BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 47 S.
Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, was the most significant of
a series of judicial decisions overturning segre-
gation laws—laws that separate whites and
blacks. Reversing its 1896 decision in PLESSY V.
FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed.
256, which established the “separate-but-equal”
doctrine that found racial segregation to be con-
stitutional, the Court unanimously decided in
Brown that laws separating children by race in
different schools violated the EQUAL PROTEC-
TION CLAUSE of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,
which provides that “[n]o state shall . . . deny to
any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.”
In making its decision, the Court declared that
“separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.”Moreover, the Court found that segre-
gated schools promote in African American
children a harmful and irreparable sense of infe-
riority that damages not only their lives but the
welfare of U.S. society as a whole.
The principle expressed in Brown was used
in later decisions of the Supreme Court and
lower federal courts to reverse segregation in
other fields as well. By the end of the 1960s, laws
that had required racial segregation in buses,
trains, bathrooms, and other public places had
been overturned, as had many other laws that
obstructed the rights of African Americans.
Brown thus served as a milestone in the struggle
of African Americans to gain equal CIVIL
RIGHTS in U.S. society. It also symbolized the
judicial activism of the Supreme Court under
Chief Justice EARL WARREN, who would go on to
lead the Court until 1969 in a remarkable era of
change with regard to civil rights.
Brown was actually the culmination of a
decades-long struggle by both African Ameri-
cans and sympathetic whites against segregation
and other discriminatory laws. Though it is a
given in the early 2000s that persons of all races
should enjoy equality under the law in the
United States, that has not been the case for
most of the country’s history. Even after the
Civil War had ended and the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Amendments had outlawed SLAVERY
and guaranteed the civil rights of “all persons
born or naturalized in the United States” (U.S.
Const. amend. XIV), southern states and locali-
ties established the racially discriminatory Jim
Crow laws—also known as the Black Codes—to
keep African Americans from enjoying legal
equality with whites. The term Jim Crow derives
from a popular minstrel song of the nineteenth
century. These laws made it difficult or impossi-
ble for African Americans to vote,made it illegal
for them to use the same public facilities as
whites, restricted their travel, forbade interracial
marriage, and otherwise attempted to keep
African Americans in a state of dependence and
inferiority with regard to whites. Most of these
laws were passed after the Reconstruction
period following the Civil War, when the mili-
tary occupation of the South had ended and the
radical wing of the REPUBLICAN PARTY, which
under President ABRAHAM LINCOLN had been
instrumental in dismantling slavery, had
declined in power. By the mid-1870s, southern
whites were again in political control of their
region, and many quickly sought to return
blacks to a position of legal inferiority through
passage of discriminatory laws.
In 1896 the legal standing of the JIM CROW
LAWS was strengthened when, in Plessy v. Fergu-
son, the Supreme Court upheld the constitu-
tionality of a Louisiana statute requiring blacks
and whites to occupy separate railway cars. The
law in question, according to the Court, was not
a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities
provided for each race were separate but equal.
Moreover, the Court voiced its disagreement
with attempts to challenge segregation laws and
with the ideas critics of segregation used to sup-
142 BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS
port those challenges. For example, in its opin-
ion, the Court considered it a “fallacy” that “the
enforced separation of the two races stamps the
colored race with a badge of inferiority,” and it
scoffed at the notion that “social prejudices may
be overcome by legislation.” Ironically, the Court
reinforced its decision to uphold the legality of
segregation on rail cars by noting the existence
of laws “requiring separate schools for colored
children.” The Plessy decision and its SEPARATE-
BUT-EQUAL doctrine were later used to uphold
segregation in public schools and other public
facilities.
African Americans and others who sympa-
thized with their cause were bitterly disap-
pointed by the Plessy decision. Over a decade
later, in 1909, some blacks and whites joined
together to form the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
which would eventually coordinate a successful
legal challenge to the Plessy ruling. The NAACP
brought together people of all races in an effort
to improve the situation of people of color.
