Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, May 17, 1954

flyer from The Lost Year: 1958-1959:

During that year, Governor Orval Faubus closed all high schools in Little Rock, locking out 3,665 black and white students from a public education, and locking in almost 200 teachers and administrators to contracts to serve empty classrooms.

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (USSC+)

347 U.S. 483

Argued December 9, 1952

Reargued December 8, 1953

Decided May 17, 1954

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS*

Syllabus

Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.

(a) The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is inconclusive as to its intended effect on public education.

(b) The question presented in these cases must be determined not on the basis of conditions existing when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but in the light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.

(c) Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

(d) Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal.

(e) The "separate but equal" doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, has no place in the field of public education.

(f) The cases are restored to the docket for further argument on specified questions relating to the forms of the decrees.

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.

... We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

In Sweatt v. Painter, supra, in finding that a segregated law school for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportunities, this Court relied in large part on "those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school." In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, supra, the Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intangible considerations: ". . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Because these are class actions, because of the wide applicability of this decision, and because of the great variety of local conditions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems of considerable complexity. On reargument, the consideration of appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated to the primary question -- the constitutionality of segregation in public education. We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws. In order that we may have the full assistance of the parties in formulating decrees, the cases will be restored to the docket, and the parties are requested to present further argument on Questions 4 and 5 previously propounded by the Court for the reargument this Term The Attorney General of the United States is again invited to participate. The Attorneys General of the states requiring or permitting segregation in public education will also be permitted to appear as amici curiae upon request to do so by September 15, 1954, and submission of briefs by October 1, 1954.

It is so ordered.

"Wood" [David Kinloch]

Wood
David Kinloch

Heartwood in softwood thought of Adam
and the chair back he gave the young gardener.
Sapwood in softwood remembered the shadow
cast by the apple on bark; springwood,
too young to recall much at all, imagined
the coming and going under the palm tree
at Timnah and corewood still felt the essential
pain of being bush in a world thinking itself
divine. Latewood allowed a final
sparrow to take its last blood red berry.
Then they shrugged and began to concentrate
on cell length, wall thickness, cellulose crystallinity.
Between them they wove their own myths
about moisture and fire, never took earth for granted.

"Wood" by David Kinloch appears in the current issue of Blackbox Manifold. In a recent interview Kinloch was asked about the influence of others in his writing and what the interviewer, Richard Price, called a "gay poetry": "You respond to what you can use in other writers' work and discard the rest ... I think I've said enough so far to suggest that my writing seeks to do more than express or posit a 'gay identity' if that is what 'gay poetry' does. This sounds like a variation on the chestnut: are you a gay writer or a writer who just happens to be gay? I'm both, alternately and sometimes at the same time. Some of my work playfully interrogates what I consider to be prejudice and injustice. If that makes me a gay writer then I'm proud to be one. But I do other things as well." 

The 1970s mysterious "Codex Seraphinanus" gets a lavish new Rizzoli edition

"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

Banksy's disappearing art: going underground to New York's public spaces

Jeff Stark's table for two, at an undisclosed subway stop

According to the New York Times, graffiti artist Banksy is now facing the dilemma of the inherently impermanent artist: his work is being painted over and otherwise removed from public spaces. In the most recent instance, a neighborhood organizer in London pried a piece of Banksy's art from a doorway and said he plans to sell the item to benefit the area's non-profit youth club. Banksy agreed -- after the act was discovered. When public space is the gallery venue, sooner or later the issue of civic reclamation will arise. As artists from the cave-painters of Lescaux to graffiti-man Banksy can tell you, public art calls for big, big spaces. 

In New York those big public spaces are likely to be underground, and sometimes in areas currently abandoned. Location, location, location -- but even underground spaces can attract the attention of civic forces who attempt to discourage visitors, and threaten artists themselves with dismantling art or even the specter of arrest for those who try to see it.

The New York Times Arts Beat carried an article about what might be considered the most exclusive of public galleries, a subway station so mysteriously secret and filled with art that police arrest anyone who tries to find it.

In an official game of good cop/bad cop, a spokeswoman from the Transit Authority confirms the department is not disturbing the art works, but the police are "taking a hard line" and arresting anyone who is caught trespassing in the station trying to see the art. It's a creative double-bind: seek but don't find, and if you do find it, you're under arrest for trespassing. There's a Kafka-like lesson in there somewhere.

The underground effort took eighteen months and includes work from more than a hundred artists. One blogger who has seen the "installation" now reports the art has been vandalized. Who said art was easy? Here's an excerpt from today's article, written by Michael Grynbaum:

The New York City police have arrested 20 people for trying to enter the abandoned subway station that is home to the formerly secret guerrilla exhibition of underground street art that was revealed to the public this month.

The clandestine gallery has attracted urban explorers eager to catch a glimpse of dozens of provocative, large-scale installations created by more than 100 street artists who sneaked into the station over the course of a year.

Several of these spelunkers, however, have encountered something else: a team of police officers, some in plain clothes, assigned by the city to monitor the site. Most of those arrested were charged with criminal trespass, and a few were caught carrying spray cans and other graffiti paraphernalia, the authorities said. Two others received transit summonses.

