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The Brown Decision

In 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

Learning Objective

  • Explain the background, ruling, and effects of Brown vs. Board of Education on the practice of racial segregation in schools.


Key Points

    • Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.
    • Prior to the Brown decision, white Americans opposing desegregation had used the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 to justify legal segregation.
    • The case was instigated by a lawsuit from 13 parents against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas and the NAACP aided the plaintiffs in bringing and arguing the case. The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education.
    • The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington D.C.).
    • The Supreme Court decided the case unanimously, with key support coming from Chief Justice Earl Warren.
    • Many resisted the ruling and the 1957 Little Rock Crisis serves as a symbolic case of the resistance and consequent enforcement of the law. 

Terms

  • Warren Court

    A term used to refer to the Supreme Court of the United States between 1953 and 1969, when Earl Warren served as Chief Justice. Warren led a liberal majority that used judicial power in dramatic fashion, to the consternation of conservative opponents. The Warren Court expanded civil rights, civil liberties, judicial power, and the federal power in dramatic ways.

  • Little Rock Nine

    A group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  • Brown v. Board of Education

    A 1954 landmark United States Supreme Court case, in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

  • "Separate but Equal"

    A legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities be equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890.

  • Plessy v. Ferguson

    A landmark 1896 United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal."


Full Text

BACKGROUND

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. During the decades preceding the Brown case, race relations in the U.S. had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law known as "separate but equal." According to it, racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1868, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race.

The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that this system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. 

THE CASE

In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were 13 Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children. The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of Education under an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over 15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP. Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett, Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter, and Lucinda Todd. The named plaintiff, Oliver L. Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, an assistant pastor at his local church, and an African American. Brown's daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.

The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars. The three-judge District Court panel found that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect upon black children, but denied relief on the ground that the black and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricular, and educational qualifications of teachers.

THE SUPREME COURT

The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington D.C.). All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical plant, curriculum, or staff. Conversely, in the Delaware case, the district court judge in Gebhart ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.

In spring 1953, the Court heard the case but was unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.

While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the judicial restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the Court the power to order its end. Chief Justice Earl Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them the simple argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of African Americans. Warren further submitted that the Court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive Southern resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion. Despite the initial opposition from justices Robert Jackson and Stanley Reed,  the final decision was unanimous. 

William Frantz Elementary School, New Orleans, 1960: U.S. Marshals escorting a young black girl, Ruby Bridges, to school. Bridges was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana and was escorted both to and from the school while segregationist protests continued.

Many resisted the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, the New Orleans school desegregation crisis ensued. As soon as Bridges entered the school, white parents pulled their own children out. All the teachers refused to teach while a black child was enrolled. Only one person agreed to teach Ruby, Barbara Henry from Boston, Massachusetts, who for over a year taught her alone.

THE AFTERMATH 

The decision's fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, which offered room to those who resisted the decision. In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as "Brown II," the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to District Courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed." The language "all deliberate speed" was seen by critics as too ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste for compliance with the court's instruction. Many Southern states and school districts interpreted "Brown II" as legal justification for resisting, delaying, and avoiding significant integration.

LITTLE ROCK NINE

As late as 1957, three years after the decision, a crisis erupted in Little Rock, Arkansas when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4 to prevent entry to the nine African-American students (known as the Little Rock Nine) who had sued for the right to attend an integrated school, Little Rock Central High School. The nine students had been chosen to attend Central High because of their excellent grades. Faubus' resistance received the attention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Woodrow Wilson Mann, the mayor of Little Rock, asked the President to send federal troops to enforce integration and protect the nine students. Critics had charged Eisenhower was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. However, he federalized the National Guard in Arkansas and ordered them to return to their barracks. He deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students.

Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine students into the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957, National Archives.

The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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