Today’s word of the day, courtesy of the Dictionary Project email, is alley. Alley is a noun that can mean “a passage, as through a continuous row of houses, permitting access from the street to backyards, garages, etc.,” or “a narrow back street,” or “a walk, as in a garden, enclosed with hedges or shrubbery,” or in bowling, “a long, narrow, wooden lane or floor along which the ball is rolled,” or “(often plural) a building for bowling,” or in the game of bowls, a “bowling green,” or in tennis, “the space on each side of a tennis court between the doubles sideline and the service or singles sideline,” or rarely, “an aisle” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/alley).

The word entered the language in the “mid-14c., ‘passage in a house; open passage between buildings; walkway in a garden,’ from Old French alee (13c., Modern French allée) ‘a path, passage, way, corridor,’ also ‘a going,’ from fem. of ale, past participle of aler ‘to go,’ which is of uncertain origin. It might be a contraction of Latin ambulare ‘to walk’ (Watkins, see amble (v.)), or it might be from Gallo-Roman allari, a back-formation from Latin allatus ‘having been brought to’ [Barnhart]. Compare sense evolution of gate.
“Applied by c. 1500 to ‘long narrow enclosure for playing at bowls, skittles, etc.’ Used in place names from c. 1500. ‘In U.S. applied to what in London is called a Mews’ [OED], and in American English especially of a back-lane parallel to a main street (1729)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=alley). “A back street” is one definition for the word mews (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mews).

Alley is pronounced / ˈæl i /, with the emphasis on the first syllable, and a second syllable that rhymes with lee. Yesterday’s word of the day, allay, is pronounced / əˈleɪ /, with the emphasis on the second syllable, which rhymes with day. The vowel in the first syllable of alley is the æ (asc), which is pronounced like the a in bat. The vowel in the first syllable of allay is the ə (schwa), the unstressed central vowel that sounds like a vocalized pause, uh. In English, vowels in unstressed syllables tend toward schwa almost always.

On this date 70 years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the case known as Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, or just Brown v Board.

The Rev. Oliver Brown was the assistant pastor at “St. Mark AME church, and union welder for the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad” (https://www.nps.gov/people/oliver-brown.htm). He and his family lived in an integrated neighborhood in Topeka, KS, but his oldest daughter, Linda, was not allowed to attend the local elementary school, assumedly with her neighborhood friends, because she was black and the school was an all-white school. Instead, she had to travel 24 blocks to get to her school.

Because of his school situation, Brown was recruited by a friend, Charles Scott, an attorney, to participate in a class-action lawsuit being organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. Though not the first recruited, Brown was given the place of lead plaintiff (ibid.).

At the time, the law of the land was controlled by the 1896 SCOTUS decision Plessy v Ferguson, which ruled that segregation was legal as long as the facilities provided were equal. Homer Plessy boarded an all-whites train in New Orleans, and the judge, John Howard Ferguson, refused to dismiss the charges. The case went to the Louisiana Supreme Court before going to SCOTUS.

The lawyers for Brown argued that a segregated school was necessarily an unequal school.

The case initially came before the Court in 1952, and it was then combined with four other class-action lawsuits under the name we all know. At that time, the Chief Justice, Frederick M. Vinson (1890-1953), was in favor of upholding the Plessy decision; it was, after all, the precedent. Vinson served as US Representative from Kentucky from 1924-29, and 1931-38. He was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, in 1937, and he served in that position until 1943, when FDR made him the Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. Then he became Secretary of the Treasury for less than a year before being appointed to the position of Chief Justice in 1946 by his good friend Harry Truman. But on September 8, 1953, he died, and Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to be his successor.

Warren was a politically powerful Republican, a former governor from California, and Eisenhower had promised him the next open seat on the Court. The concern he had to deal with in some members of the Court had to do with the repercussions of overturning Plessy, afraid that the implementation of desegregation would lead to violence in Southern states and the District of Columbia. But Warren argued from principle: “’I don’t see how we can continue in this day and age to set one group apart from the rest and say that they are not entitled to exactly the same treatment as all others,’ Warren said. ‘At present, my instincts and tentative feelings would lead me to say that in these cases we should abolish, in a tolerant way, the practice of segregation in public schools,’ he said.
“Warren also made it clear he would work with the justices to find ‘unanimity and uniformity, even if we have some differences’” (https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-supreme-court-rules-against-segregation).

Warren managed to convince the other eight judges to rule in favor of Oliver Brown and the other plaintiffs, and that unanimous decision led to school desegregation as well as the Civil Rights movement in the USA. Indeed, it was just a year later that Rosa Parks would famously refuse to arise from a whites-only seat.

With Brown v Board and the Civil Rights movement, one minority was able to begin moving out to the main streets of our country, out of the back alleys. And “Linda Brown was able to join her friends Mona, Guinevere and Wanda at Sumner Elementary thanks to the courage of her father, Oliver, and the 12 other parents” (http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.com/2012/05/brown-vs-board-of-education.html).

The image today, the young Linda Brown standing in front of Sumner Elementary School, is from https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/the-bravery-of-linda-brown.