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16 May 2007
1954 Legal Ruling a Major Victory in U.S. Civil Rights Movement
Supreme Court decision advanced U.S. Constitution’s promise of equality
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that establishment of separate public schools for black and white students is inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
Brown v. Board of Education extended federal power to education, an area traditionally controlled by states and localities. The decision also signaled a new determination to interpret more broadly the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equality before the law and began an era of federal intervention to defend and guarantee the civil rights of all Americans.
The case was filed in 1951 on behalf of the Reverend Oliver Brown, a welder in Topeka, Kansas, whose daughter Linda was required to attend an all-black school 21 blocks from her house when a white school was only seven blocks away. The lawsuit, consolidated with similar cases from other states, was argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall in 1952 and 1953.
The legal challenge to school segregation was led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Founded in 1909 as an interracial coalition devoted to improving the plight of black Americans, the organization by 1939 had established its Legal Defense and Education Fund and named Marshall its director and chief counsel. Marshall already had won a number of court victories against segregation in graduate education, where the lack of black institutions made it difficult to prove separate, let alone equal, facilities, were available.
The Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, issued a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Where previous decisions narrowly interpreted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbade states from denying equal protection under law due to race, the Brown court looked instead to the impact of segregation. As Warren wrote:
“[T]o separate them [black schoolchildren] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. … 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 which they would receive in a racially integrated school system.”
The court concluded “that 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 … [have been] deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."
UNEASY EVOLUTION OF “SEPARATE BUT EQUAL”
The U.S. Constitution established a decentralized federal system in which all powers not assigned specifically to the central government are reserved for the states and the people. Because the listed federal powers did not include education, public schools became primarily a state and local responsibility, with those governments maintaining primary control over funding and curricula.
Against this backdrop of local control of public schools, the aftereffects of slavery played out for more than a century. Although slavery was abolished in Northern states in the early 19th century, slavery continued in the South, where a plantation-based economy prevailed, until the Civil War (1861-1865). The 13th Amendment to the Constitution banned slavery in 1865, and in 1868 the 14th Amendment forbade any state from "deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
A legal challenge filed when many Southern states segregated public schools -- limiting each race to its own "separate but equal" facilities – resulted in the 1897 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which found segregation did not deprive black Americans of equal protection.
"Separate but equal" was not very equal in practice. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, for instance, per pupil expenditures during the 1949–1950 school year averaged $179 for white students but only $43 for blacks; school buildings for 2,375 white students were valued $674,000 while those for the county’s 6,541 black students appraised at $195,000, partly because many buildings lacked heat and indoor plumbing; teachers in black schools were paid one-third less than their counterparts in white schools; and white students received free bus transport, while black students were obliged to walk.
Brown, which reversed Plessy in 1954, held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," invalidated state laws mandating school segregation and began an era of federal efforts to ensure equal educational opportunity for all Americans.
ENFORCING THE DECISION
Brown did not end legal school segregation immediately, but it did put the law on the side of those who fought to integrate the public schools. In 1955, the Supreme Court revisited the issue, issuing an opinion that assigned the lower federal courts responsibility for enforcing Brown and instructed them to desegregate the schools "with all deliberate speed."
Some states were determined to resist the rulings: In Little Rock, Arkansas, the federal court ordered the placement of black students in an all-white high school and Governor Orval E. Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent their enrollment. (See related article.)
On September 24, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded with an address to the nation in which he warned:
“The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms rests upon the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and insure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts, even, when necessary with all the means at the President’s command. … Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.”
Eisenhower dispatched Army units to Little Rock and placed the National Guard under federal command. He ordered both to implement the court order by enforcing the black students’ lawful right to attend the previously all-white school.
Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, similarly used the power of the federal government to enforce school desegregation, most notably at the universities of Mississippi and Alabama. Kennedy’s reasoning, in a speech delivered on September 30, 1962, was similar to Eisenhower’s:
“Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law -- but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws, and not of men, no man -- however prominent or powerful -- and no mob -- however unruly or boisterous -- is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically authorized the U.S. attorney general to file lawsuits to force school desegregation, the door on legal segregation closed, and today no American child attends a legally segregated school.
COMBATING SEGREGATION
Despite Brown, some U.S. students still attend de facto segregated schools, for a variety of complex reasons, including housing patterns and the lingering effects of past racism. Local control and financing of public schools are another source of educational inequality because most American municipalities raise the bulk of their revenues by taxing real property (land plus improvements), jurisdictions with more valuable property can devote greater resources to public schools.
States and municipalities employ a number of strategies to combat de facto segregation, and progress toward integration is substantial but incomplete. A desegregation strategy called “busing” assigned students to travel by bus to schools outside their own neighborhoods. Such programs proved controversial because parents resisted sending their children to schools perceived as inferior, opposed long bus rides and supported the concept of neighborhood schools. That politically divisive strategy largely has been abandoned.
Other desegregation techniques are proving more successful. “Magnet” schools offer special curricula, draw from a wide geographic area and encourage diversity; and voucher programs allot parents a credit redeemable against tuition at the school of their choice. Both these programs assume that the risk of losing students will force underachieving schools to improve.
Other measures focus on how schools are financed. Many states have assumed an increased share of education costs from their municipalities to help equalize school funding, especially in states where courts have ordered a shift away from property taxes as the primary method of school support.
The United States’ progress in overcoming the many legacies of racism is reducing de facto segregation, and Americans continue to apply creative strategies to eradicate this unfortunate legacy. Today, U.S. schools welcome young people of ever more diverse origins and backgrounds, and seek to educate them all.
The full text of Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson on the FindLaw Web site.
For additional information, see the U.S. Constitution, Federalism & Democracy, The Civil War and Reconstruction, Amendments to the Constitution and Gateway to African-American History .
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
