The Road to Brown
The Road to Brown (Directed by William Elwood, 1990) This is a film about the past that opens in the present, in the halls and grounds of Chester public school in South Carolina. Today, voice-over narrator Steven Anthony Jones explains, very few of the black and white students realize that there were once laws that would have prohibited them from attending the same schools, riding the same buses, or even using the same drinking fountains. Dissolve to depression-era footage of blacks in Chester County shot by the black lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, who in 1934 traveled through the South documenting differences between schools for blacks and for whites as evidence for his campaign to end segregation. The freeze frame of Houston standing in a field and taking off his hat as he gazes thoughtfully into the camera in a short auto-portrait is perhaps one of the most powerful images of the film and recurs as the closing shot of the documentary.
Houston was “the man who killed Jim Crow,” spearheading the struggle that led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the 1954 case of Brown vs. The Board of Education. Elwood’s film uses a biographical account of Houston’s career as a means to also chronicle the “road to Brown”- a strategy that redoubles upon itself as a gesture of reflexivity about the power of the documentary camera to change the world. Houston’s footage is a powerful tool indeed; this is a camera that surveys the terrain at hand with compassion, elicits trust from human subjects, and thereby opens up a world unknown to many. Filmmaker Elwood traces in a clear and concise manner the evolution from the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case in 1857, through Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, and onward to Houston’s interventions following graduation from Harvard Law School.
Upon becoming Dean of Howard Law School, his strategy was to upgrade the school’s curriculum and gain accreditation so that a new generation of lawyers could be trained to first reclaim and then preserve civil rights for blacks. It was his strategy to use precedent cases in individual areas of the United States to make segregation such an expensive venture, that it would finally have to collapse from the weight of its own unreason. Filmmaker Elwood accompanies the narrative voice-over with photos of notable individuals such as Houston’s student Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as well as as interviews with former field secretaries of the NAACP and other justices who once worked with Houston, who died early in life at age 54.
What the film lacks is perhaps a more nuanced recognition of the diverse and divisive forces at work within the civil rights movement and an acknowledgement of the complex role of cultural institutions such as, for example, the Baptist church, or other parallel socio-political developments such as women’s rights, sexual liberation, etc. or, for that matter, social and class differences among blacks from the North and South. As it stands, the film is primarily a legal history, but a gripping and visually powerful one at that. See also Simple Justice (1993), based on Richard Kluger’s book.
Angelica Fenner University of Toronto Angelica.Fenner@utoronto.ca
