Brown v Board of Education v The Pioneer Fund, Pt 3

0:07 In July of 1966, the International Court of Justice at The Hague announced a long-awaited decision. The world had been waiting with bated breath. Surely, the world's court, this body tasked with settling disputes about international law, surely, they would have damning words for the practice of apartheid. but they didn't.

0:33 The surprise victory for South Africa was celebrated by Afrikaners in the streets of Windhoek, and the bars stayed open all night. After six years of legal proceedings, the justices had been divided, seven against seven, and the body's president cast the deciding vote. The nations of Ethiopia and Liberia had brought the complaint to the court. charging South Africa with violating the rights of Black Africans living in the territory of Southwest Africa. The court's final opinion notes that political, moral, and humanitarian considerations are not, in themselves, generative of legal rights and obligations. So, no matter how bad you might think apartheid is, there's really nothing worse than a procedural error.

1:22 And the court found that those two African nations had no legal standings to bring their complaint before the court. There was no legal controversy here to be settled. A year before the decision was handed down, the justices heard weeks of testimony at the Hague. Dozens upon dozens of witnesses spoke. But notably, there were very few experts in favor of apartheid who were not themselves South Africans. Only four, in fact. And all four of them had been flown in from the United States. On the stand, Dr. Ernest Vanden Haag told the justices that he'd earned his law degree in Italy before studying psychology in Paris and then sociology in the United States, earning both a master's and a doctorate. In his professional opinion, as a professor of

2:22 psychology and sociology, as a practicing psychoanalyst, as a professional expert witness on matters of racial segregation in the United States. Apartheid isn't bad. The doctor said there was simply no scientifically valid evidence of any kind that tended to show that racial segregation could harm anyone. Quite the opposite, even.

2:46 It might actually be beneficial for everyone involved. But what about all the existing scientific work that said the exact opposite? What about Dr. Kenneth Clark's 1950 report for the White House Conference on Children and Youth? Did Dr. Clark's report not conclude that racial separation tended to perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce negative attitudes towards members of other races? Did the report not show over and over again that racial segregation was negatively impacted the development of children of all races, and that it likely contributed to the very racial tension that its proponents claimed to be preventing. Under oath, in front of the International Court of Justice, Dr. Vanden Haag testified that not only is there no evidence for the

3:41 contentions that you have just mentioned, but whatever evidence in the body of the report that you have just mentioned has been largely faked. The attorney for Ethiopia and Liberia was shocked at the assertion. As an American himself, he was surely quite familiar with the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the underlying social science arguments used to support it, including the work of Dr. Kenneth Clark. It's been what? he asked. Faked, the doctor confirmed. F-A-K-E-D? The lawyer spelled it out, asking again, unable to believe what he was hearing. Yes, sir, Dr. Vandenhag said. Faked by Dr.

4:35 Kenneth Clark. Of course he knew that wasn't true. By 1965, Dr. Ernest Vandenhag had testified on behalf of segregation in American public schools at least three times. And as an expert witness on the Pioneer Fund's payroll, he'd been part of a legal strategy to undermine integration that abused the very idea of science. I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys. I think I've only ever met one Pioneer Fund grant recipient in person. I don't think Richard Spencer counts.

5:35 We just sat in the same courtroom for a while. But I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and I'm pretty sure that's right. It's hard to say exactly because where the money goes isn't always crystal clear, but I think I can say I've met one. And it was Jared Taylor. If his name sounds familiar to you, you may remember him as the spokesman who stepped up for the Council of Conservative Citizens back in 2015. When Dylann Roof murdered nine people during a Bible study at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, his manifesto credited that group with his political awakening. The Council of Conservative Citizens had really opened his eyes to the problems of living in a racially integrated society. And it was Jared Taylor...

