Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka set a new flood of briefs into SCOTUS – Supreme Court of the United States – which is the standard to this day. The amicus curiae – friend of the court petition – puts any and all manner of pleadings of experts and advocates before SCOTUS, including the now-famous blue-eye/brown-eye experiments. These experimental findings of psychologists were instrumental in the Court declaring separate-but-equal educational settings to be intrinsically unequal.
 
To the end of replicating the historical amicus experiment, my black history professor played the nasty teacher in a short version of the process, as the one who tormented the chosen ‘brown’ eyed children, subjecting them to insult, yet with no power to physically injure them.  Dr. Levy was one of two tag-team teachers in this class, the first offered in the Oklahoma college system for black history, to which I was enrolled as a white among a  balanced mix of races. Dr. Levy’s tale of teacher’s torment stuck tight inside my mind’s moral corner all these nearly forty years. [more]