NEW YORK — Harry Briggs Jr., whose parents originated the pivotal lawsuit that struck down public school segregation in 1954, but whose name was relegated by fate to a forgotten legal footnote, died Aug. 9 in the Bronx in New York City. He was 75.
The cause was complications of cancer, said his wife, Helen.
Mr. Briggs’s parents were furious that 8-year-old Harry and his fellow black students in Clarendon County, S.C., were forced to walk as far as 10 miles to attend classes while whites were bused at public expense to their own segregated school.
With Harry Briggs Sr. listed alphabetically as the lead plaintiff, the local chapter of the NAACP filed suit in 1949 against the school district in a case argued by Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black justice of the US Supreme Court.
When it reached the Supreme Court, Briggs v. Elliott was merged with four similar cases and became known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. The NAACP lawyers argued that segregation itself, and the concept of “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, violated the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” guarantee.
Why did Brown — the Rev. Oliver L. Brown, who stood in for his daughter Linda, a third-grader, on the legal papers — instead of Briggs wind up being immortalized as a benchmark in civil rights jurisprudence?
Historians have attributed the naming convention to a scheduling quirk involving the five lawsuits, although there has been some speculation that Tom C. Clark, a Supreme Court justice from Texas, gave Brown prominence, figuring that advancing a case from Kansas, instead of one from South Carolina, would make it appear less like the court was singling out the South.
Reversing the court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the justices ruled unanimously on May 14, 1954, that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate, but equal’ has no place” because “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
By then, Linda Brown was already in junior high school, which in Topeka had been integrated earlier. She became a teacher, and was instrumental in reopening the Kansas case and proving that the city’s schools were still segregated. She also began a foundation with her sister Cheryl to campaign for educational equity.
The Briggs family’s fate was more biblical. Having stirred the racial status quo in Summerton, they inherited the wind.
Even before the lawsuit was filed, Harry Briggs’s parents lost their jobs because they had signed a petition in 1947 calling on Clarendon County School Board 22 to supply school buses for black students. Theirs were the first two names on the petition, which was organized by the Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine, the principal of the all-black Scott’s Branch School. Harry’s was third. Their request was rejected.
“He had this job at the gas station for so many years, and they told him if he don’t take his name off the petition, they would fire him,” Mr. Briggs said of his father in a 1985 interview for the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965).”
Harry Sr., a Navy veteran who had served in the South Pacific in World War II, was fired on Christmas Eve as an attendant at the Sinclair gas station owned by the mayor of Summerton, H.C. Carrigan. Harry’s mother, the former Eliza Gamble, was discharged as a chambermaid at a local motel.
Briggs v. Elliott (R.W. Elliott was the chairman of the school district board) became so locally infamous that young Harry was warned away from white neighborhoods and lost his paper route. Even the family cow was supposedly served with a summons for wandering into an all-white cemetery.
“They banded together to correct the injustice of unequal education,” Nathaniel Briggs, Harry Jr.’s youngest brother, said last week. “Lots of people paid the price in reprisals.”
Harry Briggs Jr. was born in 1941, in Summerton. He walked the 5 miles to a wooden schoolhouse, which had 12 rooms, one for each grade. (When the coal supply was depleted, he and his classmates were assigned to chop wood.)
In addition to his wife, the former Helen Mack, with whom he lived in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, and his brother, Nathaniel, he leaves two children from an earlier marriage, Patricia Briggs-Perry and Audra Briggs; two sons, Ronald Junious and Gregory Junious; and a sister, Catherine Smith.