6:24 who fielded calls from reporters, explaining that, quote, Our site educated him. Our site told him the truth about interracial crime. What he then decided to do with that truth is absolutely not our responsibility. The Council of Conservative Citizens is the successor organization to those white citizens' councils we've talked so much about in recent months. And in addition to being that group's spokesman during their 2015 PR crisis, Jared Taylor is the man behind American Renaissance, a magazine-turned-website that has been the premier outlet for pseudoscientific racism in the American white supremacist movement for nearly 40 years. When I met Jared Taylor, he was wearing sunglasses and a big

7:13 floppy sun hat. It was the middle of September 2021. I remember when it was, because I was already in a very sour mood that day, because my car got totaled in a police chase the night before. I was fine. I wasn't involved. My car was just parked on the street in D.C., and someone drove a stolen car into it and kept on going. So I'd started my day arguing with a D.C. cop I found in the act of putting a little note under my windshield wiper. Jared Taylor and I were both at that rally in support of the imprisoned January 6th rioters as interested observers, both hoping not to be recognized. But I'd recognize that old racist anywhere. As the editor of American Renaissance, he's been a very important racist behind the scenes for decades now.

8:06 But that appearance on behalf of the Conservative Citizens Council in 2015, trying to distance the organization from a racist mass murderer, is probably his most mainstream claim to fame. We will have to do a whole series of episodes about him one of these days, and not just because it's partly his fault I can't ever visit Boise, Idaho.

8:31 He's an interesting character. It wasn't until I was writing these episodes about the history of the Pioneer Fund that I realized exactly what it meant that Jared Taylor has received so much money from the Pioneer Fund over the years. He couldn't have gotten American Renaissance off the ground without that money. And he was still receiving tens of thousands of dollars every year through 2008. This wasn't just racist money for a racist organization. This wasn't just a gift between friends. This was another attempt at a pro-race science movement front organization, designed to promote the work of Pioneer Fund-affiliated academics and authors. I had to look decades into the past to see the pattern, but now that I

9:24 see it, it's clear as day. Those early issues of American Renaissance are almost entirely devoted to positive reviews of books and articles written by Pioneer Fund grant recipients. Articles by academics funded by Pioneer Grants and articles by members of Pioneer's board. those same board members were featured speakers at the annual conference almost every year for more than a decade. So it's really no different from any of the other myriad front groups created by the Pioneer Fund, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology in New the Foundation for Human Understanding, the Human Diversity Foundation, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, Mankind Quarterly. Pioneer Fund money

10:08 was always spinning up some group or publication that was made up entirely of its own insiders, meant solely to popularize their work. These networks are completely insular. these little pockets of intellectual infection that seem highly resistant to the antibiotics of modern academic consensus. The pseudoscientific argument for racially determined patterns in intelligence or criminality haven't changed in nearly a century. And that's not a coincidence. It's not a coincidence that everyone still trying to convince you there's some scientific merit to it is hanging out together. What I'm getting at here is he's still around. You know, Jared Taylor, that only Pioneer Fund grant recipient that I've met. He's

11:04 still out there. He's having his annual race science conference next month in Tennessee. The Pioneer Fund, this big pot of some old racist money that we've been talking about all this time, it's kind of dead. Dead. They've spent down their assets and they're pretty dormant. They've transitioned more fully to their new front organization, but the Pioneer Fund itself is more or less over. But the seeds that money planted have grown. This story about the past can shine a little light on what sort of fruit those seeds may bear. This story, the one I'm telling you on this podcast today, It will end. But the assault on integrated education hasn't ended. And you can draw a straight line from the anti-DEI op-eds that are running in

12:00 conservative magazines right now to the professors who are willing to perjure themselves for white supremacy in a courtroom in Jackson, Mississippi in 1964. So I hope you'll forgive me this one final rumination on the Pioneer Fund's assault on Brown v. Board of Education. We've taken a bit of a roundabout path to this point in our story, and that's on me.

12:25 I'm sorry. I've written about a quarter of a million words so far this year, and sometimes I just can't get them to come out in the right order. I think it's the changing of the seasons. I'm just all mixed up right now. So just so we're all on the same page here, we're talking about the Pioneer Fund.

12:44 Wycliffe Draper, a reclusive millionaire who inherited his wealth from a family textile manufacturing business, but never actually worked, started this charitable foundation in 1937. Originally, so he could fund the distribution of Nazi propaganda films and run a small scholarship program designed to incentivize high-achieving white families to have more children. He was a eugenicist who had a lot of friends in Nazi Germany. He used his money to fund studies he hoped would prove that race mixing was biologically dangerous. and he put money into lobbying Congress for a bill that would deport all Black Americans to Liberia.

