WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden marked the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision ending institutionalized segregation in public schools this week by welcoming plaintiffs and family members of the landmark case to the White House.
Thursday’s visit to the Oval Office to commemorate the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools comes as Biden steps up his efforts to highlight his administration’s commitment to racial justice.
The president courted black voters in Atlanta and Milwaukee this week with two black radio interviews in which he highlighted his record on jobs, health care and infrastructure and attacked Republican Donald Trump.
Biden will speak at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Friday and will meet – along with Vice President Kamala Harris – with leaders of the Divine Nine, a group of historically black sororities and fraternities. And the president will deliver commencement speech on Sunday at Morehouse College, the historically black college in Atlanta, and speak at an NAACP gala in Detroit.
During Thursday’s visit with the litigants and their families, the conversation focused largely on honoring the plaintiffs and the ongoing fight to strengthen education in Black communities, according to attendees.
“He praised them for changing our nation for the better and committed to continuing his fight to bring us closer to the promise of America,” White House senior adviser Stephen Benjamin told reporters after the meeting.
Biden faces a tough re-election campaign in November and is looking to repeat his 2020 success among black voters, a key bloc that will assist him beat Trump. But Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polls from throughout Biden’s term show that even among some of his most faithful supporters, including Black adults, there is a widespread sense of disappointment with his performance as president.
“I do not accept the notion that Black support for Biden is waning,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who attended the Oval Office visit. “This election is not about candidate A versus candidate B. It’s about whether we have a functioning democracy or something less.”
Attendees at the meeting included John Stokes, a Brown plaintiff; Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father Oliver Brown was the lead plaintiff in the Brown case; and Adrienne Jennings Bennett, a plaintiff in Boiling v. Sharpe, which was heard at the same time and banned racial segregation in schools in Washington, DC. The meeting was attended by plaintiffs and family members of litigants from five cases consolidated into the historic Brown case.
The Brown decision overturned an 1896 decision that institutionalized racial segregation with so-called “separate but equal” schools for black and white students by ruling that such arrangements were anything but equal.
Brown Henderson said one of the meeting participants called on the president to make May 17, the day the decision was announced, an annual federal holiday. She said Biden also recognizes the courage of the litigants.
“He recognized that in the ’50s and ’40s, when Jim Crow was still on the rise, the people you see here were taking a risk when they signed up to be part of this case,” she said. “Every time you rolled back Jim Crow and segregation, you took a risk, your lives, your livelihoods, your homes. He thanked them for taking that risk.”
The announcement last month that Biden had accepted an invitation to deliver Morehouse’s commencement address sparked peaceful student protests and calls for university officials to cancel Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Biden has dispatched Benjamin to meet with Morehouse students and faculty in recent days.
Benjamin told reporters Thursday that the situation in the Middle East was among the topics he discussed with students and faculty during the visit.
