BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 47 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, was the most significant of a series of judicial decisions overturning segregation laws—laws that separate whites and blacks. Reversing its 1896 decision in plessy v. ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256, which established the "separate-but-equal" doctrine that found racial segregation to be constitutional, the Court unanimously decided in Brown that laws separating children by race in different schools violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, which provides that "[n]o state shall … deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws." In making its decision, the Court declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Moreover, the Court found that segregated schools promote in African American children a harmful and irreparable sense of inferiority that damages not only their lives but the welfare of U.S. society as a whole.

The principle expressed in Brown was used in later decisions of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts to reverse segregation in other fields as well. By the end of the 1960s, laws that had required racial segregation in buses, trains, bathrooms, and other public places had been overturned, as had many other laws that obstructed the rights of African Americans. Brown thus served as a milestone in the struggle of African Americans to gain equal civil rights in U.S. society. It also symbolized the judicial activism of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice earl warren, who would go on to lead the Court until 1969 in a remarkable era of change with regard to civil rights.

Brown was actually the culmination of a decades-long struggle by both African Americans and sympathetic whites against segregation and other discriminatory laws. Though it is a given in the early 2000s that persons of all races should enjoy equality under the law in the United States, that has not been the case for most of the country's history. Even after the Civil War had ended and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had outlawed slavery and guaranteed the civil rights of "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" (U.S. Const. amend. XIV), southern states and localities established the racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws—also known as the Black Codes—to keep African Americans from enjoying legal equality with whites. The term Jim Crow derives from a popular minstrel song of the nineteenth century. These laws made it difficult or impossible for African Americans to vote, made it illegal for them to use the same public facilities as whites, restricted their travel, forbade interracial marriage, and otherwise attempted to keep African Americans in a state of dependence and inferiority with regard to whites. Most of these laws were passed after the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, when the military occupation of the South had ended and the radical wing of the republican party, which under President abraham lincoln had been instrumental in dismantling slavery, had declined in power. By the mid-1870s, southern whites were again in political control of their region, and many quickly sought to return blacks to a position of legal inferiority through passage of discriminatory laws.

In 1896 the legal standing of the jim crow laws was strengthened when, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute requiring blacks and whites to occupy separate railway cars. The law in question, according to the Court, was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities provided for each race were separate but equal. Moreover, the Court voiced its disagreement with attempts to challenge segregation laws and with the ideas critics of segregation used to support those challenges. For example, in its opinion, the Court considered it a "fallacy" that "the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority," and it scoffed at the notion that "social prejudices may be overcome by legislation. "Ironically, the Court reinforced its decision to uphold the legality of segregation on rail cars by noting the existence of laws "requiring separate schools for colored children." The Plessy decision and its separate-but-equal doctrine were later used to uphold segregation in public schools and other public facilities.

African Americans and others who sympathized with their cause were bitterly disappointed by the Plessy decision. Over a decade later, in 1909, some blacks and whites joined together to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), which would eventually coordinate a successful legal challenge to the Plessy ruling. The NAACP brought together people of all races in an effort to improve the situation of people of color. Although the NAACP achieved some victories in the fight against Jim Crow laws in the first two decades of its existence, it was not until 1935 that the organization began actively to mount a campaign against segregation in schools. It did so assisted by legal counsels charles houston and william h. hastie, and a young assistant, thurgood marshall, who would go on to be a member of the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.

By 1939, Marshall had become head of the NAACP legal branch, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and by the early 1950s, he and his organization had argued and secured significant legal victories before the Supreme Court that helped set the stage for Brown. In Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629, 70 S. Ct. 848, 94 L. Ed. 1114 (1950), the Court sided with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when it ruled that a separate law school for blacks in Texas could not provide an education equal to that available to whites at the more established University of Texas Law School. And in another case brought by Marshall's organization, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637, 70 S. Ct. 851, 94 L. Ed. 1149 (1950), the Court ruled that separate library and lecture hall seats for a single black graduate student were a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, neither case addressed the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy.