13:27 After the Supreme Court decision in Brown in 1954, he shifted his attention more fully to the issue of segregation. That was the front line in the battle for white supremacy in America. During this era, he poured money into the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and personally funded Mississippi's public relations campaign against federal civil rights legislation. When he died in 1972, there was more money in his bank account in Jackson, Mississippi than there was in his personal accounts in New York, where he lived. His estate provided funds to open up whites-only private schools in Mississippi, schools run by the Citizens Council to get around legally mandated desegregation in public schools. The Pioneer Fund's primary function, both during

14:18 Draper's life, but most especially in the decades since his death, has always been to create the illusion of meaningful academic debate on the issue of scientific racism. Never forget that. They're creating an illusion. Because the scientific consensus has actually been crystal clear since at least the 1950s. There is no longer a debate to be had about it, and there hasn't been for a very long time. There is no scientific evidence that Black people are inferior to white people.

14:53 They've spent a long time looking for that evidence, and it isn't there. There is evidence to the contrary. The thing they are looking for is not real. In serious scientific circles, it has been embarrassing to pretend you thought it might be real. For decades. But by paying a great deal of money to disseminate the works of racist scientists, by creating their own journals to publish this work, by hijacking professional mailing lists to put these racist books in the mailboxes of thousands of their colleagues, they've managed to keep the conversation alive all this time, tricking the unsuspecting reader into hearing them out in the name of objectivity or scientific inquiry or academic freedom. But none of those

15:41 things apply here. Because the questions have been asked and answered. And the science is pretty settled. But the truth's never stopped, anybody has it. And in the early 1960s, the Pioneer Fund was determined to put their network of segregationist scientists to work in their effort to stop enforcement of school desegregation.

16:04 We've already talked a bit about what it takes to get into the courtrooms. They couldn't just file a lawsuit of their own and take it directly to the Supreme Court and say, we would like you to reconsider the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It doesn't work like that. The strategy they landed on was showing up in the middle of other people's lawsuits, filing motions to intervene in the kinds of lawsuits Black families were filing all over the southern United States in order to get their local school districts to comply with the Brown decision. The pair of cases they settled on were Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education in Savannah, Georgia, and Evers v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District in Jackson, Mississippi. In both cases,

16:50 the plaintiffs were Black schoolchildren who were being denied access to their local public school on the basis of race, in violation of the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown. And in both cases, the plaintiffs were assisted by legal counsel from the NAACP, with the named plaintiff in both of those cases being the teenage son of a prominent NWCP activist.

17:13 These were just two of hundreds and hundreds of similar suits filed by families just like the Stells and the Evers. In the South, integration was won county by county, one court battle at a time. When Ralph Stells' family filed their suit in 1962, they woke up to a burning cross on their front lawn. In 1963, just months after the suit in Mississippi was filed on behalf of Daryl Evers, his father, Medgar Evers, was murdered. And still, county by county, families fought for access to the education their children were entitled to. We talked a few weeks ago about the legacy of those court cases, the hundreds of school districts that have remained under federal supervision for decades, and the Trump administration's eagerness to wipe those desegregation orders from the books.

18:09 but these were the two cases the segregationist scientists chose to insert themselves into. The timing was right, and they felt confident that their arguments would be well-received by the judges those cases were assigned to. That's all it would take to be allowed into the case as interveners. And from there, they just sort of assumed their arguments would be so convincing that the courts would have no choice but to go against the Supreme Court decision and the resulting chain of appeals would end in the Brown case being overturned. That's not what ended up happening, obviously. The two cases followed pretty similar timelines about a year apart.

19:06 The segregationists filed their motion to intervene in the Stell case in January of 1963, and the original trial in the Stell case was held in Georgia in the summer of 1963. While appeals were still underway in Stell, the group found a new batch of aggrieved white parents to represent and filed to intervene in the Evers case in February of 1964. Testimony in the Evers case was heard in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The game plan was the same in both cases— The Pioneer Fund put up the money, organized the legal strategy, ghostwrote the motions, and provided the experts who would testify. The scientists they recruited to testify were all already members of the Pioneer Fund.

