With All
Deliberate Speed
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965)
Annotated draft decree regarding
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
April 8, 1955
Page 2
Manuscript Division
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The deliberations of the Supreme Court in its landmark case of
1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which found
school segregation to be unconstitutional, are well documented in
the Library's manuscript collections.
After the Brown opinion was announced, the Court heard
additional arguments during the following term on the decree implementing
the ruling. While the NAACP lawyers had proposed to use the word
"forthwith" to achieve an accelerated desegregation timetable, Chief
Justice Earl Warren adopted Justice Felix Frankfurter's suggestion
to use a phrase associated with the revered Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"with all deliberate speed." Shortly after Warren retired from the
Court he acknowledged that "all deliberate speed" was chosen as
a benchmark because "there were so many blocks preventing an immediate
solution of the thing in reality that the best we could look for
would be a progression of action."
It became clear over time that critics of desegregation were using
the doctrine to delay compliance with Brown, and in 1964
Justice Hugo Black declared in a desegregation opinion that "the
time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." This draft decree
with Frankfurter's own changes in pencil, along with related
unique
documents in the Frankfurter and Warren papers, has helped scholars
analyze the evolution of the Brown case.
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