Brown v. Board of Education

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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

For more information on Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka), visit Britannica.com.

• 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
• Vote: 9–0
• For the Court: Warren

The 14th Amendment declares, “No state shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In 1896 the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on the meaning of this equal protection clause. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled that the 14th Amendment allowed a state to segregate whites and blacks by providing “separate but equal” facilities for blacks.

For nearly 60 years this doctrine of “separate but equal” served as a constitutional justification for racial segregation in the United States. This doctrine sanctioned separating blacks and whites in schools, housing, transportation, and recreation.

Not all Americans accepted the view that the Constitution allowed racial discrimination. Those opposed to segregation agreed with Justice John Harlan, who dissented in Plessy, declaring, “Our Constitution is color-blind.” In 1909 a group of black and white Americans formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to fight segregation and racial injustice. In the 1930s and 1940s, NAACP legal counsel successfully argued a number of Supreme Court cases in which the Court prohibited segregation in public universities, political primaries, and railroads. By 1950 many blacks and whites were ready to challenge the constitutionality of segregated elementary and high schools. In the early 1950s five separate cases—from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas, and Washington, D.C.—made their way through the court system. In each case the parents of black schoolchildren asked lower courts to strike down laws requiring segregated schools. The NAACP provided these parents with legal help. Eventually, the Supreme Court heard these cases together as Brown v. Board of Education. The case received its name when Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, Kansas, school board for denying their eight-year-old daughter, Linda, admission to a school only five blocks from their house. She had to leave her home at 7:40 every morning and travel 21 blocks in order to reach her assigned school by 9:00. The school board refused to let Linda attend the school in her own neighborhood solely because she was black and the school nearest to her home was for whites only.

The Issue

Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice, was director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He provided legal counsel for the Browns and the other plaintiffs. Marshall presented evidence showing that separating black and white students discriminated against blacks, placing them at a severe disadvantage. He argued that segregated schools were not and could never be equal. Such schools, he said, violated the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment.

John W. Davis, a distinguished attorney and a 1924 Presidential candidate, represented the defense. He argued that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended that article to prevent segregation in the nation's schools. Further, he claimed, the courts did not possess the authority to order the states to desegregate their schools.

Those states with segregated schools claimed that the dual system provided “separate but equal” facilities for whites and blacks. In fact, virtually no black schools were equal to white schools. The South Carolina case, for example, began when the local school board, run by whites, refused to provide school buses for black children. The board also refused to pay for heating the black schools or to provide them with indoor plumbing—services and facilities provided to white students. In spite of these glaring inequities, the black plaintiffs did not argue that the school systems were separate but unequal. Rather, they focused on challenging the “separate but equal” doctrine itself. Did state-supported segregation in public schools, even when black and white schools had equal facilities, violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment?

Opinion of the Court

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine as an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren said that segregation clearly gave black children “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” Even if segregated schools gave blacks access to equal physical facilities, Warren argued, they deprived students of equal educational opportunities.

Warren declared, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Significance

The Brown decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The ruling in this case destroyed the constitutional foundations of all forms of state-supported segregation in the United States. It also prompted massive resistance to school integration in many states. That resistance, in turn, helped spur the growth of the civil rights movement. This movement encouraged the passage of the federal civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965, and 1968, which increased black political and civil rights.

Resistance also slowed implementation of the Brown decision in schools and led to many additional court cases. For example, Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed all of its public schools—for whites as well as blacks—rather than integrate. The first additional case, Brown v. Board of Education (349 U.S. 294), known as Brown II, came in 1955.Brown II came before the Court because, as Chief Justice Warren wrote, “[W]e requested further argument on the question of relief.” The Court wanted to consider the issue of how to implement the ruling of Brown I to end segregation in public schools. In Brown II the Court set forth guidelines that placed the primary responsibility for doing so on local school officials. Federal district courts were to continue their jurisdiction and oversight of school desegregation cases. They could allow school districts to proceed carefully and gradually to complete school desegregation.