19:50 of the Pioneer Fund Front Group, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, the IAAEE. And they all received funding from Pioneer for their work. Ernest Vanden Haag, Henry Garrett, and R. Travis Osborne appeared on the stand in both cases. Wesley Critch George and Clarette Armstrong testified in the Stell case, and Travis McGurk and Robert Kuttner testified only in the Evers case. Vanden Haag and George we've talked a little bit about in past episodes. Vanden Haag testified as an expert in sociology and psychology, despite only holding degrees in economics. And Wesley Critch George was a retired anatomy professor who, just two years earlier, had been hired by the state of Alabama... to write a

20:38 report providing scientific justification for segregation. His report, which was a collection of decades-old junk science, had been ghostwritten by a number of his colleagues from the IAAEE. And the Pioneer Fund board gave it their final edit, and the fund's president, Harry Weyer, wrote the report's introduction. The other experts presented at trial were primarily psychologists by training. Henry Garrett, R.

21:07 Travis Osborne, and Frank McGurk were all psychology professors, and Clarette Armstrong was a clinical psychologist. Aside from Wesley Critts George, the only expert on the team with any background in a biological science was Robert Kuttner, a lifelong neo-Nazi with a PhD in zoology. Like so many pieces of writing allegedly authored by a single Pioneer Fund-affiliated academic, The motions in these cases were written by committee. The lead attorney on the case, a semi-retired Georgia lawyer and prominent segregationist named R. Carter Pittman, signed his name to court filings he did not write, at least not on his own.

21:52 Just as Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyer always got final say on any articles written by the scientists the fund subsidized, every document in these court cases crossed Harry Weyer's desk. I did find what looked like an early draft of the petition to intervene in the Stell case that has a signature block for Harry Weir, but the scan I found doesn't actually have his signature, and it doesn't have a clerk stamp on it, so I'm not sure it was ever filed as part of the official case record.

22:23 Harry Weir was an attorney by trade, but did not make an appearance on this case. As was so often the case in his career, he worked only behind the scenes. and the brief in support of the motion to intervene was written almost entirely by Donald Swan, the Pioneer Fund's treasurer and an avid supporter of the American Nazi Party.

22:47 This collection of racist scientists were united in purpose. They were all segregationists, and they all wanted that Pioneer Fund money to keep on coming. But they didn't necessarily always agree on the exact scientific reasonings for the racism they shared. I guess it's hard to reach a clear consensus when you're all just making things up. So their conclusions tended to match, but the explanations were often at odds, which is not great if you're talking about science. So before they could argue the case in court, they had to try to come to an agreement that about which version of the science had the best shot at winning the case.

23:38 Some members of the group worried that if they relied too heavily on studies showing differences in IQ, they'd be susceptible to an environmentalist attack. In this context, that word doesn't mean someone who cares deeply about environmental conservation. It's the idea that, well, the scientific truth, that a person's environment is has a significant impact on their development. So it's a hereditarian versus environmentalist debate about race and IQ.

24:11 The disagreement was about whether differences in standardized test scores were due to inherent genetic differences in intelligence or perhaps outside factors like school quality, socioeconomic status, education level of the child's parents, adequate nutrition, access to health care, you know, things that actually provably impact the thing being measured. They were all in agreement that it was certainly true that Black students were simply biologically inferior, but they feared that relying too heavily on this kind of data would open them up to this particular hereditarian versus environmentalist debate. It was a line of attack they knew they would be weak on, and this one's particularly thorny because it's Even

25:01 setting aside the environmentalist versus hereditarian debate and accepting for a moment the possibility, though we know it to be false, that there is a correlation between race and IQ, assuming that were true, the court could then say, well, we'll simply sort the students by IQ instead of race. Because even the cherry-picked data that they would be able to present shows that there is more variation within races than than there is between the averages across races. So some white students would score very low and some black students would score very high. If you sorted by test score or IQ, you would end up with racially mixed classrooms.

25:47 During their planning sessions, similar concerns were raised about whether or not to include the claim that segregation was simply the natural order. some innate human behavior that you can't legislate away. Again, many of them agreed that this was true, but they would have to convince an outside audience, and they worried this would be a hard sell to liberals or northerners that they would encounter on the request through the courts. And of course, The central anxiety for almost every segregationist has always been, and probably will always be, miscegenation.

