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| Harry and Eliza Briggs |
June 23rd marked the 62nd anniversary of the dissenting opinion of Judge Waties Waring in the case of Harry Briggs v. R.W. Elliot.
Never heard of Harry Briggs? I hadn’t either until I read the following article from Prologue magazine.
Who Was Harry Briggs?
Prologue
Winter 2012
Often the ordinary citizen can feel that there’s little he or she can do to change long-established practices or right entrenched wrongs. But one or two people can make a difference, and in the 1940s, Harry and Eliza Briggs stepped up to make a change for their children.
The Briggs family lived in Summerton, South Carolina, where African American children had no school bus. Some children walked up to 10 miles through corn and cotton fields to attend a segregated school. White children in the school district rode to and from school in nice, clean buses.
Harry Briggs was a gas station attendant in Summerton; Eliza was a maid at a hotel. They volunteered their home in 1949 as a meeting place where people could sign a petition for equalizing educational opportunities. They were the first to sign the petition. What happened next changed the face of America.
That petition led to a major civil rights court case, Briggs v. Elliott (1951), heard in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina. Two of the three judges assigned to the case ruled in favor of the school board, holding that separate-but-equal school facilities were constitutional. The third judge, J. Waties Waring, wrote a dissenting opinion, noting that “segregation is per se inequality.”
The Briggs case was appealed and later merged with four other cases that made up Brown v. Board of Education, a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Brown, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. It was a landmark case that had tremendous, positive ramifications for civil rights.
Without the work of the gas station attendant and his wife, a maid, the country would look far different than it does today.
from Prologue, Winter 2012, volume 44, number 4, page 72
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| Judge Waties Waring |
Read the petition of Harry Briggs, et al. to the Board of Trustees for School District No. 22 and view the signatures
Read the dissenting opinion of Judge Waring
Prologue, a publication of the National Archives and Records Administration, is shelved in the Government Documents Collection (AE 1.111:) of the James B. Duke Library. Select articles can be found online at http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/.