In 1952 Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund brought two more significant cases

to the Supreme Court: Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 74 S. Ct. 693, 98 L. Ed. 884 (1954), which dealt with racial segregation of schools in the District of Columbia, and Brown, which was actually a consolidation of four class action suits (suits brought to court on behalf of a group of people) from federal district courts in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund brought the cases to court on behalf of African American children who were refused admission to schools attended by white children as a result of laws allowing or requiring racial segregation in schools. The plaintiff named in the case, Oliver Brown, had a daughter, Linda Brown, who had been denied admission to an all-white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because she was black. In all but the Delaware case, a three-judge federal district court had decided against the African American children and in favor of the school districts, citing as precedent the Plessy separate-but-equal doctrine. In the Delaware case, the state supreme court also upheld this doctrine but ordered that black children be sent to superior white schools until schools provided for blacks could be improved to an equal condition.

Brown was argued before the Court in 1952 and reargued in 1953. Marshall, in making his statement before the Court, argued that the statutes in question in this case were equivalent to the black codes. He pointed out the contradictions in allowing blacks and whites to vote in the same places and attend the same colleges and universities, but not allowing black and white children to attend the same elementary schools. He also maintained that a decision in favor of segregation would effectively be a decision to keep African Americans as near as possible to their former state of slavery. According to Marshall, such a decision would be equivalent to saying that "Negroes are inferior to all other human beings."

Oliver Brown and the NAACP

As the man whose name appeared in the title of perhaps the most influential U.S. Supreme Court decision ever, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), Oliver Brown was an unlikely hero for the civil rights movement. The African American welder, war veteran, and assistant pastor was a quiet, upstanding citizen of Topeka, Kansas, who had never been known to publicly oppose discrimination against his race. However, he took a decisive stand against racial discrimination when he joined one dozen other African American parents in filing suit for the right of their children to attend the elementary schools of Topeka alongside white children.

Brown's participation in the lawsuit was encouraged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), which provided necessary legal expertise and organization for the case. Long familiar with the practice of school segregation in Topeka and many other school districts, NAACP lawyers approached Brown and other parents in the summer of 1950 to see if they would join them in a case that challenged that practice.

It was precisely Oliver Brown's modest qualities that made the NAACP choose him as a plaintiff. His reputation for integrity could help mute criticism in a controversial case that stirred up angry emotions in both the white and black communities of Topeka. The city's white majority was largely content to remain with a school system that maintained eighteen all-white elementary schools and four all-black elementary schools. African Americans, meanwhile, feared the case would cause the white community to attack what few civil rights they already possessed. Others could not become involved in such a controversy without the fear of losing their jobs with white employers. For that reason, very few African Americans in Topeka actually belonged to the NAACP.

Like many other African American parents, Brown was upset that his daughter had to travel a long distance to an all-black school when an all-white school was located much nearer their home. He also could not help but notice that the all-white schools were in better repair than the all-black schools. Brown agreed to join in the NAACP's case, and in September 1950, he tried unsuccessfully to register one of his three daughters, Linda Brown, in an all-white school only seven blocks from their house. When the case first came to the U.S. District Court for Kansas in June 1951, Brown testified that his daughter had to travel twenty-one blocks to an all-black school, part of the way through a dangerous railroad switching yard.

In the end, African Americans did not seek to end the system of segregation in public schools merely to have their children travel fewer miles to class or sit in nicer buildings. At stake were much more important issues that affected their status in U.S. society. As expressed by NAACP attorneys in later testimony before the Supreme Court, African Americans had come to see segregated schools as inherently unequal. These schools relegated African Americans to an inferior class, instilled feelings of insecurity, diminished their opportunities, and retarded their mental development. The victory eventually achieved in Brown would go a long way toward eliminating those harmful effects of segregation and guaranteeing African Americans their full constitutional rights.

john w. davis, who was legal counsel for the state of South Carolina, argued in his closing remarks that the state had honored Plessy's separate-but-equal doctrine through large investments in schools for black students. He claimed that the state had the intention of creating a condition of equality for children of all races and that "the happiness, the progress and the welfare of these children is best promoted in segregated schools." He also maintained that it was not within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how the state of South Carolina conducted its school system. He told the Court:

Your Honors do not sit, and cannot sit as a glorified Board of Education for the State of South Carolina or any other state….