26:29 They're so terribly worried about race mixing, and they're quite convinced that allowing children of different races to learn to read in the same room is the first domino in a chain reaction that inevitably ends with the complete elimination of the white race. IAAEE co-founder A. James Greger put his foot down here, though. As critical as they all agreed it was to prevent people of different races from intermarrying or, God forbid, producing children, that wasn't the issue before the court. They had to stay focused. Their science needed to be a direct counterpoint to the social science presented to the court in the original court cases that led to the Brown decision. Don't worry about the contradictions.

27:16 They don't matter. It's not a problem at all. for them to believe simultaneously that segregation is simply a natural human state, while also believing that without legally enforced segregation, people will immediately begin intermarrying in great numbers. Both of these arguments are perfectly at home, side by side in the same publication, written by men who want the same things and don't really care how they get them. Ultimately, legally, The best argument was going to be the one that directly addressed the key social science evidence cited in a single footnote in the Brown decision. The decision itself is based on law, not the facts and evidence. The legal underpinning of the Brown v. Board of Education decision is

28:07 the 14th Amendment. Simple as that. But in one little footnote... the justices acknowledged the weight of the evidence offered that showed how psychologically damaging segregation is. Footnote 11 begins with a citation to Dr. Kenneth Clark's 1950 report to the White House Conference on Children and Youth. That same report that Dr. Vanden Haag would later tell the International Court of Justice had been faked. Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark were psychologists. The couple both testified in some of the cases later combined under the heading of Brown v. Board of Education, specifically about their studies on the effects of discrimination on child development. They are, perhaps, best known for their doll test, although that was not a particularly significant

28:59 component of their testimony before the court. The doll test was simple. Child subjects between the ages of 3 and 7 were shown several dolls. The dolls were perfectly identical in every way, except they varied in skin color. And these black children were asked questions like, Show me the good doll. Show me the doll that looks like you.

29:23 Show me the doll that looks bad. Show me the doll that has a nice color. The children were able to correctly identify which doll represented which race, and which doll looked more like them when asked. But disturbingly, many of the children identified the white doll as better to play with, better looking, the nice doll. The clerks wrote that Black children, even as young as three, had clearly begun to internalize the idea that their race made them lesser than, that pervasive discrimination was impacting their self-esteem. Dr.

30:03 Clark's report contains a great deal more than just the Dahl study, as did his supplemental brief to the court of the Brown case and his testimony. But the simplicity of the Dahl test made it a favored place for attack. Even before he was an expert witness in these cases, Ernest Vanden Haag was obsessed with smearing the Clarks' work.

30:27 He published a paper in 1956 attacking the use of social science in the Brown case. And if you only read Ernest Vanden Haag's attack on the Clarks' testimony, you might think the Dahl test was the extents of the science provided. In his book, Science for Segregation, John P. Jackson Jr. notes that this was a very common feature of attacks on the science used in Brown. Reducing the weight of the evidence to just the Dahl test made it easier to dismiss. But there was a great deal more here. Now, to give Vanden Haag the benefit of the doubt for a brief moment, maybe he misread the record in 1956. But by the time he took the stand in 1963 in Stell, in 1964 in Evers, and 1966 in the case against South Africa, he knew he

31:21 was misrepresenting the work of Kenneth and Mamie Clark because he and Kenneth Clark had been arguing about it in public for years. Kenneth Clark rarely issued public responses to segregationist critics. But in 1959, he addressed Vanden Haag directly in a paper published in the Villanova Law Review, writing, would have to be taken more seriously if he had examined the nearly 60 references which were used as a basis for the social science brief which was submitted to the United States Supreme Court. It's a pretty cutting reply, with some hard lines like, either Dr. Vanden Haag did not read or did not understand the basic documents which are relevant to a scholarly discussion on the issue. Vanden

32:29 Haag replied a year later in the same publication that, accusing Dr. Clark of perjury. It was never just about the dolls, and he knew that. Many of the false claims Vanden Haag made on the stand in the 60s about Dr. Clark's research had been directly addressed by Clark in the 1959 paper that Vanden Haag had responded to.

32:51 He knew he was lying. And he wasn't the only one who lied on the stand. During a last-minute strategy meeting a few weeks before the Stell case went to trial... Robert Kuttner and Wesley Kritz George had a disagreement. Remember, they're the only two guys on the team whose training is in a physical science. George had been an anatomy professor, and Kuttner was a biologist with a doctorate in zoology.