Although the NAACP achieved some victories in
the fight against Jim Crow laws in the first two
decades of its existence, it was not until 1935 that
the organization began actively to mount a cam-
paign against segregation in schools. It did so
assisted by legal counsels CHARLES HOUSTON and
WILLIAM H. HASTIE, and a young assistant, THUR-
GOOD MARSHALL, who would go on to be a mem-
ber of the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.
By 1939, Marshall had become head of the
NAACP legal branch, the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund, and by the early 1950s, he and his organi-
zation had argued and secured significant legal
victories before the Supreme Court that helped
set the stage for Brown. In Sweatt v. Painter, 339
U.S. 629, 70 S. Ct. 848, 94 L. Ed. 1114 (1950), the
Court sided with the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund when it ruled that a separate law school for
blacks in Texas could not provide an education
equal to that available to whites at the more
established University of Texas Law School. And
in another case brought by Marshall’s organiza-
tion, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339
U.S. 637, 70 S. Ct. 851, 94 L. Ed. 1149 (1950), the
Court ruled that separate library and lecture hall
seats for a single black graduate student were a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. How-
ever, neither case addressed the separate-but-
equal doctrine of Plessy.
In 1952 Marshall and the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund brought two more significant cases
to the Supreme Court: Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S.
497, 74 S. Ct. 693, 98 L. Ed. 884 (1954), which
dealt with racial segregation of schools in the
District of Columbia, and Brown, which was
actually a consolidation of four CLASS ACTION
suits (suits brought to court on behalf of a group
of people) from federal district courts in
Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund brought the
cases to court on behalf of African American
children who were refused admission to schools
attended by white children as a result of laws
allowing or requiring racial segregation in
schools. The plaintiff named in the case, Oliver
Brown, had a daughter, Linda Brown, who had
been denied admission to an all-white elementary
school in Topeka, Kansas, because she was black.
In all but the Delaware case, a three-judge federal
district court had decided against the African
American children and in favor of the school
districts, citing as precedent the Plessy separate-
but-equal doctrine. In the Delaware case, the
state supreme court also upheld this doctrine but
ordered that black children be sent to superior
white schools until schools provided for blacks
could be improved to an equal condition.
Brown was argued before the Court in 1952 and reargued in 1953. Marshall, in making his statement before the Court, argued that the
statutes in question in this case were equivalent
to the BLACK CODES. He pointed out the contradictions
in allowing blacks and whites to vote in
the same places and attend the same COLLEGES
AND UNIVERSITIES, but not allowing black and
white children to attend the same elementary
schools. He also maintained that a decision in
favor of segregation would effectively be a decision
to keep African Americans as near as possible
to their former state of slavery. According to
Marshall, such a decision would be equivalent to
saying that “Negroes are inferior to all other
human beings.”
JOHN W. DAVIS, who was legal counsel for the
state of South Carolina, argued in his closing
remarks that the state had honored Plessy’s separate-
but-equal doctrine through large investments
in schools for black students. He claimed
that the state had the intention of creating a condition of equality for children of all races
and that “the happiness, the progress and the
welfare of these children is best promoted in
segregated schools.” He also maintained that it
was not within the jurisdiction of the U.S.
Supreme Court to decide how the state of South
Carolina conducted its school system. He told
the Court:
Your Honors do not sit, and cannot sit as a
glorified Board of Education for the State of
South Carolina or any other state. . . .
…Neither this Court nor any other court
. . . can sit in the chairs of the legislature of
South Carolina and mold its educational system,
and if it is found to be in its present
form unacceptable, the State of South Carolina
must devise the alternative.
On the same day that the Court handed
down its decision in Brown, it decided the
related case of Bolling. Applying the same principles
that it had used in Brown, the Court ruled
in Bolling that racial segregation of schoolchildren
in the District of Columbia was unconstitutional.
In the following year, the Supreme Court on
reargument made another decision in Brown
that was designed to establish the methodology
by which to enforce desegregation of public
schools. Brown II, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99
L. Ed. 1083 (1955), as it has come to be called,
determined that school authorities had the principal
responsibility for evaluating and solving
local educational problems, including those
resulting from segregation. The Court decided
to remand (send back) the individual cases in
Brown to lower courts in order that those courts
might better assess the efforts of school authorities
to desegregate the public schools and
thereby provide to African American children
their equal protection under the laws as promised
by the Fourteenth Amendment. The lower
courts were directed to take into account any
problems concerning school administration,
facilities, transportation, and personnel, and to
consider any revision of local laws necessary to
resolve the problems and achieve desegregation.
