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Brown vs. Board of Education was the landmark case that resulted in desegregation of public schools. Linda Brown was a little African American girl attending third grade at public school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1951. She lived a few blocks from a White elementary school, but when her father attempted to enroll her in the neighborhood school, his request was denied. Linda Brown ended up traveling about a mile every day to get to the nearest Black elementary school.
Topeka's NAACP branch was glad to assist Mr. Brown in challenging the segregation law. In 1892 the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision had set the legal precedent for the concept of "separate but equal" which had been applied to the schools in Southern states since then. In most cases, the schools were far from equal, but throughout the South, they were indeed separate. Parents of Black students in several other states (South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware) were pursuing the challenge to the "separate but equal" doctrine at around the same time that Oliver Brown went to the Topeka NAACP for help.
In the summer of 1951 Mr. Brown's case was heard by the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The remedy requested was an injunction to prohibit segregation of the public schools in Topeka. The NAACP argued that separating Black children from White children was sending a message to them that they were somehow inferior, so there was no way that the education provided could be equal.
The Board of Education argued that segregation was a fact of life in the states where these children attended school, and that segregated schools helped prepare the children for the reality of what their adult lives would be like. The Board of Education cited examples of successful, educated African Americans like Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Booker T. Washington, none of whom had attended integrated schools.
In handing down their decision, the judges wrote that "colored children…" suffered a "detrimental effect" from segregation of the schools. However, they believed that the legal precedent set by the Plessy vs. Ferguson case prevented them from issuing the requested injunction, and they ruled in favor of the Topeka Board of Education.
The case was appealed and it went to the United States Supreme Court in the fall of 1951. It was combined with the cases from Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina. The Supreme Court tossed this one around for a long time. They first heard the case in 1951, but did not issue a decision. They discussed various interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether the Plessy vs. Ferguson case had violated it. They heard it again in December of 1953. Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first African American Supreme Court Justice, argued for Brown and the NAACP.
Finally, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued their decision: "…Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities? We believe that it does…We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place…"
With segregation of public schools declared unconstitutional, segregationists across the South sprang into action to prevent the implementation of public school integration. In some states the legislatures passed state laws to uphold segregation, which then had to be challenged in court by the federal government, one by one, delaying the day when Black children would be admitted to the White schools. Some White segregationists formed councils to fight against desegregation. One of the most dramatic scenes surrounding school desegregation occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when White mobs screamed threats at nine Black high school students and blocked them as they tried, unsuccessfully, to enter their new school for the first time. President Eisenhower ended up calling in the National Guard to protect them so they could go in (but that can be another week's column!)
School
desegregation obviously did not happen overnight, but the Brown vs. Board
of Education decision was the legal decision necessary to make it happen,
ever. By the time the decision was handed down by the Supreme Court in
1954, Linda Brown had already moved on to attend middle school. []
Republished 4.25.05