… Neither this Court nor any other court … can sit in the chairs of the legislature of South Carolina and mold its educational system, and if it is found to be in its present form unacceptable, the State of South Carolina must devise the alternative.

On the same day that the Court handed down its decision in Brown, it decided the related case of Bolling. Applying the same principles that it had used in Brown, the Court ruled in Bolling that racial segregation of schoolchildren in the District of Columbia was unconstitutional.

In the following year, the Supreme Court on reargument made another decision in Brown that was designed to establish the methodology by which to enforce desegregation of public schools. Brown II, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955), as it has come to be called, determined that school authorities had the principal responsibility for evaluating and solving local educational problems, including those resulting from segregation. The Court decided to remand (send back) the individual cases in Brown to lower courts in order that those courts might better assess the efforts of school authorities to desegregate the public schools and thereby provide to African American children their equal protection under the laws as promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. The lower courts were directed to take into account any problems concerning school administration, facilities, transportation, and personnel, and to consider any revision of local laws necessary to resolve the problems and achieve desegregation.

Brown v. Board of Education dealt only with government-mandated or government-authorized segregation. It did not apply to racial segregation or discrimination related to restaurants, theaters, employment, country clubs, or other parts of the private sector. However, Brown fostered changes in the legal and moral outlook of the country that greatly aided future efforts to end racial discrimination as related to

employment, housing, and places of public accommodation, and thus greatly affected U.S. race relations.

Despite the promise of Brown, desegregation of U.S. schools proceeded slowly. In the years immediately following the decision, many southern school districts resisted or delayed implementation of its desegregation requirements, thereby forcing the Supreme Court and other lower courts to oversee and supervise school administrative functions in many localities. As time went on and southern schools became more integrated, the Court shifted its focus to school districts all over the country, particularly those in cities. In the second half of the twentieth century, many African Americans moved from rural to urban areas, often in the northern states. School districts in many of those urban areas became separated into suburban white districts and urban black districts. In response to this challenge, courts imposed busing requirements during the 1970s: in the interest of creating more racially balanced schools, children were bused to different schools that were sometimes far from their home neighborhoods. In many cities, busing became highly controversial.

By the late 1980s, legal battles surrounding the legacy of the Brown decision changed when some school districts began to request that they be released from the court supervision of their operations that had been required by Brown. Accordingly, the Supreme Court began to focus on the issue of when a court order to desegregate a school district should be dissolved and autonomy returned to the local school officials and community. In Board of Education v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237, 111 S. Ct. 630, 112 L. Ed. 2d 715 (1991), which dealt with a court-imposed desegregation plan in Oklahoma City, the Court ruled that a court-ordered desegregation decree may be dissolved when a school district shows that it has taken all "practicable" steps to end a state-imposed dual school system and demonstrates that it is unlikely to revert to its former ways. The ability to dissolve a court-ordered desegregation plan, the Court's opinion stated, would enable a school district that had attempted to achieve the goal of desegregation to avoid "judicial tutelage for the indefinite future."

Justice Marshall, now near the end of his career on the Court, dissented from the majority opinion in Dowell. He argued that, given the long history of segregation, it was too early to leave the Oklahoma City school district to its own devices. Though he agreed that perpetual federal judicial supervision of local schools had never been envisioned by the Court, he feared that the Court's decision in this case would simply perpetuate an already unsatisfactory standard of integration in the Oklahoma City school district and in other school districts.

