When was Brown v. Board of Education?
Institutional racism
The 1954 "Brown vs. Board of Education" decision was the beginning of the process of desegregation and the elimination of de jure discrimination. However, it was hard to determine the challenges that the process would present and the obstacles that would continue to exist.While the concept of "separate but equal" had been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, it was clear that the racial divide had not yet been gapped. As the years since Brown v. Board of Education passed, both verbal and physical abuse continued. After Brown v. Board of Education, the desegregated environment proved to be strenuous and was going to require some work. The increase of racial tension and racial incidents in institutes of higher education is said to be due to the "lack of knowledge, experience, and contact with diverse peers; peer-group influence; increased competition and stress; the influence of off-campus groups and the media; alcohol use; changing values; fear of diversity; and the perception of unfair treatment". Although Brown v. Board of Education was ruled in 1954, actual integration did not completely occur until many years later; the U.S. Supreme Court held multiple hearings on the desegregation of schools, continuously they maintained that Brown v. Board of Education must be followed by schools, colleges, and universities. The manner in which Brown v. Board of Education was drawn out years after the decision helped instill racism in education by illustrating the extraordinary lengths some educational institutions would go to in order to avoid integration.
John W. Eggleston
Although Eggleston firmly believed in states' rights, he became best known for the opinions he wrote overturning attempts by Virginia legislators to avoid complying with the United States Supreme Court's decisions in "Brown v. Board of Education" (which had a companion case Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County). The Massive Resistance crisis had embroiled Virginia, with U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd vowing to make his state a bastion against enforcement of "Brown". Justice Eggleston wrote the 1955 decision which interpreted a state constitutional provision such that Virginia could not pay private school tuitions for students who left public schools because they integrated racially. In response, legislators proposed a state constitutional amendment, which voters approved the following January, then the special legislative session of August and September 1956 adopted the Stanley plan which included such tuition grants. The school voucher issue then came before the Court again as Harrison v. Day, a declaratory judgment action brought by the Virginia attorney general against the state's comptroller. Chief Justice Eggleston's opinion of January 19, 1959 (birthday of Robert E. Lee and a state holiday in Virginia), while criticizing the federal decision, also declared the new Virginia laws unconstitutional. Only the two justices from Richmond refused to make the decision unanimous, Harold Fleming Snead joining in the dissent of Willis D. Miller, although a three-judge federal panel on the same day also overturned the Stanley Plan as unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution in James v. Almond. School desegregation came before the Virginia Supreme Court again in 1963, and Chief Justice Eggleston strongly dissented from the six-justice majority in December 1963, correctly predicting that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn their approval of funds for Prince Edward County's segregation academies while its public schools remained closed, Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. Another important opinion was "United States Construction Workers" v. "Laburnum Construction Corp." (1953), which established the authority of state courts to adjudicate suits by corporations against labor unions over unfair business practices. In one of his last of more than 500 opinions, Eggleston wrote a unanimous decision about a prisoner (Robert Lee Clark) being improperly denied his right to appeal.