33:19 One of the documents the segregationists attached to their brief was the George Report, that 1962 report commissioned by the state of Alabama. As we talked about a few weeks ago, that report... was designed to look very scientific. It was full of footnotes and citations and descriptions of very scientific-sounding studies.

33:41 To the layperson, it was science. But George hadn't done any research of his own, and the studies he relied on to make his arguments were all decades old, and many of them had been thoroughly debunked in the scientific literature. Kuttner had read George's report. And as a biologist, he knew it was bullshit that wouldn't stand up to the slightest scientific scrutiny. If the plaintiffs brought their own scientists, they'd be in some real trouble here. In a letter Kuttner sent after this meeting, he says something that really gives the game away, I think. All of the science George relied on was garbage. It was outdated, debunked, Some of it had been falsified to begin with. It was useless.

34:38 But in that letter, he says he agrees with the conclusions anyway, as well as the conclusions George used them to bolster in his report, writing, quote, I do not need anatomic evidence to convince me of anything regarding the ability of the Negro to build civilizations. I have said and wrote for 10 years that the history of the world provides all the proof we need that some races have flunked the evolutionary IQ test. So he's saying, you're making this up, but I believe it anyway. I know this science is fake, but the conclusions are the same as my feelings, so it's true anyway. Dr. George testified about the value and importance of his own report at the Stell trial but a scheduling conflict prevented him from

35:29 participating in the Evers trial. The report was important to their case, so it was still admitted as evidence, so they had to call their only other physical science to testify to it. Robert Kuttner took the stand and, under oath, testified about the importance and validity of the studies cited in George's report. The same studies he'd privately criticized George for using in the first place because they were scientifically worthless.

36:00 So in the end, he did what all pioneer fun scientists do. He held the party line. He served racism, not science. And he lied. The strategy they settled on was sort of scattershot. They just picked a little bit of everything. They had a little bit of the biology, some IQ stuff. a little bit of direct rebuttal to the testimony used in Brown about the impact of segregation on self-esteem and child development. Segregation was actually good for children of all races, and they had psychologists who could testify to that. The trials were odd. I mean, everything these people are saying is downright bizarre, but procedurally, it would have been a very strange thing to see. Remember, These segregationist scientists are interveners in these cases. So in

36:58 this first trial, the case is Ralph Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education. This is the type of case we've talked about before. So the plaintiff here is a Black student seeking enforcement of the Brown decision. He's filed suit against the local school system in order to gain access to an integrated classroom. The Pioneer Fund crew... are not involved in this underlying lawsuit. They are not a party to it. They have involved themselves by convincing the judge to approve their motion to intervene as an interested third party. Ordinarily, an interested third party might just file a brief. Maybe they'll cross-examine some witnesses at trial or put on a little bit of their own evidence, but

37:49 maybe they don't even do that. Usually a trial involves the plaintiffs and the defendants putting on evidence, right? They're the ones who are party to the original underlying case. They're the ones suing each other. But there wasn't really a case here. As we've discussed in other episodes about this type of litigation, there's not a lot to argue about.

38:16 In the post-Brown legal landscape, the school district doesn't have a defense. If they're doing school segregation, all the court can do is make them stop. There's no legal leg to stand on here because the Supreme Court has already spoken. So at the Stell trial, nobody put on any evidence. The school district barely participated. They did not defend themselves.

38:45 The plaintiffs offered two witnesses, the school superintendent and the father of the lead plaintiff. They hardly said anything at all after their objection to the intervener's witnesses were overruled. So almost the entire trial was just this parade of expert witnesses put on by the third-party intervener. R. Travis Osborne, a psychology professor in Georgia, testified about the study he'd conducted with Pioneer Fund grant money on racial differences in test scores in Savannah. Henry Garrett testified that those differences in test scores were a result of inherent racial differences. Now, as far as I can tell, it didn't come up at trial, but it is interesting to note here that Henry Garrett did testify in one of the five cases

39:35 later combined under the heading of Brown. You know, throughout this whole process of intervening in the Stell and Evers cases, the segregationists are complaining endlessly that they had to be allowed to put on their own science in these cases because They'd been denied the opportunity to present any counterpoint to the science presented before the Brown decision. Right? Their argument is, if we had been allowed to counter this science before 1954, it never would have gone the way that it did. We didn't get a chance before. But that's not true. Henry Garrett testified in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, one of the five cases that led to the Brown decision. that would have

40:18 been part of the record in Brown. The segregationists put their own scientists on the stand in 1952, and the Supreme Court read that, and they didn't buy it. At the Stell trial, Wesley Kritz-George offered testimony about a variety of studies showing differences in brain size. Ernest Vanden Haag said integration would lead to widespread neurosis among Black people.