In another case, Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 112 S. Ct. 1430, 118 L. Ed. 2d 108 (1992), the Supreme Court held that district courts may relinquish supervision and control of school districts in incremental stages, before full compliance has been achieved in every facet of school operations. The Court also ruled that once a school district corrects any racial imbalance that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the district has no obligation to remedy a later imbalance caused by population shifts.

As these cases indicate, the issue of desegregation of public schools remained a vital public issue even several decades after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown. As a means of both training and socialization, education is still a necessity for U.S. society as a whole and for any individual in particular, and it is expected to remain so in the future. Guided by Brown, the U.S. judicial system has decisively concluded that the constitutional provision of equal protection under the laws guarantees that children be entitled to an equal, not a separate, public education.

further readings

Balkin, Jack M., and Bruce Ackerman, et al., eds., 2001. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Hunt, James L. 2001. "Brown v. Board of Education After Fifty Years: Context and Synopsis." Mercer Law Review 52 (winter).

Irons, Peter H. 2002. Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking.

Klein, Dora W. 2002. "Beyond Brown v. Board of Education: The Need to Remedy the Achievement Gap." The Journal of Law and Education 31 (October).

Kluger, Richard. 1975. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf.

Levine, Ellen, ed. 1994. Freedom's Children. New York: Avon Flare.

Miller, LaMar P., ed. 1986. Brown Plus Thirty: Perspective on Desegregation. New York: Metropolitan Center for Educational Research, New York Univ. Press.

Patterson, James T. 2001. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Pollack, Jack. 1979. Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America. Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Weinburg, Meyer. 1967. Race and Place: A Legal History of the Neighborhood School. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Whitman, Mark, ed. 1993. Removing a Badge of Slavery: The Record of Brown v. Board of Education. Princeton, N.J.: Wiener.

Wilkinson, J. Harvie III. 1979. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

cross-references

"Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" (Appendix, Primary Document); Civil Rights; Discrimination; Equal Protection; Jim Crow Laws; Marshall, Thurgood; NAACP; Republican Party; School Desegregation; Warren, Earl; Warren Court.

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), argued 9 Dec. 1952, reargued 8 Dec. 1953, decided 17 May 1954 by vote of 9 to 0; Warren for the Court (Brown I); 349 U.S. 294 (1955), reargued, on the question of relief, 11–14 April 1954, decided 31 May 1955 by vote of 9 to 0; Warren for the Court (Brown II). With a brisk, nontechnical and unexpectedly unanimous opinion running only ten pages, Chief Justice Earl Warren ignited a legal and social revolution in race relations and constitutionalism. “Brown was the beginning,” Alexander M. Bickel later wrote—the beginning not only of substantive changes in the American social structure but also in the nature and expectations of how the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution.

Background

The decisions—on the merits (Brown I) and on relief (Brown II)—culminated a litigation campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its legal arm, the Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., that began twenty years earlier. Beginning in the mid‐1930s, the NAACP brought suits first at the state and then at the federal level challenging, on constitutional grounds, the legal regime of “ Jim Crow”—state‐imposed racial segregation in public accommodations and in education (see Segregation, De Jure). The goal was to abolish Jim Crow and to spur substantive improvement in public education for African‐Americans. The primary obstacle facing the NAACP was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court had held 7 to 1 that state‐imposed racial segregation in public facilities was not “unreasonable” and therefore did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The initial steps in the strategy did not confront Plessy frontally but sought to undermine it. When the Supreme Court invalidated Missouri's out‐of‐state tuition program for African‐American law students in 1938 (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada), everyone knew that the legal superstructure of Jim Crow was vulnerable. Successive decisions by the Court, largely involving cases brought by the NAACP, continued the erosion of Jim Crow in public transportation and in education.

