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Jim Crow Déjà vu or “I’m I Oppressed?”
Thurgood Marshall spoke to many NAACP youth groups before the United States Supreme Court overturned segregation in 1954. Marshall, an NAACP lawyer, asked the black children what they wished to be when they grew up. “I’m going to be a good butler,” they said, or “I hope I can get into the post office.”
Marshall concluded that segregation destroyed their aspirations, which was a legal concern.
One major psychological aspect influenced the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish segregation. The court ruled, “To separate black children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a sense of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in ways that are unlikely to be undone.”
Marshall felt that once black children could compete with white children without special treatment, this ingrained sense of inferiority would disappear. The post-civil rights generation had a responsibility to rid themselves of that sense of inferiority so it wouldn’t carry on into the 21st century.
Unfortunately, there were a few missteps.
First, in his 1965 Howard University address, President Lyndon B. Johnson endorsed the notion of black dependency. Johnson told the graduating black students that in order to attain “equality as…