BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION
On May 17, 1954 the United States
Supreme Court handed down its
ruling in the landmark case of Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas. The Court’s unanimous
decision overturned provisions of the
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision,
which had allowed for “separate but
equal” public facilities, including
public schools in the United States.
Declaring that “separate educational
facilities are inherently unequal,” the
Brown v. Board decision helped break
the back of state-sponsored
segregation, and provided a spark to
the American civil rights movement.
The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children. The suit called
for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of
Education operated separate elementary schools 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 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.
Linda Brown
This unanimous decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, ended
federal tolerance of racial segregation. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Court had ruled
that “separate but equal” accommodations on railroad cars conformed to the Fourteenth
Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. That decision was used to justify
segregating all public facilities, including schools. In addition, most school districts,
ignoring Plessy’s “equal” requirement, neglected their black schools.
In the mid-1930s, however, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) challenged school segregation in a series of court cases. In these the
Court required “tangible” aspects of segregated schools to be equivalent. The rulings
prompted several school districts to improve their black students’ schools. Then the
NAACP contested the constitutionality of segregation in four regions. Each of the school
districts involved had improved the tangible aspects of its black schools, but Brown
brought segregation squarely before the Court. In the unanimous decision Chief Justice
Earl Warren rejected the Plessy doctrine, declaring that “separate educational facilities”
were “inherently unequal” because the intangible inequalities of segregation deprived
black students of equal protection under the law. A year later, the Court published
implementation guidelines requiring federal district courts to supervise school
desegregation “on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed.”
Opposition to Brown reached an
apex in Cooper v. Aaron (1958),
when the Court ruled that states
were constitutionally required to
implement the Supreme Court's
integration orders. Massive
resistance was a strategy declared
by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd of
Virginia to unite white politicians
and leaders in Virginia in a
campaign of new state laws and
policies to prevent public school
desegregation, particularly after the
Students resisting integration of their school
Brown v. Board of Education 1954.
Many schools, and even an entire
school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration,
before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal
District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those
policies unconstitutional. Although most of the laws created were overturned by state
and federal courts within a year, some aspects of the campaign against integrated
public schools continued in Virginia for many more years.
Widespread racial integration of the South
was achieved by the late 1960s and 1970s.
In the meantime, the equal protection ruling
in Brown spilled over into other areas of the
law and into the political arena as well.
Scholars now point out that Brown v. Board
was not the beginning of the modern civil
rights movement, but there is no doubt that
it constituted a watershed moment in the
struggle for racial equality in America.
US Marshalls escorting Ruby Bridges to school