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• Although African Americans first sued (unsuccessfully) to
stop mandated racially segregated education in 1849, in the case
Roberts v. City of Boston, the successful lawsuits known as Brown
v. Board of Education were the culmination of a litigation strategy
initiated in the 1930's. Charles Hamilton Houston, Dean of Howard
University's Law School, is recognized as the chief architect of
the NAACP's legal strategy for racial equality. Lawsuits on the
long road to Brown included:
1938 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada
The U.S. Supreme Court invalidates state laws that, to avoid admitting
African-American students to all-white state graduate schools or
building separate black graduate schools, require black students
to attend out-of-state graduate schools.
1940 Alston v. School Board of City of Norfolk
A federal appeals court orders that African-American teachers be
paid salaries equal to those of white teachers.
1948 Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Regents
The Supreme Court rules that a state cannot bar an African-American
student from its all-white law school on the grounds that she had
failed to request the state to provide a separate law school for
black students.
1950 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents
The Supreme Court holds that an African-American student admitted
to a formerly all-white graduate school could not be subjected to
practices of segregation that interfered with meaningful classroom
instruction and interaction with other students, such as making
a student sit in the classroom doorway, isolated from the professor
and other students.
1950 Sweatt v. Painter
The Supreme Court rules that a separate law school hastily established
for black students to prevent their having to be admitted to the
previously all-white University of Texas School of Law could not
provide a legal education “equal” to that available
to white students. The Court orders the admission of Herman Marion
Sweatt to the University of Texas Law School.
• The Brown vs. Board of Education case was named for
Oliver Brown, father of Linda Brown, a seven year-old who was denied
admission to an elementary school just blocks from her home in Topeka,
Kansas.
• Besides the lawsuits in Topeka and Prince Edward County,
Virginia, formally known as Davis v. the Board of Prince Edward
County, the court appeals consolidated in Brown v. Board
of Education included cases initiated in Washington D.C., Delaware
and Clarendon County, South Carolina when they arrived at the Supreme
Court.
• Brown v. Board of Education was first argued before
the United States Supreme Court over three days beginning on December
9, 1952 and re-argued a year later. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs
was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then-head
of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In his argument, Marshall asked
the court:
“Why of all the multitudinous groups of people
in this country [do] you have to single out Negroes and give them
this separate treatment?” Marshall challenged the justices,
arguing, “The only way that this Court can decide this case
in opposition to our position... is to find that for some reason
Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.”
• When the South Carolina case was in a lower court, Attorney
Robert Carter presented as evidence the research of Psychologist
Kenneth Clark, who found that black students preferred a white doll
to a black doll and described the black doll as “bad.”
According to Clark there was a direct correlation between segregated
schools and black studentsí poor self-esteem.
• Members of the U.S. Supreme Court, following the first hearing,
were divided about whether to end school segregation. At the suggestion
of Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was particularly pointed in his
questions to NAACP attorneys during the hearing, the divided court
took the unusual step of delaying judgment and posing additional
questions to both sides for re-argument.
• The NAACP gathered leading scholars from around the nation,
including historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, to
help craft answers to the court's questions. The case was re-argued
on December 8, 1953.
• Chief Justice Vinson died before the court ruled on the case,
and he was replaced by former California Governor Earl Warren. Warren's
confirmation as chief justice on March 1,1954, changed the direction
of the leadership of the court.
• May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in favor
of the plaintiffs. In the words of Chief Justice Warren, who wrote
the opinion:
“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools
has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is
greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating
the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of
the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of
a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore,
has a tendency to (retard) the educational and mental development
of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they
would receive in a racially integrated school system...
We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine
of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational
facilities are inherently unequal.”
• At the time of the Brown decision, 39 percent of all American
students and two-thirds of African American children, lived in the
segregated south. The southern states spent on average 43 percent
more per white student than the amount spent per black student.
• In 1991 the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dowell v. Oklahoma
City authorized a return to neighborhood schools even if the change
in policy would lead to re-segregation. In many districts where
court-ordered desegregation was ended, there has been significant
re-segregation.
Sources of information: Shades of Freedom
by A. Leon Higginbotham; African American Voices of Triumph: Perseverance,
Senior Editor Henry Louis Gates; From Slavery to Freedom by John
Hope Franklin; Simple Justice by Richard Kluger; The Civil Rights
Project, Harvard University; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, Inc., Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence
and Research; www.brownmatters.org,
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; www.brownat50.org,
Howard University.
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