn’t accept it.”
In 1960, Singleton became president of the NAACP chapter at UCLA
and said he immediately tried to get the organization to focus on
the disparities in the Westwood community.
Many of the barber shops near campus would turn away black
students who wanted their hair cut, Singleton said. Soon after,
students organized petitions and picket lines, until the
administration stepped in to show their support for the
students.
But the perception that these barber shops were being
discriminatory is open to interpretation, as is evident in a
conversation with Oakley’s Barber Shop owner, Larry
Oakley.
Sitting in the waiting area of this shop, established in 1929
with its roots in Westwood as deep as those of UCLA, Oakley
remembers there was some conflict regarding race about 40 years
back.
But he quickly points out that the barber shop turned away black
students simply because at the time, the barbers did not know how
to cut black students’ hair.
As time went on, Oakley’s began hiring barbers that could
cut black students’ hair, the 77-year-old shop owner said,
adding that there are no longer any problems with students of
different races.
“Now we got a really good relationship with black
students,” Oakley said.
Better relations eventually did begin to develop between black
students, the administration and members of the campus community
resulting from many organized efforts in the 1960s.
In response to suspicions that some landowners in Westwood would
not rent to black students, Singleton and other activists tested
the leasing process.
Students often went to the housing office on campus to look for
postings of apartments that were available for rent.
Sometimes, when black students showed up, the landlords would
immediately say the apartment had already been rented, Singleton
said. In response, groups of students would send white students to
inquire about the same apartment and would be told that the
apartment was, in fact, vacant.
Each time such a situation would develop, these students would
make a complaint to the housing office, and eventually after
receiving the support of the chancellor at the time, Franklin
Murphy, the office would not repost apartment buildings that had
been found to practice discrimination.
Singleton, who later became the first director of UCLA’s
African American studies center, recalls an apartment building on
the corner of National and Sepulveda boulevards that, under the
threat of picketing and negative publicity, eventually conceded and
allowed black students to take residency.
The same strategy was used against employers who were reluctant
to hire black students.
“They would accept me over the phone, but when they saw me
and saw that I was black, they’d say the job was
taken,” Singleton said, adding that he had been turned down
on jobs ranging from dishwasher to salesperson.
Eventually, the bureau of occupation, essentially a career
center, stopped posting jobs that refused to hire based on
race.
“After a number of victories of this sort, we found that
they would eventually back down,” Singleton said.
And as many of his friends and alumni such as McNichols attest,
it was students like Singleton who were instrumental in making all
these victories on and off campus.
“We were all in a coordinated role then … the group
became active in the free-speech movement (that) had to do with
raising money at the edge of campus to support the Civil Rights
Movement in the South,” said Rick Tuttle, an Undergraduate
Students Association Council administrative representative and a
friend of Singleton, as he spoke of his work as a student with
fellow activists of different ethnic backgrounds and campus
affiliations.
In the summer of 1962, Singleton organized a group of freedom
riders that traveled to Jackson, Mississippi. Eight UCLA students,
including Singleton, who made the journey to the South were
arrested on the charge of “disturbing the peace” while
they had been sitting in the white waiting room of a railroad
station, according to a Daily Bruin article written in October
1961. A later article describes freedom rider testimonies of brutal
beatings and verbal assaults during their time in prison.
The front page of the Daily Bruin on Sept. 18, 1961, speaks
volumes about the race issues that students were faced with every
day.
The center headline draws attention to a new University of
California policy instituted by former UC President Clark Kerr that
prohibits off-campus special interest groups from using the
university name.
This is the reason the UCLA chapter of NAACP underwent a name
change, Singleton said. It later became the Westwood NAACP.
The right sidebar article features a picture of a young
Singleton and describes his efforts gathering signatures for
petitions that condemn housing discrimination. To the left of the
article, is a brief column titled “Negro Professor Here
Can’t Find Westwood Home,” under which is a story about
freedom riders describing the brutality that they had incurred.
In 2001, McNichols attended the 40th anniversary of the freedom
ride. He was sitting in a hotel lobby, when about five students
““ black and white ““ walked up to him and thanked him
profusely for the work he had done.
“You can’t really express in words what an
experience like that feels like,” McNichols said, adding that
he hopes the upcoming generations will protect the rights for which
Brown v. Board stood.
“What I hope for is very simple and basic, we have to
protect the Bill of Rights and equal opportunities at all costs …
that’s all you really need in life to be a good
person,” he said.