Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), U.S. Supreme Court decision holding racially segregated schools unconstitutional. Linda Brown, a black elementary‐school student in Topeka, Kansas, could not attend classes near her home because state law mandated racial separation in public schools. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1951 filed suit in federal court on behalf of Brown and several other plaintiffs, seeking a ruling on the constitutionality of racially segregated schools. The NAACP had decided to test the prevailing legal doctrine that racially segregated schooling did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if equal resources were provided to blacks and whites. This doctrine, embodied in the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, governed all aspects of domestic race relations and legitimated the pervasive segregation that banished African Americans and other racial minorities to the margins of society. The challenge to school segregation thus indirectly bucked powerful legal precedent and generations of social practice.

Brown was distinguished by the plaintiffs' use of testimony from social scientists who argued that segregation psychologically damaged black children. The U.S. District Court upheld segregation in its August 1951 decision in the case but attached to its opinion a statement supporting social science claims. The NAACP continued this approach when the case reached the Supreme Court. The high court heard Brown with four companion cases brought against segregating school districts.

Commentators opposed to overturning Plessy argued that the abolition of school segregation required congressional passage of a law specifically prohibiting it. NAACP attorneys argued that the Fourteenth Amendment banned any discrimination by the states and required no further articulation. Attorneys for the segregationist states held that inferior conditions in black schools were correctable, that their clients had already begun reforms, and that the high court should not confuse the practical difficulties of equalizing black and white schools with the principle of separate‐but‐equal itself. Segregationists denied the wide scope claimed for the Fourteenth Amendment by their adversaries. If segregation psychologically injured black children, they contended, the children would suffer further during the integration process.

Overturning the Plessy doctrine, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on 17 May 1954, that segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” The opinion, prepared by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reiterated the argument about the psychological harm of segregation. After the decision, concern about the practical aspects of implementing desegregation and fear that violence would accompany desegregation efforts, led the Court to hear arguments in Brown that specifically addressed implementation issues. Historians referred to these 1955 hearings as Brown II. Predisposed to let district courts arrange the details of desegregation, the Supreme Court sent the school‐segregation cases back to the original districts with instructions to execute its mandate “with all deliberate speed.”

Brown featured the participation of several noted figures. Chief Justice Warren, named by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Court after the sudden death of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson in 1953, presided over an increasingly activist Court. Thurgood Marshall, leader of the NAACP defense team, had argued several major cases before the Supreme Court. A Howard University Law School graduate, he was himself appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the first African American so honored. The psychologist Kenneth Clark of the City College of New York, one of the expert witnesses, was known for his study of African American children's response to black and white dolls. When black children rejected dolls that most resembled them, Clark believed, they revealed an internalized a sense of inferiority. While his thesis was (and remains) controversial, Clark, an African American, subsequently became a highly influential academic and public intellectual.

Immediate popular reaction to Brown was mixed. Technically, the Court's decision bound only the specific school districts in litigation, but its broader application was clear. Reaction in the Deep South was negative. So‐called citizens councils, devoted to upholding white supremacy, originating in Mississippi in July 1954, soon spread throughout the region. In 1956, more than one hundred congressmen and senators signed the “Southern Manifesto” endorsing segregation.

Some southern whites resisted violently. They rioted when Autherine Lucy, a black student, enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1956. A 1957 confrontation between President Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus over integrating Little Rock Central High School resulted in federal military intervention for the first time since Reconstruction.

Separate schools also existed in northern communities, often because of demography rather than law. Considerable friction developed over implementation issues in these areas, especially regarding busing to achieve racial balance. Few northerners openly defended segregation, but the racial composition of public schools subsequently became a divisive national issue.

Brown was preceded by nearly twenty years of litigation before the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorneys exposed the limitations of the separate‐but‐equal doctrine in cases involving graduate school education. They thus laid the groundwork for ending segregation by gradually eroding the legal foundations on which it rested.

The court's decision also had deep implications for the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plaintiffs in Brown had argued that segregation singled out citizens by race. The justices accepted the view that only a belief in the inferiority of blacks, which they found untenable, could validate such distinctions.

The abandonment of segregation accelerated by the Brown decision coincided with the Cold War effort to present the United States to the world as a showcase of democracy. The Supreme Court decision legitimated the claims of African Americans and other racial minorities to participate in national life and set the stage for the emerging civil rights movement.
See also Civil Rights Legislation; Federal Government, Judicial Branch; Fifties, The; Race, Concept of; Racism.

Bibliography

Richard Kluger , Simple Justice, 1975.
Raymond Wolters , The Burden of Brown, 1984.
Mark V. Tushnet , The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950, 1987.
Mark V. Tushnet , Making Civil Rights Law, 1994.

Brenda Gayle Plummer