United States Supreme Court rendered its historic Brown versus Board of Education decision that outlawed racial segregation of public schools. At that time, I was a junior high school student attending Dade County’s all black Dorsey Junior and Senior High School in Liberty City. The decision had no effect upon my generation of high school students since Florida, like all of the other southern states, delayed implementation of the ruling for as long as possible. By the time the Dade County Public School system finally admitted its first black student to a previously all-white school in 1963; I had graduated from college and was a naval officer.

As I prepared to leave the Navy after almost seven years of service, I applied for admission to the University of Florida’s Ph.D. program in psychology. I was rejected because of my race. In fact, as was the common practice at the time, the state of Florida having written to me that “Negro students” were not admitted to the all-white university, offered to pay my tuition at any other university outside of the state.

This offer was a reflection of the separate but equal doctrine that had defined public education in the South since 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the infamous Plessey vs. Ferguson decision that segregation of the races was constitutional as long as equal facilities were provided for blacks. Since Florida had no “Negro institution” that offered the Ph.D. in psychology at that time, Florida was required to offer me, and other blacks who were knocking on the doors of public universities at that time, equal educational opportunities elsewhere.

I rejected the state’s offer and instead applied for the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I was admitted there with all expenses paid plus a fellowship. I didn’t need Florida’s educational bribe. I have never fully forgiven Florida for this great insult to my race and to my humanity and I have not forgotten the generosity and openness of the people of Tennessee.

The separate but equal doctrine was established in 1896 when Plessey, a black man who was white, boarded an all-white railroad coach in Louisiana. At that time, there were “colored” coaches which blacks were obliged to use. These coaches were not nearly as well accommodated as were white coaches. The seats were essentially benches and the black coach was usually the first one behind the engine which assured blacks of getting most of the heat, smoke, and cinders while whites rode in relative comfort in coaches farther back.

Plessey refused to move to the Negro coach and was subsequently arrested. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which handed down the separate but equal ruling in 1896. This, therefore, was the law of the land until the Brown Decision in 1954.

Of course, blacks virtually never had equal facilities. For example, when I attended segregated schools in Florida between 1946 and 1957, black schools were sent used textbooks when the school districts purchased new ones for white students. When I attended school in Volusia County in central Florida in the late 1950s, I recall being sent to Deland’s all white high school to collect broken laboratory equipment for our science classes. We were given broken Bunsen burners, test tubes and such, all without a word of complaint (understandably) from our black teachers and principals. To have questioned this practice would have surely resulted in their firing.

But the Brown decision was to have changed all that. Given how reluctant the Court is to reverse itself, one wonders what led the Court to overturn Plessey v. Ferguson. Part of the answer lies in the testimony the justices heard in the Brown case from the nation’s leading black psychologist at the time, Kenneth Clark. It was the first time the Court allowed testimony from a social scientist on a constitutional issue. Clark had conducted a series of experiments throughout the South in the early 1950s. His famous experiment involved the presentation to black children the choice of one of two dolls with which the child could chose to play; one white, one black.

Clark found that black children consistently selected the white doll, leading him to conclude that these black children saw themselves as inferior to whites and therefore they rejected their own race (racial self-hatred) in favor of whites. In the end, he and the attorneys who argued for overturning Plessey, made the point that even if black children were attending segregated schools that were “equal” to whites, the very separation of the races itself was psychologically damaging to the black children even to the point of self-rejection. It was probably Clark’s testimony that led the Court to hold that forced segregation was damaging to black children in irreparable ways.

Did the desegregation of public schools in fact help black children psychologically? I suspect that it did. This past February during Black History Month, I gave a presentation at Miami-Dade County’s McArthur Senior South High School which serves “difficult” students, most of whom are black. I conducted an exercise with the students, which was a modified and admittedly limited version of Clark’s experiment. I asked the black students to close their eyes and to picture in their minds two dolls, one white, the other black. I asked them to choose which doll they would like to have and to write the letter “W” on a blank sheet of paper is they wanted the white doll or a “B” if they preferred the black one. Almost every student (out of more than 60) held up the letter “B”. If this is, indeed, a reflection of the fact that during the half century since the Brown decision, black children have become more accepting of themselves as human beings, all the turmoil and pain that resulted from that momentous decision will have been worth it.