Brown v. Board of Education dealt only with
government-mandated or government-authorized
segregation. It did not apply to racial segregation
or discrimination related to restaurants,
theaters, employment, country clubs, or other
parts of the private sector. However, Brown fostered
changes in the legal and moral outlook of
the country that greatly aided future efforts to
end RACIAL DISCRIMINATION as related to
employment, housing, and places of public
accommodation, and thus greatly affected U.S.
race relations.
Despite the promise of Brown, desegregation
of U.S. schools proceeded slowly. In the years
immediately following the decision, many
southern school districts resisted or delayed
implementation of its desegregation requirements,
thereby forcing the Supreme Court and
other lower courts to oversee and supervise
school administrative functions in many localities.
As time went on and southern schools
became more integrated, the Court shifted its
focus to school districts all over the country,
particularly those in cities. In the second half of
the twentieth century, many African Americans
moved from rural to urban areas, often in the
northern states. School districts in many of
those urban areas became separated into suburban
white districts and urban black districts. In
response to this challenge, courts imposed busing
requirements during the 1970s: in the interest
of creating more racially balanced schools,
children were bused to different schools that
were sometimes far from their home neighborhoods.
In many cities, busing became highly
controversial.

By the late 1980s, legal battles surrounding
the legacy of the Brown decision changed when
some school districts began to request that they
be released from the court supervision of their
operations that had been required by Brown.
Accordingly, the Supreme Court began to focus on the issue of when a court order to desegregate
a school district should be dissolved and autonomy
returned to the local school officials and
community. In Board of Education v. Dowell, 498
U.S. 237, 111 S. Ct. 630, 112 L. Ed. 2d 715 (1991),
which dealt with a court-imposed desegregation
plan in Oklahoma City, the Court ruled that a
court-ordered desegregation decree may be dissolved
when a school district shows that it has
taken all “practicable” steps to end a stateimposed
dual school system and demonstrates
that it is unlikely to revert to its former ways.
The ability to dissolve a court-ordered desegregation
plan, the Court’s opinion stated, would
enable a school district that had attempted to
achieve the goal of desegregation to avoid “judicial
tutelage for the indefinite future.”
Justice Marshall, now near the end of his
career on the Court, dissented from the majority
opinion in Dowell. He argued that, given the
long history of segregation, it was too early to
leave the Oklahoma City school district to its
own devices. Though he agreed that perpetual
federal judicial supervision of local schools had
never been envisioned by the Court, he feared
that the Court’s decision in this case would simply
perpetuate an already unsatisfactory standard
of INTEGRATION in the Oklahoma City
school district and in other school districts.
In another case, Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S.
467, 112 S. Ct. 1430, 118 L. Ed. 2d 108 (1992),
the Supreme Court held that district courts may
relinquish supervision and control of school
districts in incremental stages, before full compliance
has been achieved in every facet of
school operations. The Court also ruled that
once a school district corrects any racial imbalance
that violates the Equal Protection Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment, the district has no
obligation to remedy a later imbalance caused
by population shifts.
As these cases indicate, the issue of desegregation
of public schools remained a vital public
issue even several decades after the Supreme
Court’s decision in Brown. As a means of both
training and socialization, education is still a
necessity for U.S. society as a whole and for any
individual in particular, and it is expected to
remain so in the future. Guided by Brown, the
U.S. judicial system has decisively concluded
that the constitutional provision of equal protection
under the laws guarantees that children
be entitled to an equal, not a separate, public
education.
FURTHER READINGS
Balkin, Jack M., and Bruce Ackerman, et al., eds., 2001. What
Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The
Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark
Civil Rights Decision. New York: New York Univ. Press.
Hunt, James L. 2001. “Brown v. Board of Education After Fifty
Years: Context and Synopsis.” Mercer Law Review 52
(winter).
