Multimedia Collection
The Road to Brown
VHS
50 minutes
E185.61 .R461 1990
The Road to Brown is the story of segregation and the brilliant legal campaign against it which helped launch the Civil Rights movement. It is also a moving and long-overdue tribute to a daring but littleknown black lawyer, Charles Houston "the man who killed Jim Crow."
The film plunges us into the nightmare world of Jim Crow constructed in the South after the Civil War to rob former slaves of their newly won constitutional rights. Black people were denied the right to vote, bound to landowners through sharecropping and forced to attend segregated schools. Anyone who objected was liable to be lynched.
Charles Houston, Dean of Howard University Law School, realized that an attack on the legal basis of segregated education would undermine Jim Crow. We see clips from a devastating film Houston shot in South Carolina in 1934 documenting the inequality of black schooling. In a taut constitutional detective story, the film untangles the cases which led to the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Finally, the film revisits the "New South" of integrated schools and black elected officials. Though much has changed, it's clear America still has far to go along the road to equality and social justice.
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