40:41 And Clarette Armstrong offered supporting evidence for Vanden Haag's testimony, saying that in her experience... Black students struggled to complete their coursework already, and they would of course be unable to keep up with their white peers. Clarette Armstrong had worked for a time as a psychologist at New York's Bellevue Hospital. Her expert opinion that Black students were constitutionally unfit for schoolwork is unsurprising, given the state of her resume in the 1930s. She'd lent her voice as an expert in the fight against admitting refugee children fleeing Nazi persecutions.

41:16 citing her own professional opinion that Eastern Europeans were feeble-minded, insane, and predisposed to crime. She also authored a study on IQ in Puerto Rican children in New York City, concluding that they weren't educable at all and would be better suited for training programs to prepare them for manual or industrial labor jobs. In both Estelle and Evers' cases, the NAACP lawyers said very little They objected to the court hearing these experts at all. But their cross-examination of any of these witnesses was very brief. They didn't put on their own scientists in rebuttal. They didn't argue the science because they didn't have to. The Supreme Court's decision wasn't based on the science. It was based on the law.

42:10 There's nothing to argue about here. They had no legal burden to rebut this. The court never should have entertained it to begin with. But the segregationists started with the Stell case for a reason. They knew Judge Frank Scarlett, and they knew he agreed with them. He was a diehard segregationist. It didn't matter that there was no legal rhyme or reason to what was going on here. He liked what he heard, so he sided with the interveners.

42:43 His opinion devotes a significant amount of time and care to summarizing the expert testimony provided by the interveners at trial. That pseudoscience served as justification for his decision to deny the petition for an injunction. Ralph Stell and these similarly situated plaintiffs would not get a court order allowing them to attend the all-white schools. And Judge Scarlett dismissed the case.

43:13 The racists were over the moon. They won. They put on their fake science. They wrote up their little reports. They argued that Brown had been based on fake science. And it worked. They won. There was still the uphill battle of taking that win and leveraging it against the Supreme Court president. But this was a huge first step.

43:39 Alabama Governor George Wallace borrowed language from Scarlett's opinion to justify a trio of executive orders allowing segregated schools in Alabama to remain open. R. Carter Pittman, the lawyer who'd argued the case for the interveners, took a victory lap, giving speeches all across the South about their success. One of those speeches was to a meeting of the Citizens Council, Jackson, Mississippi.

44:03 And this is around the time Pittman started taking out those newspaper ads we talked about a few weeks ago, looking for school teachers willing to testify. It looks like he was planning ahead for what he imagined would be his Supreme Court debut. And then, flushed with victory, they tried it again, filing their petition to intervene in the Evers case in Mississippi. Obviously, their win was short-lived. The NAACP appealed the Stell decision to the Fifth Circuit, and the appellate court was not happy to see what Judge Scarlett had done. The Fifth Circuit immediately provided some interim relief granting the preliminary injunction the plaintiffs had sought to begin with. So even as R. Carter Pittman is taking

44:49 his victory lap, schools in Savannah did begin to integrate that fall. The actual appeal took another year. In their opinion, the appeals court states plainly that it's obvious to them what's going on here. The lower court had allowed the interveners into the case as part of their effort to overturn the Brown decision. The appeals court reminded Judge Scarlett that even if he personally believes the Supreme Court made a mistake, he's bound by the Supreme Court decision and he has no authority to act otherwise. In the summer of 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The landmark civil rights legislation had been originally proposed by President Kennedy in his 1963 report to the American People on

45:38 Civil Rights. That televised speech aired on the evening of June 11th, 1963. It's what Medgar Evers' children stayed up late to watch on TV the night they saw their father murdered. It took another year of violence before the idea became federal law. But once Johnson signed the bill, the segregationists had to admit defeat here. School desegregation wasn't just a matter of court orders anymore. It had been enshrined into federal law. Just days after the bill was signed, Judge Sidney Mize issued his decision in the Evers case.

