DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
The Brown Decision
Supreme Court rules “separate but equal” unconstitutional
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
The Brown case began to take shape once Marshall found the right plaintiff in the Reverend Oliver Brown, father of Topeka, Kansas, grade-schooler Linda Brown. Linda had been obliged to attend a black school 21 blocks from her house, although there was a white school only seven blocks away. The Kansas state courts had rejected Brown’s claim by finding that the segregated black and white schools were of comparable quality. This gave Marshall the chance to urge that the Supreme Court at last rule that segregated facilities were, by definition and as a matter of law, unequal and hence unconstitutional.
Marshall’s legal strategy relied on social scientific evidence. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled a team of experts spanning the fields of history, economics, political science, and psychology. Particularly significant was a study in which the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark sought to determine how segregation affected the self-esteem and mental well-being of African Americans. Among their poignant findings: Black children aged three to seven preferred white rather than otherwise identical black dolls.
Marshall’s strategy. Citing the Clark paper and other studies identified by plaintiffs, the Supreme Court ruled decisively:
... in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated ... are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Education attorney Deryl W. Wynn, a member of the Oxford University Roundtable on Education Policy, has said of the significance of Brown:
Here was the highest court in the land essentially saying that something was wrong with how black Americans were being treated.... I remember my father, who was a teenager at the time, saying the decision made him feel like he was somebody.... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is that it serves as a constant reminder that each child, each of us, is somebody.
The Court did not specify a timeframe for ending school segregation, but the following year, in a group of cases known collectively as “Brown II,” Marshall and his colleagues secured a Supreme Court ruling that desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed.”
Even then, resistance continued in parts of the South. In September 1957, when black students were forcibly turned away from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Marshall flew to the city and filed suit in federal court. His victory in this case set the stage for President Dwight Eisenhower’s declaration of September 24: “I have today issued an Executive Order directing the use of troops under federal authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock, Arkansas.... Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.”
Brown, Little Rock, and the NAACP team’s other legal triumphs illustrated both the strengths and the limits of the “legal” civil rights movement. Black Americans, relegated for decades to inferior, segregated schools, scarcely might have imagined the sight of federal authorities escorting black students into formerly all white classrooms — in Little Rock, at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and at the University of Alabama in 1963. But litigation worked slowly, and one case at a time.
Legal segregation, meanwhile, still prevailed in much of the South, not just at many schools but at nearly every kind of public facility, from swimming pools to buses and from movie theaters to lunch counters. And segregationists succeeded all too often in depriving African Americans of their most basic constitutional right. Through a combination of unfair technicalities, outright fraud and chicanery, and ultimately by threat of violence, the plain language of the Fifteenth Amendment was subverted, and blacks throughout the South were unable to vote.
Plainly, new civil rights laws were required. Passing them would require a political consensus strong enough to overcome the die-hard opposition of southern representatives in Congress. The legal struggle continued with Thurgood Marshall leading the way — from 1961 to 1965 as Judge Marshall of the U.S. Court of Appeals (the nation’s second highest federal court), and then during the quarter-century from 1967 to 1991 as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice.
Meanwhile, a new, political civil rights movement was coalescing. Brave African Americans, joined by allies of every race and creed, began firmly but peaceably to insist upon the full measure of civil rights to which they were entitled as Americans. As they forced their countrymen to confront squarely the unconscionable realities of segregation and racial oppression, the balance of national sympathies — and of political forces — shifted. It all began on a December 1955 evening in Montgomery, Alabama, when a 42-year-old seamstress, tired after a long day at work, refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus.
