1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision
1954 United States Supreme Court case
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision "Plessy v. Ferguson", which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in "Brown", and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.
The case began in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against the Browns, relying on the precedent of "Plessy" and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.
In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in "Brown II" (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
In the Southern United States, the reaction to "Brown" among most white people was "noisy and stubborn", especially in the Deep South where racial segregation was deeply entrenched in society. Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of "Cooper v. Aaron", the Court reaffirmed its ruling in "Brown", and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no power to nullify its ruling.
Background.
For much of the 60 years preceding the "Brown" case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause ("no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws"). Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Beginning in the 1930s, a legal strategy was pursued, led by scholars at Howard University and activists at the NAACP, that sought to undermine states' public education segregation by first focusing on the graduate school setting. This led to success in the cases of "Sweatt v. Painter", 339 U.S. 629 (1950) and "McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents", 339 U.S. 637 (1950), suggesting that racial segregation was inherently unequal (at least in some settings), which paved the way for "Brown".
The plaintiffs in "Brown" asserted that the system of racial separation in all schools, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. "Brown" was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled "The Race Question". This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism. Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal's "" (1944). Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration.
The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism were doing to America's international image. When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, the first question he was asked was, "Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" Douglas later wrote that he had learned from his travels that "the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India." Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, echoed Douglas's concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, proclaiming that "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."
District court case.
Filing and arguments.
In 1951, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas, in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were 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 due to a 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over 15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP. Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett; Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter; and Lucinda Todd.
The named African-American plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, as well as an assistant pastor at his local church. He was convinced to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend, Charles Scott. Brown's daughter Linda Carol Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.
As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and redirected to the segregated schools.
The case "Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" was named after Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster. The lawyers, and the National Chapter of the NAACP, also felt that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court justices. The 13 plaintiffs were: Oliver Brown, Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, and Lucinda Todd. The last surviving plaintiff, Zelma Henderson, died in Topeka, on May 20, 2008, at age 88.
District court opinion.
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in "Plessy v. Ferguson". Judge Walter Huxman wrote the opinion for the three-judge District Court panel, including nine "findings of fact," based on the evidence presented at trial. Although finding number eight stated that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on negro children, the court denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers. This finding would be specifically cited in the subsequent Supreme Court opinion of this case.
Supreme Court arguments.
The case of "Brown v. Board of Education" as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: "Brown" itself, "Briggs v. Elliott" (filed in South Carolina), "Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County" (filed in Virginia), "Gebhart v. Belton" (filed in Delaware), and "Bolling v. Sharpe" (filed in Washington, D.C.).
All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The "Davis" case, the only case of the five originating from a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School. The "Gebhart" case was the only one where a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court, found that discrimination was unlawful; in all the other cases the plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found discrimination to be lawful.
The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial equality as to all such factors. The lower court, in its opinion, noted that, in Topeka, "the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of study, qualification and quality of teachers, as well as other educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable." The lower court observed that "colored children in many instances are required to travel much greater distances than they would be required to travel could they attend a white school" but also noted that the school district "transports colored children to and from school free of charge" and that "no such service [was] provided to white children." In the Delaware case the district court judge in "Gebhart" ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.
Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall—who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967—argued the case before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general Paul Wilson—later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas—conducted the state's ambivalent defense in his first appellate argument.
In December 1952, the Justice Department filed an "amicus curiae" ("friend of the court") brief in the case. The brief was unusual in its heavy emphasis on foreign-policy considerations of the Truman administration in a case ostensibly about domestic issues. Of the seven pages covering "the interest of the United States," five focused on the way school segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War competition for the friendship and allegiance of non-white peoples in countries then gaining independence from colonial rule. Attorney General James P. McGranery noted that "the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." The brief also quoted a letter by Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamenting that "the United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country."
British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has written that "Although the Court's opinion in "Brown" made no reference to these considerations of foreign policy, there is no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision."
Consensus building.
In spring 1953, the court heard the case, but was unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.
The court reargued the case at the behest of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who used reargument as a stalling tactic, to allow the court to gather a consensus around a "Brown" opinion that would outlaw segregation. The justices in support of desegregation spent much effort convincing those who initially intended to dissent to join a unanimous opinion. Although the legal effect would be same for a majority rather than unanimous decision, it was felt that dissent could be used by segregation supporters as