Irons, Peter H. 2002. Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken
Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking.
Klein, Dora W. 2002. “Beyond Brown v. Board of Education:
The Need to Remedy the Achievement Gap.” The Journal
of Law and Education 31 (October).
Kluger, Richard. 1975. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v.
Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for
Equality. New York: Knopf.
Levine, Ellen, ed. 1994. Freedom’s Children. New York: Avon
Flare.
Miller, LaMar P., ed. 1986. Brown Plus Thirty: Perspective on
Desegregation. New York: Metropolitan Center for Educational
Research, New York Univ. Press.
Patterson, James T. 2001. Brown v. Board of Education: A
Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York:
Oxford Univ. Press.
Pollack, Jack. 1979. Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed
America. Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Weinburg,Meyer. 1967. Race and Place: A Legal History of the
Neighborhood School. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of
Health, Education, and Welfare.
Whitman, Mark, ed. 1993. Removing a Badge of Slavery: The
Record of Brown v. Board of Education. Princeton, N.J.:
Wiener.
Wilkinson, J. Harvie III. 1979. From Brown to Bakke: The
Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New
York: Oxford Univ. Press.
CROSS-REFERENCES
“Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” (Appendix,
Primary Document); Civil Rights; Discrimination;
Equal Protection; Jim Crow Laws; Marshall, Thurgood;
NAACP; Republican Party; School Desegregation; Warren,
Earl; Warren Court.

Oliver Brown and the NAACP

As the man whose name appeared in the title of
perhaps the most influential U.S. Supreme
Court decision ever, Brown v. Board of Education, 347
U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), Oliver
Brown was an unlikely hero for the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT. The African American welder, war veteran,
and assistant pastor was a quiet, upstanding
citizen of Topeka, Kansas, who had never been
known to publicly oppose discrimination against his
race. However, he took a decisive stand against
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION when he joined one dozen
other African American parents in filing suit for the
right of their children to attend the elementary
schools of Topeka alongside white children.
Brown’s participation in the lawsuit was encouraged
by the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), which provided
necessary legal expertise and organization for the
case. Long familiar with the practice of school SEGREGATION
in Topeka and many other school districts,
NAACP lawyers approached Brown and other parents
in the summer of 1950 to see if they would join
them in a case that challenged that practice.
It was precisely Oliver Brown’s modest qualities
that made the NAACP choose him as a plaintiff. His
reputation for integrity could help mute criticism in a
controversial case that stirred up angry emotions in
both the white and black communities of Topeka. The
city’s white majority was largely content to remain
with a school system that maintained eighteen allwhite
elementary schools and four all-black elementary
schools. African Americans, meanwhile, feared
the case would cause the white community to attack
what few CIVIL RIGHTS they already possessed. Others
could not become involved in such a controversy
without the fear of losing their jobs with white
employers. For that reason, very few African Americans
in Topeka actually belonged to the NAACP.
Like many other African American parents,
Brown was upset that his daughter had to travel a
long distance to an all-black school when an allwhite
school was located much nearer their home.
He also could not help but notice that the all-white
schools were in better repair than the all-black
schools. Brown agreed to join in the NAACP’s case,
and in September 1950, he tried unsuccessfully to
register one of his three daughters, Linda Brown, in
an all-white school only seven blocks from their
house. When the case first came to the U.S. District
Court for Kansas in June 1951, Brown testified that
his daughter had to travel twenty-one blocks to an
all-black school, part of the way through a dangerous
railroad switching yard.
In the end, African Americans did not seek to end
the system of segregation in public schools merely to
have their children travel fewer miles to class or sit in
nicer buildings. At stake were much more important
issues that affected their status in U.S. society. As
expressed by NAACP attorneys in later testimony
before the Supreme Court, African Americans had
come to see segregated schools as inherently
unequal. These schools relegated African Americans
to an inferior class, instilled feelings of insecurity,
diminished their opportunities, and retarded their
mental development. The victory eventually achieved
in Brown would go a long way toward eliminating
those harmful effects of segregation and guaranteeing
African Americans their full constitutional rights.