The biggest break occurred in 1948, when the United States attorney general, for the first time, signed an amicus curiae brief in a race case (Shelley v. Kraemer), which signaled the federal government's symbolic support for the NAACP strategy. The Court held racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional in that case, but the watershed did not come until two years later in 1950, when the Court invalidated segregation in graduate schools (McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents) and in law schools (Sweatt v. Painter). The Court's opinions in both cases noted the inequality of facilities created by Jim Crow, but disapproved, for the first time, the “intangible” but genuine harms of racial segregation—such as inability of blacks to associate with white colleagues and the consequent limitation to their education. Unbeknownst outside the Court, many of the justices concluded privately in 1950 that McLaurin and Sweatt sealed the fate of Jim Crow and of Plessy itself.

The stumbling block in the Brown litigation, which affected more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia, and their millions of schoolchildren, and which was in progress when the 1950 cases were decided, was the scope of relief. When Brown was first argued in 1952, the Court internally was divided not so much on the merits but on how, and at what pace, to order relief. The Court remained at loggerheads over the issue during the summer of 1953 when fate intervened. Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who wrote Sweatt and McLaurin but hesitated to require massive desegregation, died suddenly. His replacement, Earl Warren, responded to the situation by convincing his colleagues to decide the merits in one opinion and to defer the question of relief to a second opinion following reargument. At the time, Warren's greatest achievement was thought to be massing a Court unanimous in both vote and opinion; to do so, he had to convince at least two justices, Robert H. Jackson (concurrence) and Stanley F. Reed (dissent), to suppress opinions that they were then preparing. The Court's ultimate unanimity was publicly applauded and was said to buttress the wisdom of the result.

Opinions

Warren later revealed in his memoirs that he wrote Brown I in a short, nonaccusatory and nontechnical style so that it could be understood by laymen and even be reprinted widely in the public press. The opinion elided all of the hard questions: the evidence of the historical understanding of the Equal Protection Clause (see History, Court Uses of)—upon which the parties had been directed to focus their reargument—was deemed “inconclusive”; Plessy's claim that segregation caused no harm was refuted by modern social science data (including highly controversial works cited in Footnote 11); and Plessy itself was disingenuously circumscribed (“In the field of public education, separate but equal has no place” [p. 494]). Warren tried to show that the Court had incrementally chipped away at Plessy in the preceding cases and, in a larger sense, that the logic of Plessy had self‐destructed over time, as African‐Americans became more successful in various fields, and as education became more central to American life. Indeed, Brown self‐consciously avoided questioning the entire structure of Jim Crow in all of its applications but focused exclusively on segregated education and on its harm to those separated because of their race.

If Brown I contained moral clarity without explicit doctrinal foundation, Brown II—rendered one year later—lacked both. The NAACP urged desegregation to proceed immediately, or at least within firm deadlines. The states claimed both were impracticable. The Court, fearful of hostility and even violence if the NAACP views were adopted, embraced a view close to that of the states—but with insistence that progress begin soon. Nonetheless, the opinion equivocated on every line and essentially returned the problem to the courts where the cases began for appropriate desegregative relief—with, in the phrase that soon was condemned for its invitation to recalcitrance, “all deliberate speed.” A Court admirably unanimous on the merits in 1954 became ambiguously, indeed emptily, unanimous on the key issue of relief in 1955.

Brown II imposed substantial costs on all concerned. The burden of producing multimillion‐student desegregation plans was placed on the plaintiffs and the NAACP, who were undermanned, thinly financed, and targets of hostility. The justices had privately hoped that the Department of Justice, which had participated in all of the Brown arguments, would energetically support the plaintiffs, but President Eisenhower chronically avoided the issue and promised no more than “to obey the law of the land.” School districts were caught in a political whipsaw between a handful of reform‐minded residents who wished to make desegregation work and the vast majority who resisted change and saw the issue as fuel for their own devices. Southern congressional leaders and regional governors were especially outspoken in their defiance of the decisions.