Although the Supreme Court ordered school districts to begin desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” in reality just the opposite occurred. Fourteen years after Brown, less than 20 percent of black students in the South attended integrated schools. Faced with continued resistance, the Supreme Court ruled in 1968, in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, that segregation must end “at once.” Eventually, lower federal court rulings and the work of the federal executive branch agencies began to change this pattern. By the 1980s most Americans fully accepted the Court's ruling in the Brown case as the correct decision. Today, it is hailed as one of the greatest and most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.

See also Civil rights; Equality under the Constitution; Marshall, Thurgood; Plessy v. Ferguson

Sources

• Daniel M. Berman, It Is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on School Segregation (New York: Norton, 1966).
• Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Knopf, 1976)

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), decision on remedy, 349 U.S. 294 (1955), was the leading case of the five decided by the Supreme Court finding that segregation in public education violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The constitutionality of state laws requiring segregated schools seemed to be established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld a Louisiana law requiring "separate but equal" accommodations on railroads. Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, prepared the groundwork for the Brown decision in a series of cases in which the Supreme Court invalidated segregated education in graduate and professional schools because the segregated programs did not provide an equal education. Extending those precedents to secondary and elementary schools was a large step, because the justices believed maintaining segregated education was a central feature of the southern system of segregation as a whole.

Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, Kansas, school board because his daughter was denied admission to the school closest to the Brown home. The NAACP developed similar cases in Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, all of which the Supreme Court considered along with Brown. The lawyers for the African American plaintiffs and the school boards argued the cases twice before the Court reached its unanimous decision invalidating segregated education and casting doubt on Plessy v. Ferguson, which seemed to allow segregation in any public facility. Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion said that the Court could not "turn the clock back" to 1868, when the equal protection clause was adopted, or to 1896; that segregation could "affect the hearts and minds" of African American children "in a way unlikely ever to be undone"; and that schools segregated by law could never be equal.

The Court then asked the lawyers to argue the cases a third time to determine what the proper remedy for the unconstitutional system should be. Rejecting the NAACP's arguments for immediate desegregation, the Court, again unanimously, directed the lower courts to supervise desegregation plans that would begin the process immediately and then proceed "with all deliberate speed." Some school boards, particularly in the border states, complied with court orders rather quickly, but desegregation faced resistance in the Deep South. Not until after the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did the Deep South implement substantial desegregation.

Bibliography

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

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

—Mark V. Tushnet

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The 1954 landmark decision by the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 47 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, that held that racial segregation in public education is unconsti- tutional.

Brown v. Board of Education was the most significant of a series of judicial decisions overturning segregation laws—laws that segregate, or 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 for 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 today 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 them 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, 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 under legal counsels Charles Houston and William H. Hastie, and a young assistant, Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become a member of the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.

By 1939, Marshall had become head of the NAACP's 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."

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.

When the Court handed down its opinion, which was written by Chief Justice Warren on May 14, 1954, it held that segregating children by race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of the equality of the physical facilities and other elements of the schools. The Court based its decision in part on contemporary psychological and sociological studies that demonstrated the harmful effects of segregation on children. In particular, the Court's opinion argued that segregation promotes a sense of inferiority in African American children: "To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Such a sense of inferiority, the Court maintained, impairs the motivation of African American children to learn and deprives them of benefits they would otherwise receive in a racially integrated school. The Court also supported its decision by stating that education had become an even more important element in U.S. life than it had been when the Plessy decision was made in 1896:

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of the state and local governments… . It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities… . It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

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-auth- orized 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 remains 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 will undoubtedly 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.

See: Civil Rights; Discrimination; Equal Protection; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Plessy v. Ferguson; Republican Party; School Desegregation; Warren Court.

A case regarding school desegregation, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. The Court ruled that segregation in public schools is prohibited by the Constitution. The decision ruled out “separate but equal” educational systems for blacks and whites, which many localities said they were providing. The Court departed from tradition by using arguments from sociology to show that separate educational systems were unequal by their very nature.