Sixty Years After Brown v. Board

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended racial segregation of schools. Most people know that Thurgood Marshall argued the case for the NAACP before the Supreme Court, but few people know that the long NAACP campaign for equality built on a foundation forged in part by Prince Hall Masons like George W. Crawford, an African American lawyer born in Alabama who received his legal training at Yale.
    Fifty years after he graduated from law school and began his law career in 1904, including many cases that challenged segregation and work for the NAACP's civil rights division, Crawford learned of the historic victory of his younger colleague Marshall (also a Prince Hall Mason).
    Soon after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that spring in 1954, Crawford was speaking at a banquet with fellow Masons in Philadelphia. Obviously moved by the occasion, Crawford spoke eloquently of the long path to that victory. Finally a key barrier to equal education had come down. He said that through fraternal organizations, African Americans “first learned the power of a common cause.” He then put that lesson in a global context:

A Prince Hall Mason has an inescapable identification” with people of color around the world, he declared. From Greenland to Africa to India, he said, “geography cannot diminish your inevitable concern nor your inescapable attachment. You are in Little Rock, Arkansas, even though a postman leaves your mail at a street address in Pittsburgh. You are in Montgomery, Alabama even though you vote from Manhattan. You are in Johannesburg, South Africa even though a census taker registers you on the south side of Chicago… Be proud … to be a Negro American. Be proud to be a Negro Mason.