Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark case of paramount importance in American legal history. It revolutionized the fight against racial injustice by challenging the entrenched practice of racial segregation in public schools. This case marked a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, addressing the deeply rooted educational disparities and dismantling the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson. The struggle for equal access to quality education became the focal point of Brown v. Board of Education, catalyzing a transformative legal battle that aimed to reshape the very foundations of American society.
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What Was Brown Vs Board Of Education?
The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was the name given to five different cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the topic of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Bolling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools.
May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court ruled the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional and gave the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) the most celebrated victory in its history.
While the Brown decision of the Supreme Court was eventually unanimous, it took place only after a hard-fought, multi-year effort to convince all nine justices to reverse the “separate but equal” doctrine supported by their predecessors in the controversial 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the Court.
In the 1930s, this movement was conceived by Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of Howard Law School, and brilliantly executed by his star student, Thurgood Marshall, who became the first director-counsel of LDF, in a series of cases over the next two decades.
Facts of the Case
Brown v. Board of Education was a consolidation of five separate cases from four different states that were collectively presented to the Supreme Court. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Gebhart v. Belton, and Bolling v. Sharpe. All of these cases dealt with the issue of segregation in public schools, and the plaintiffs in each case argued that the practice of segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Segregated school systems in Topeka, Kansas; Sumner, Kansas; and South Carolina
In Topeka, Kansas, the school system was segregated by law, with African American children being required to attend separate schools that were often of lower quality than those attended by white children. The plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka argued that this system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
In Sumner, Kansas, the school system was also segregated by law, with African American children being required to attend a separate school that was located farther away from their homes than the white school. This case, Briggs v. Elliott, was the first of the five cases to be filed.
In South Carolina, the school system was segregated by law, with African American children being required to attend separate schools that were often overcrowded and underfunded. The plaintiffs in the case argued that this system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and their case was known as Briggs v. Elliott in South Carolina.
The Case and Legal Arguments
Brown v. Board of Education consolidated several cases from different states, including Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In each case, African American families contested the racial segregation of public schools. The combined instances highlighted the problem’s pervasive extent and the demand for a thorough legal remedy.
The legal arguments against racial segregation in public education centered on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. According to Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues, African American children were stigmatized and denied access to the same educational possibilities as white students because of segregated schools. According to the plaintiffs, such segregation trampled on “equal protection under the law” and maintained structural inequality.
Thurgood Marshall, as lead counsel for the plaintiffs, played a pivotal role in crafting the legal strategy and presenting the case before the Supreme Court. The argument against racial segregation was framed by Marshall’s excellent legal knowledge and oratory skill, highlighting its negative impact on African American children’s self-esteem, growth, and hopes for the future. Marshall’s drive to confront discriminatory practices and win justice for African American pupils matched his strategic insight. The Court’s unanimous judgment in favor of desegregation, which changed the course of American civil rights and education, was eventually made possible by his ardent advocacy and rigorous preparation.
When Did Brown vs Board of Education Start?
Brown itself, beginning in December 1952, was not a single case, but rather a concerted group of five cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia against school districts. Marshall employed the finest lawyers in the country, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles, and John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.C. Hayes, to litigate these cases.
These LDF attorneys, along with William Coleman, the first Black person to serve as a Supreme Court law clerk, were supported by a brain trust of legal experts, including future federal district court judges Louis Pollack and Jack Weinstein. LDF also focused on research by historians, such as John Hope Franklin, and a number of arguments in social science.
This study included the now-famous doll studies by psychologist Kenneth Clark, which revealed the influence of segregation on Black children. Clark discovered that Black children were led to believe that Black dolls were inferior to white dolls and that they were inferior to their white peers by extension.
What Happened in Brown vs Board of Education?
In what would become a landmark case, Oliver Brown initiated a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education in 1951 when his daughter, Linda Brown, was refused admission to the city’s segregated white elementary schools. The case was personally argued before the Court by Marshall. While he addressed a number of legal concerns on appeal, the most common one was that separate Black and white school systems were fundamentally unequal and thus violated the “equal protection clause” of the United States’ Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.
In addition, he also argued that segregated school systems appeared to make Black children feel inferior to white children, based on sociological studies, such as that conducted by social scientist Kenneth Clark, and other evidence, and that such a system should not be legally permissible.
The Justices of the Supreme Court, meeting to discuss the case, found that they were profoundly divided over the issues presented. Although most decided to reverse Plessy and declare segregation to be illegal in public schools, they had different reasons for doing so. Unable to find a settlement by June 1953 (the end of the 1952-1953 term of the Court), the Court agreed in December 1953 to hear the case again.
Wrapping up his presentation to the Court at that second hearing, Marshall emphasized that segregation was rooted in the need to keep “the people who were formerly in slavery as close to that stage as possible.” Even with such strong claims from Marshall and other LDF attorneys, the behind-the-scenes lobbying of the newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren took about five months to campaign for the newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren.
However, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died during the ensuing months and was succeeded by California Gov. Earl Warren. Chief Justice Warren was willing to do something when the case was reheard in 1953 that his predecessor did not have, i.e. to have all the Justices to agree to accept a majority decision declaring unconstitutional segregation in public schools.
He delivered the Court’s opinion on May 14, 1954, stating that “We conclude that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place in the field of public education. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Recognizing that its decision was controversial, the Court took another year to issue an order implementing the Brown II decision. Back then, a firm timeline for eliminating segregation was unable to be set by the Court. It ruled only that “with all deliberate speed, public schools desegregate.” Unfortunately, desegregation was neither deliberate nor speedy. In the face of fierce and often violent “massive resistance, ” LDF sued hundreds of school districts across the country to vindicate the promise of Brown.