46:18 It's another odd opinion. It's pretty long, and he devotes considerable time to summarizing the expert testimony offered at trial by the intervener's expert witnesses. It reads a lot like Judge Scarlett's opinion, because he too was clearly quite convinced by the arguments about the intellectual inferiority of Black students and the claims that segregation was not only Not bad for Black children, but probably even good for them. If you didn't know how the story ended, you would absolutely assume this opinion ends with a ruling in favor of the segregationists. But it doesn't. Because Judge Mize had no choice.

47:01 He would be an absolute fool to write an opinion he knew would be returned to him with harsh words the second the Court of Appeals saw it. And that's exactly what would have happened. At the time, both Mississippi and Georgia fell under the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. So the Fifth Circuit decision overturning Judge Scarlett in the Stell case was a pretty good indicator of what would happen to a ruling in Mississippi that ran counter to Brown. And, of course, any ruling he made in favor of the segregationists in July of 1964 would probably violate the newly signed Federal Civil Rights Act. Judge Mize made it very clear that his ruling was under duress. calling it contrary to the facts and the law, and opining that those

47:45 facts presented at trial cried out for a complete reconsideration of the Brown decision. But he acknowledged that that was beyond his power. So, reluctantly, the judge who'd fought so hard to keep James Meredith out of Ole Miss a few years earlier had to sign his name to the Order to Integrate Public Schools in Jackson, Mississippi. In the fall of 1964, Black children were sitting in previously all-white elementary school classrooms in Jackson. By the end of 1964, the Supreme Court had declined to hear the intervener's appeal in the Stell case. There was very little point in continuing to pursue this tactic. Not only had all of their attempts to attack Brown on the courts failed, it wouldn't matter much now if they had succeeded. Brown had

48:40 been codified into law. The Pioneer Fund didn't mount any similar legal efforts to intervene in subsequent lawsuits that eventually resulted in the full desegregation of public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. But the Pioneer Fund did pay for the establishment of whites-only private schools in response. The Pioneer Fund pulled back on their efforts in this particular arena. There was no point pouring money into preventing integrations. was going to happen no matter what. But they doubled down on their efforts to popularize the idea that it would destroy American society.

49:20 The Fund's activities in the latter half of the century involve a whole new cast of characters, every one of them a terribly weird little guy. Leave a pin on your red string board here if you're keeping tabs on that sort of thing, but It'll probably be a minute before I have the stamina to figure out how many episodes it'll take to fit Jesse Helms into the story.

49:43 One day. We have all the time in the world. By 1971, only 20% of Black students in the South were still attending effectively segregated schools, compared to 99% in 1964. Progress was hard won. But it was won. And it continued in fits and starts, in courtrooms and in bloody protests, in spite of Klan bombings and well-funded racist opposition throughout the 70s. The number of segregated schools declined steadily. Until Ronald Reagan. And it's been ticking slowly back up ever since.

50:25 Reagan directed the Department of Justice to oppose busing. He vetoed a bill that appropriated millions of dollars in funding to assist Chicago in their ongoing efforts to fully racially integrate their public schools. And he dismantled the Emergency School Aid Act, which provided federal funding to school districts who were trying to comply with desegregation orders. Increasing economic inequality, the rise of charter schools and presidential administrations like those under Reagan or Trump, who have very publicly backed off of enforcement efforts on civil rights-era gains, have left us in the worst position we've been in since the 1970s.

51:01 These segregationists lost in the 1960s. But they've never stopped fighting. The world keeps changing around them, but they'll never give up on their dream of an all-white country. Whether it's 1955 and they're mailing out pamphlets about the Marxist science of the Brown decision, or it's 2025 and they're tweeting about critical race theory and DEI hires. The ideas are the same. The people just asking questions about whether black students belong at Harvard or black professors earned their tenure, they owe everything to the men who fought so hard to keep those black students out of school in the first place. They're the same weird little ideas. These guys are nothing new. Weird Little Guys is a production of

52:05 Cold Zone Media and iHeart Radio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.

52:21 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.