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Thursday, June 10, 2021

The namesake of Harlan Community Academy

When you check out Harlan's official IG you will see a post celebrating the class of '21 andI 'm using that post to celebrate their accomplishment in graduating. Here's hoping for their best successes in the future.

The namesake of Harlan High School was a US Supreme Court Justice who was the only dissent in the landmark SCOTUS case Plessy vs. Ferguson which legally allowed for separate but equal - essentially racial segregation. So this recent article from NPR talks a bit about the legacy of the late Justice John Marshall Harlan:

A new book explores the life of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who, through his writing, made history even though he lost. Harlan was on the court in 1896 when it endorsed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson and was the lone justice who voted no. He wrote the only dissenting opinion.

"His dissent was largely invisible in the white community, but it was read aloud in Black churches. It was published in Black newspapers. This was the one link of hope that white people might support them and see the law through their eyes," said Peter Canellos, author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero, in an interview on Morning Edition.

It took generations, but eventually the dissenter won. The court ruled differently in 1954.

Harlan, a white man from Kentucky, grew up before the Civil War in a family that enslaved people.

"One of the great mysteries of Harlan's career is that he grew up in such a family and yet became the leading defender of Black rights of his generation," Canellos. Part of the reason might have been a Black man who grew up with him, widely believed to have been his half-brother.

And it's amazing to have a high school which earlier in its history educated a number of Black Cook County Judges named for the lone dissenter in a case that established legal segregation.

If you want to know more I shared a video regarding Plessy v Ferguson from one Mr. Beat. 


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