It was not until the ensuing victories of LDF in Green v. County School Board (1968) and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) that the Supreme Court provided mandates to abolish “root and branch” segregation, specifying concrete factors to be taken into consideration to eradicate the consequences of segregation, and ensuring that federal district courts had the power to do so.
Earl Warren
Earl Warren was a prominent figure in American legal history, serving as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969. His tenure on the Supreme Court was marked by significant shifts in U.S. constitutional law, with major impacts on racial equality, criminal justice procedures, and the distribution of legislative power. His early life experiences, including his father’s temporary blacklisting after the Pullman Strike of 1894 and Earl’s own work on the railways, shaped his progressive views on politics and law. These experiences led him to develop a critical stance towards the exploitative practices of railroad companies, as he later recounted in his memoirs. In his inaugural term as Chief Justice, Warren delivered the unanimous opinion for the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. This ruling overturned the “separate but equal” principle established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, declaring that segregating public school students by race inherently violated the Constitution. Warren’s leadership in the court emphasized the urgency of desegregating schools, demanding it be done with “all deliberate speed.”
Little Rock Nine
The Supreme Court’s ruling did not detail the methods for integrating schools, instead calling for additional discussions on the matter.
In a subsequent ruling in May 1955, known as Brown v. Board of Education II, the Court passed the responsibility of overseeing future desegregation efforts to lower federal courts. It instructed local school boards and district courts to carry out desegregation efforts “with all deliberate speed.”
However, this approach inadvertently allowed for resistance to desegregation at local levels, both judicially and politically. While states like Kansas moved forward in line with the decision, numerous officials, especially in the South, resisted its implementation.
A notable instance occurred when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the state National Guard in 1957 to block African American students from entering a high school in Little Rock. This led to a significant crisis that was only resolved when President Eisenhower intervened by sending in federal troops to escort the “Little Rock Nine,” a group of nine African American students, into Central High School, safeguarded by armed forces.
Unfortunately, desegregation was neither deliberate nor speedy. In the face of fierce and often violent “massive resistance, ” LDF sued hundreds of school districts across the country to vindicate the promise of Brown.
It was not until the ensuing victories of LDF in Green v. County School Board (1968) and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) that the Supreme Court provided mandates to abolish “root and branch” segregation, specifying concrete factors to be taken into consideration to eradicate the consequences of segregation, and ensuring that federal district courts had the power to do so.
Who Won Brown vs Board of Education?
The answer is a complicated one. And now, Brown’s job is far from completed. On federal court dockets, more than 200 school desegregation cases remain open; LDF alone has nearly 100 of these instances. Latest Supreme Court rulings have made it harder for school desegregation to be accomplished and sustained.
Public school students are becoming more culturally segregated as a result of these changes and other factors than at any time in the past four decades. This backsliding makes it even more important for LDF to continue to uphold the Brown values and to lead the continuing fight to provide children with an equal opportunity to learn in each of the classrooms of our country.
“As Senator Obama noted in a 2008 Philadelphia speech, “segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they got, then and now, helps to justify the pervasive difference in achievement between Black and white students today.”
What Was the Impact of Brown vs Board of Education?
While the judgment of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board failed to accomplish school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast opposition to it across the South) fueled the United States’ burgeoning civil rights movement.
Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The Montgomery bus boycott sparked her arrest and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and marches (many led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a campaign that would finally lead to the overthrow of Jim Crow laws throughout the South.
The process of desegregation began in earnest with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assisted by its implementation by the Justice Department. The 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Equal Housing Act of 1968 were followed by this seminal piece of civil rights legislation.
In 1976, the Supreme Court released another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, finding that federal civil rights laws were violated even by private, non-sectarian schools that refused entry to students on the basis of race.
The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education set the legal framework that would be used to abolish legislation imposing segregation in other public buildings by overturning the ‘separate yet equal’ doctrine.
But the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary goal of integrating the public schools of the country, despite its undoubted effect.
The debate persists today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, about how to combat racial inequality in the school system of the country, primarily focused on residential trends and resource disparities between schools in affluent and economically deprived districts across the nation.
Impact
The immediate reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education decision was mixed. Many African Americans and civil rights advocates celebrated the ruling as a major victory, while others were more cautious, recognizing that the decision was only the first step in a long and difficult fight to end segregation. In addition to the emotional reactions, there were also practical challenges to implementing the decision. Many school districts resisted integration, and some even closed their schools rather than comply with the ruling.
Transformation of education and civil rights in the United States
Despite these challenges, the Brown v. Board of Education decision had a profound impact on education and civil rights in the United States. Over the following years, school districts across the country gradually integrated their schools, and the federal government became more involved in enforcing desegregation. The decision also paved the way for other civil rights victories, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Subsequent cases and challenges to segregation in other aspects of American life
Despite these victories, segregation remained a persistent problem in many areas of American life, and subsequent court cases challenged segregation in housing, employment, and other areas. One of the most famous of these cases was Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Other cases challenged discriminatory practices in voting, employment, and access to public accommodations. While there is still work to be done to achieve full equality in the United States, the Brown v. Board of Education decision remains a landmark case in the struggle for civil rights and equality.
Citations
1- https://www.history.com/topics/Black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka
2- https://www.britannica.com/event/Brown-v-Board-of-Education-of-Topeka
3- https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/history-brown-v-board-education-re-enactment
4- https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_brown.html