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Fifties in America
Brown v. Board of Education

Identification: U.S. Supreme Court decision holding school segregation
unconstitutional
Date: Decided on May 17, 1954

The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that legally mandated segregation of American public schools was unconstitutional launched a social and political upheaval during the 1950's that helped give rise to the modern Civil Rights movement.

In 1896, in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court held that state governments could mandate racial segregation by law in public facilities so long as "equal but separate accommodations" were provided. The result of this decision was the passage of a broad range of "Jim Crow" laws, particularly in the South. These laws established racial segregation in nearly all public facilities, including the public schools.

Legal attacks on the segregation laws began in earnest during the 1930's under the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Because state universities had made no provision for black students, the NAACP's campaign focused at first on segregation in graduate and professional schools. By 1950, several cases forcing the admission of minority students to graduate and law schools had been won. In 1947 and 1948, cases challenging elementary and secondary school segregation were filed in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. In each case, black children had been denied admission because of their race to schools attended by white children. In all but the Delaware case, the state courts upheld the segregation statutes under the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal rule.

Supreme Court Action
Because the myriad cases all involved the same fundamental issue, they were consolidated into one case presented before the U.S. Supreme Court under the title Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg, briefed and argued the cases for the plaintiffs. They argued that separate schools for blacks and whites were not equal and could not be made equal, and therefore, state statutes that require racial segregation violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The NAACP's position was reinforced by a brief filed by Attorney General Herbert Brownell on behalf of the Department of Justice. The states were represented by John W. Davis, a prominent appellate attorney. Davis argued that Plessy had settled the issue and that its precedent ought to be binding, especially since it reflected the way of life to which people had become accustomed, especially in the South.

After hearing arguments in the case in 1952, the Supreme Court asked the parties for additional arguments in its 1953 term. Re-argument dealt primarily with the historical circumstances under which the Fourteenth Amendment had been written and passed. Meanwhile, changes were coming to the Court. Early in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had appointed Earl Warren, the former governor of California, to be chief justice. It fell to Warren rather than his less imaginative predecessor, Fred Vinson, to organize the Court in the case. A majority of justices were in favor of overruling Plessy and doing away with segregation. Warren felt strongly that in a decision of such magnitude, the Court should speak with a single unanimous voice. He spent much time persuading justices Tom Clark and Stanley Reed--who were from Texas and Kentucky--to join the majority.

In its unanimous decision, the Court held that "in the field of public education the doctrine of `separate but equal' has no place." Separate facilities were held to be inherently unequal, regardless of the physical facilities of the schools in question. The Court asked for further argument on how the decision was to be enforced, and a year later it held that federal courts would have the power to issue injunctions requiring the desegregation of public schools.

Impact
The moral and political impacts of Brown were enormous. On the legal side it quickly became clear that courts would no longer tolerate racial segregation, and during the remainder of the 1950's and beyond, school systems were desegregated in spite of massive southern resistance. Federal troops had to be deployed on several occasions to enforce court orders, most notably in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Moreover, the same legal analysis of segregation that characterized Brown subsequently was applied to racial segregation in all public facilities, and one after another the manifestations of Jim Crow began to disappear. In northern states school segregation existed also, brought about primarily by discriminatory school zone boundaries. This segregation too was ended by federal courts. The legal and moral basis for these kinds of later developments can be traced back to Brown.

On the political side Brown was the genesis of the massive Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. Demonstrations and political action for equality eventually resulted in the end of most private racial segregation and, in 1964, in the passage of a powerful civil rights act by Congress. The new law prohibited racial discrimination in places of public accommodation; it was subsequently strengthened to prevent discrimination in employment, housing, and education.

Further Reading
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Civil Rights movement, from Brown v. Board of Education to the death of President Kennedy. Very strong on the moral and psychological impact of the Brown case.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of "Brown v. Board of Education" and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Fascinating discussion of NAACP activities and the legal strategy for overturning the separate-but-equal rule.

Raffel, Jeffrey. Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. A comprehensive compilation of entries for important court decisions, persons, concepts, and organizations that proved central to the history of school segregation and desegregation in the United States.

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998. Biographical study of Marshall's legal philosophy as desegregation advocate and his twenty-four-year career as justice of the Supreme Court.

Robert Jacobs

See Also
Bolling v. Sharpe; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights movement; Education in the United States; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Racial discrimination; School desegregation; Southern Manifesto; Supreme Court decisions, U.S.; Sweatt v. Painter; Vinson, Fred M.; Warren, Earl.