While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away — “This is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,” said one officer – the paintings of what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they have no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hope nobody ever gets to see it again.

“We have no intention of disturbing the works,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit, the subway’s operator. Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. “It’s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,” she added.

The organizers of the project, who did not return a request for comment, have so far refused to disclose the location. So have transit officials. But first-person accounts, photographs, and speculation around the Internet focus squarely on an abandoned station constructed in the 1930s atop the existing Broadway stop on the G line, near South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ...

So far, efforts by the authorities to secure the space have appeared only partly successful. Evidence ofrecent visits to the site has been published on the Internet, including photographs that suggest some ofthe artworkhas been defaced by graffiti.

One blogger from Brooklyn, who said he explored the site in the early hours of Nov. 4, posted photographs onhis Web site that appeared to show vandalized works. “It does seem to only have been tagged by one person and it’s actually kind of sad since some of the works are so amazing,” the blogger wrote in an e-mail. (He asked to remain anonymous, hoping to avoid interest from the authorities.)

Photos from the New York Times by Garrett (at bottom) and Katherine Lorimer (at top).

What hath Warhol wrought: "The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" [Cory Doctorow] discusses creative appropriation

Andy, seriously clowning around

These days it is difficult to see an advertisement, surf the web, listen to pop music or watch any media without some form of artistic "appropriation." Whether it's called sampling or theft or even genius, the intentional use and layering of others' ideas is a common thread to our shared culture.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol's appropriation of Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans as subjects for art elevated America's advertising to a level of consideration that shocked some and amused others. He was the first to suggest that the nation's disposable post-war culture was something more about form than function, that America was a nation filled with everyday objects fit equally for artistic appreciation as to throw away.

It was the ultimate extension of the old saying about one man's trash -- and, for many, a new gloss on the idea of kitsch. The fact that his iconic and appropriated images continue to contain an appraised value as well as artistic worth -- although some would argue otherwise -- is, at bottom, the economic heart of current discussions about internet rights, copyright, musical sampling, and intellectual property. Cory Doctorow takes up the argument in his essay The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow that there is a fundamental disparity between proposed changes in copyright law and the creative freedom of the artist with 21st century tools.

The past, in this case, seems no guide to the future: recent print copyright changes that extend legal ownership to 75 years and beyond clash with other media decisions: the music industry is just facing up to a 1976 law that reverts ownership rights to songwriters after 35 years -- in time for the age of digital music on the internet, unforeseen all those years ago.

The projected loss of corporate revenue is one factor in the current debate, but the rights of the individual are an even more important one. The ultimate legal argument about intellectual property, of course, will hinge on financial issues: can corporate entities make a profit in the uncharted future? The artist's right to expression, if it's even considered, will pose a thornier path.

Here's an excerpt from Doctorow's essay, condensed from his address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, which is available both in print and -- tellingly -- available as a free download. As Doctorow points out, the decision is one in which -- perhaps for the first time -- the artist can have an activist role:

... we're all of us trying to influence the future, or the present, or our view of the past. Writing about humanity's relationship with technology is an activist pursuit, because it requires that you take a stand on how things really are, or ought to be. We live in a technological society, and it is impossible to write about technological change without writing about social change.

... If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well. ...

Warhol, the media outsider, was eventually subsumed by a culture that said "yes! of course!" to his vision as a single artist. The struggle these days seems to be how intellectual property can still be maintained in a multimedia universe that makes accesibility free, to millions, at the click of a mouse. The jury's still out about intellectual property rights, even as all sides -- individuals and corporations -- continue to deliberate furiously with a Supreme Court battle looming somewhere ahead in the uncertain future.

Jack Kerouac, born May 12 1922

"All of life is a foreign country."

(above: Kerouac's navy enlistment photo, 1943)

"Mama's Boy" (Biff Rose)

"Mama's Boy"

(Biff Rose)

When I was a little boy livin' down down in the South
Mama told me never to open my mouth
Mama told me
Mama scold me

I was just a little boy 'bout 9 or 10
Mama had alot of influence then
And she told me
Mama scold me

Mama told me when to go out and play
She even told me what to do and say, yeah

Well she must have had authority from above
She even told me who to love, yeah

When I was a little boy, twenty five or so
Well, I took a little trip to Ohio, yeah
But Mama told me

Them Yankees they done done us wrong
Mama, singing the same old song, yeah
And she scold me

Mama says times is changing fast, yeah
But she's gonna hold out to the last
But I fell in love with a pretty little thing
And I brought her a thirty-five dollar ring, yeah

Well there's one thing people that I want to lay on you
Now that I live in California
My mama told me

But the kids are growing up fine as can be
Members of a new society, yeah
My mama scold me

But when you're full of love there's nothing to fear, yeah
With an open heart and an open ear

So, to all you mothers that I love so
Trust your babies, let 'em go, yeah

"Mama's Boy" by Biff Rose appeared on his 1968 album The Thorn in Mrs. Rose's Side.

Salvador Dali, born May 11 1904

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."