The Court itself suffered symbolically to some extent. If Brown I was a clarion call, Brown II’s ambivalence implicitly diminished the moral imperative of the first decision. As organized resistance, especially in Congress, and less organized resistance at the grass roots, mounted, the Court retreated and did not hear another case involving segregation for more than three years after Brown II. Then, in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Court's opinion on the Little Rock, Arkansas, school crisis of 1957–1958, spoke more to the importance of the Court's own power than to the substantive issue of equal protection of the laws.

Aftermath

Between Brown II and Cooper v. Aaron, the Court refused to hear further cases involving segregation and the scope of Brown but issued a series of controversial per curiam decisions based solely on requests for review of lower court decisions. The Court invalidated segregated state parks, beaches and bath houses, golf courses, and even public transportation. The final decision (Gayle v. Browder, 1956), was tinged with irony, because it effectively overruled Plessy—a step the Court found unnecessary to take in Brown and that the per curiam order did not even admit was in issue. The reasonless per curiam orders prompted many legal scholars to warn that the Court was acting more out of conviction than principle and urged the justices to explain their actions, both to refute southern charges of willfulness and to provide guidance for future cases involving racial issues in nonsegregation situations. Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), the companion case to Brown from the District of Columbia, provided the rudimentary doctrinal apparatus to meet the need, but the Court eschewed the opportunity.

Because Brown II provided so little guidance, either as to relief or as to the precise doctrinal foundation of Brown I, the Court put itself in the position of reexplaining, and effectively remaking, the basic principle in every successive segregation case. After reaffirming Brown against gubernatorial resistance in 1958 at Little Rock, the Court turned a doctrinal and substantive corner with Green v. County School Board of New Kent County in 1968 when it held that compliance with Brown II required not simply abolition of state‐imposed segregative practices but the effective desegregation of formerly segregated schools. After Green, busing for racial balance was inevitable, which the Court confirmed in Swann v. Charlotte‐Mecklenburg County Board of Education (1971).

On one level, Brown was remarkably ineffectual. By 1964, a decade after the first decision, less than 2 percent of formerly segregated school districts had experienced any desegregation. As Brown was applied outside the original jurisdictions where segregation was imposed or permitted by law, local resistance became even more fierce and sustained. Yet Brown was a potent catalyst for ambitious social change, both in Congress, where the aspirations of Brown helped prompt the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 among others, and in the federal courts themselves, where the decision's bold moral hopes and impatience with formal doctrinal obstacles encouraged a generation of lawyers and activists to improve society under the rubric of constitutional exegesis. Inspired by Brown, lawyers and judges breathed new life into not only the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but also its Due Process Clause (in both its procedural and its more controversial substantive senses). (See Due Process, Substantive.) The Court itself was emboldened in part by the experience of Brown to expand federal protection for state defendants in criminal proceedings and to strengthen the protection of the First Amendment to critics of first state and then of the federal government during the decade following Brown. For example, the constitutional doctrine of “freedom of association,” which was created by the Court in NAACP v. Alabama (1958), was directly related to school desegregation: state officials tried to compel the publication of the organization's membership lists in part to discourage support for desegregating schools.

Earl Warren's opinion for the Court in Brown I made the decision seem inevitable, and today, as Warren said in the companion case, a contrary result seems unthinkable. Yet the outcome was the product of a lengthy process that involved more than the NAACP and critical maneuvers inside the Court during the 1953 term. In many respects, the seeds for Brown were sown in the early 1930s, when the justices were presented with case after case in which black criminal defendants in the South were victimized by police, judges, and all‐white juries. The stark reality of Jim Crow, and its routine brutality, impelled the Court to begin the process of dismantling Jim Crow piecemeal well before the NAACP strategy hit full stride during World War II. The courage of African‐American servicemen during the war, and President Harry Truman's willingness to make civil rights a national issue in 1948—with a presidential commission and at the Democratic Convention as well as in Shelley v. Kraemer—provided the important symbolic presence of national support that helped to steel the Court's will to move from protection of African‐American individuals to African‐Americans as a class, and, inevitably, as a social movement. Whatever the consequences borne out by the case law, Brown remains a potent symbol of the aspiration for the Constitution and the values it enshrines.

