'Speed' takes ambitious ride through the history of school desegregation

"With All Deliberate Speed," a 50th anniversary documentary about the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, bites off more than it can chew -- and chews on it anyway. Sprawling and ambitious, it reaches back to the early roots of the Civil Rights struggle and zooms in on schoolrooms in 2002 to divine what the decision did and didn't change. The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

"There was no Rosa Parks then, there was no Martin Luther King then, there was no Jesse Jackson then," says John Watson, an old man marveling at the nerve he and his classmates in Prince Edward County, Va., showed in going out on strike in 1951 to protest the separate and extremely unequal conditions experienced by black and white students. Directed by Peter Gilbert, who produced and shot the great 1994 basketball documentary "Hoop Dreams," "With All Deliberate Speed" offers stark evidence of the lopsided Jim Crow school systems of the South: White kids got buses and new high schools, while black kids had to walk to tar-paper shacks with no bathrooms.

The filmmakers focus on two of the five court cases that were eventually bundled together and presented to the Court as "Brown v. Board of Education." There were the Moten High kids in Prince Edward County: Led by an idealistic and determined 16-year-old girl named Barbara Johns, they just wanted a new school building, but the local superintendent shooed them out, telling them "I don't care if you never go to school." They contacted the NAACP, which agreed to take their case only if the fight could be broadened to attack the larger issue of segregation.

Similarly, the protest in Clarendon County, S.C., began when one father wanted the local school system to provide a bus so his kids wouldn't have to walk 9 miles to school. A young Thurgood Marshall, working for the NAACP, took the case to US Federal District Court in Charleston, where he was advised by Judge J. Waties Waring to challenge the system of "separate but equal" rather than the busses. Marshall promptly retooled the lawsuit; Waring, a white anti-segregationist, was ostracized by his peers for the rest of his days.

"With All Deliberate Speed" looks back to the contributions of Charles Houston, the president of Howard University Law School in the '30s and '40s, who consciously trained a generation of young black attorneys to take up the battle. It addresses how the addition of four words -- "with all deliberate speed" -- to the Warren Court's unanimous 1954 decision was interpreted by state governments to mean "with any conceivable delay," slowing the pace of integration to a crawl and inflaming the most rabidly racist segments of the South while suppressing moderate elements. And it brings on teachers and students in the new millennium to document and decry the continued inequality of public education, now split along lines of poor and rich (the poor just happen to be largely African-American).

It's a heady historical brew, but Gilbert almost sours it by bringing on Famous Celebrities to dramatically read speeches and letters of the period. If it's not actor Joe Morton interpreting the words of Charles Houston in a style more appropriate to Hamlet, it's Alicia Keys, in her trademark hat and makeup, swooning through a letter written by Barbara Johns.

We see the real Johns (who died in 1991) interviewed in early middle age, and she's so much more thoughtful, troubled, and real than Keys that you wish Gilbert had dispensed with a gimmick obviously meant to bring in "the kids." On the basis of the modern high school students we see in "With All Deliberate Speed," the kids are all right. It's the system that's still broken.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

With All Deliberate Speed
Directed by: Peter Gilbert
Written by: Nathan Antila
Starring: Alicia Keys, Larenz Tate, Joe Morton, Mekhi Phifer, Vernon Jordan, Julian Bond
Narrated by: Jeffrey Wright
At: Kendall Square
Running time: 110 minutes
Unrated