Brown v. Board – Sandy Rosenberg

Speaker Adrienne Jones again asked me to offer the opening prayer on the opening day of the legislative session.

This is what I said.

Whether this is your first Opening Day or your 42nd, it is a special occasion.

To enter this State House, we walk past the statues of Thurgood Marshall; of two school children from Topeka, Kansas; and of Donald Gaines Murray.

Both Murray and Marshall graduated from Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass Senior High School. Murray returned home from a small college in Massachusetts to seek admission to his state’s law school.

Marshall’s successful lawsuit on Murray’s behalf was the first step on the legal path of overturning the separate but equal doctrine. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous.

Last month, I had the privilege of speaking at the opening ceremony for the new Cross Country Elementary Middle School. I was in the kindergarten class when the school first opened in 1955. It was five blocks from the home where I grew up.

Monday night, I heard a colleague speak of the 11/2 mile walk she took home from school – hungry and without lunch.

Sunday afternoon, I swam at a pool that my father could not.

At dinner that evening in Little Italy, the restaurant owner told me of the sign outside the swim club when she was young.

It read: “Privileges of the Swimming Pool Are Extended Only to Approved Gentiles.”

We come here today from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, with different life experiences.

Whether it is your first session or your 42nd session, may we return home in April after benefiting all of the people of Maryland.

Margaret W. Rose, was denied the opportunity to attend high school in Baltimore County because of her race.

Her lawyer was Thurgood Marshall.

Maryland’s highest court ruled in 1937, “Admission to the white school could be required only upon a showing that the equality of treatment is not obtainable separately.”

Ms. Rose was the aunt of Speaker Adrienne Jones.

Speaker Jones spoke of her aunt’s case today at the rededication of the Marshall statue outside the State House.

That case was one of the first brought by future Justice Marshall on the legal path to Brown v. Board of Education, where he persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the separate but equal standard.

The Speaker was too modest.

She could have added that a settlement of a lawsuit asserting that Maryland’s historically black colleges and universities are underfunded, in violation of the Brown decision, was announced last month.

That lawsuit was filed in 2006.

What prompted the settlement was House Bill 1, Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Funding.

The sponsor of that bill was Speaker Jones.