See also Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Alexander M. Bickel , The Least Dangerous Branch (1962).
Charles L. Black, Jr. , The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions, Yale Law Journal 69 (1960): 421–430.
Dennis J. Hutchinson , Unanimity and Desegregation, Georgetown Law Journal 68 (1979): 1–96.
Richard Kluger , Simple Justice (1975).
Philip B. Kurland , Brown v. Board of Education Was the Beginning, Washington University Law Quarterly (1979): 309–405.
Gerald Rosenberg , The Hollow Hope (1990).
Mark Tushnet , The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (1987).

Dennis J. Hutchinson

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

Kans. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. Linda Brown was denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka because she was black. When, combined with several other cases, her suit reached the Supreme Court, that body, in an opinion by recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren , broke with long tradition and unanimously overruled the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson , holding for the first time that de jure segregation in the public schools violated the principle of equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Responding to legal and sociological arguments presented by NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall , the court stressed that the "badge of inferiority" stamped on minority children by segregation hindered their full development no matter how "equal" physical facilities might be. After hearing further arguments on implementation, the court declared in 1955 that schools must be desegregated "with all deliberate speed."

Restricted in application to de jure (legally imposed) segregation, the Brown rule was applied mainly to Southern school systems. After strong resistance, which led to such incidents as the 1957 Little Rock , Ark., school crisis, integration spread slowly across the South, under court orders and the threat of loss of federal funds for noncompliance. The Brown decision gave tremendous impetus to the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and hastened integration in public facilities and accommodations. Segregation maintained by more subtle and intractable forces, however, has remained an important element in American society. De facto school segregation, caused by residential housing patterns and various other conditions rather than by law, has been attacked by the busing of students and other mechanisms. The landmark decision is commemorated by the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka (see National Parks and Monuments , table).

Bibliography: See studies by J. T. Pattterson (2001) and M. Minow (2010).

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS

Opinion of U.S. District Court, D. Kansas, August 3, 1951 . . . . . . . . .2

Initial Briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court

Brief for Appellants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Appendix to Appellants' Briefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Brief for Appellees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20

Memorandum Decision of the Supreme Court, June 8, 1953 . . . . . .32

Briefs for the Parties on Reargument

Brief for Appellants in Nos. 1, 2 and 4 and for Respondents in No. 10 on Reargument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

Brief for the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, on Questions Propounded by the Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

Opinion of the Supreme Court, May 17, 1954 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130

Briefs to the Court on Further Reargument

Brief for Appellants in Nos. 1, 2 and 3 and for Respondents in No. 5 on Further Reargument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .136

Supplemental Brief for the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, on Questions 4 and 5 Propounded by the Court . . .149

Reply Brief for Appellants in Nos. 1, 2 and 3 and for Respondents in No. 5 on Further Reargument . . . . . . . . . . .151

Opinion of the Supreme Court, May 31, 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (USA, 1954–5) One of five cases and two decisions in which the US Supreme Court under Justice Warren revealed its liberal inclinations by unanimously reversing precedents dating from the case of Plessey v. Ferguson. On 17 May 1954, the Court ruled that racial segregation in the provision of publicly funded schooling was contrary to the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and therefore illegal and inherently unequal. The ruling marked the beginning of a comprehensive legal attack, culminating in the end of racial segregation in the Southern states. The case was also a milestone in the history of the NAACP, whose activism in promoting the ruling's enforcement was critical in the way it was applied. The case was argued by J. T. Marshall, and in the second ruling on 13 May 1955 produced the phrase ‘desegregation with all due speed’ on the part of the Justices. The case was a civil rights landmark, and marked the beginning of the second reconstruction period in American race relations that would project full social integration of African Americans into the centre of the American political agenda.