The NAACP Legal Defense Fund recruited Linda’s father, Oliver, to participate in a unified school segregation case headed for the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, pictured here, was one of the lead attorneys on the subject.
Legal Segregation in the United States
Many are still confused about what is Brown vs Board of Education. It’s essential to understand how greatly it affected history. The Brown decision was a landmark in US history. It was a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement and ended legal segregation. As a child, Linda Carol Brown and her younger sister Terry Lynn often had to walk along railroad tracks to school. Their path was long and arduous, but it was a journey that ultimately led to the most important civil rights case in American history – Brown vs Board of Education.
When the Supreme Court decided Brown, it ruled that laws that separate children by race in public schools are unconstitutional. This landmark decision overturned the 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, opening the door to school desegregation.
After the Civil War, states began passing laws that promoted segregation. In 1896, the Supreme Court established its doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy vs. Ferguson, which upheld Louisiana’s law mandating separate accommodations for black and white passengers in railway cars. Despite laws that made it illegal to deprive Blacks of their rights, many local officials and Vigilantes enforced Jim Crow policies involving everything from banking (separate banks), medicine (different hospitals), and even the legal system (separate trials and witness stands in courtrooms).
In the 1930s, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began working to integrate schools through the courts. The NAACP’s lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston, argued in Brown vs. Board of Education that keeping black and white students separated in schools violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The story of Brown vs. Board of Education is far more complicated than a little girl’s struggle to attend school only blocks from her house in a town where the laws still allow segregation. But it was the first step in a long journey toward justice and equality that continues today. The historic Brown decision and the events that led to it remind us of our country’s shared history of hope, despair, and determination.
Brown vs. Plessy vs. Ferguson
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation could be justified as a “reasonable exercise of legislative authority.” The Court upheld state laws mandating separate but equal railroad cars and other accommodations for whites and Blacks. Segregation became ensconced in the South through a battery of laws and social customs known as Jim Crow. Schools, theaters, restaurants, and other public places were segregated; poll taxes, literacy requirements, and grandfather clauses prevented many Black voters from casting their ballots.
In 1950, the NAACP helped families in Topeka, Kansas, organize to challenge their local school board’s decision not to let their children enroll in white schools. They chose Oliver Brown as the lead plaintiff in the case, known as Brown vs. Board of Education.
While Brown has become one of the Warren Court’s most famous decisions, it was not without controversy. Even today, some believe that the ruling went too far or was based on faulty legal logic. Supporters of judicial restraint worried that the Court overstepped its constitutional authority by writing new law. Other critics believed that the Court relied too heavily on social science research and did not consider current-day attitudes or thoughts when making its decision. Despite the dissenting opinions, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion became the law of the land and has remained so.
The Court’s Decision
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown was a monumental victory for the civil rights movement. It held that segregation was unconstitutional and that schools must integrate. However, it did not set a specific deadline for combining schools, and many pro-segregation states defied the ruling. Attorney Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black Supreme Court Justice, argued the case on behalf of the NAACP and the Brown family. He and his colleagues successfully argued that keeping students separate violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court agreed and ordered that schools in the five cases before it be desegregated.
The cases that were heard together included the Brown case from Topeka, Briggs v. Elliott from South Carolina, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County from Virginia, and Gebhart v. Belton from Delaware. The fact that the Court chose to hear these cases collectively sent a clear message that school segregation was a national problem, not just a Southern one.
The Court ruled in the majority opinion written by Justice Earl Warren that state-sanctioned racial segregation of public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It rejected the argument that Congress had intended to allow racial segregation when it enacted the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s. Justice John Marshall Harlan, who had voted against the Plessy decision in 1896, was the sole dissenter in this case. His searing dissent was a full-fledged rebuke of Plessy and helped shape Brown’s majority opinion.
The Southern Response
In the years after Brown, many state and local school boards resisted school desegregation. Some even ignored the Court’s decision. The backlash against the Court’s verdict reached the highest levels of government in 1956, when 82 representatives and 19 senators endorsed a so-called Southern Manifesto, calling for “all lawful means” to resist “chaos and confusion” caused by school desegregation.
Despite this, a few school districts began adopting policies allowing Black children to attend integrated schools. However, these measures were not widely implemented. The desegregation struggle continued for another decade, and by 1964, only about 3% of all Black children in the South attended racially integrated schools.
The backlash against Brown encouraged racist politicians to avoid implementing it, and it also gave rise to the nascent civil rights movement, which doggedly challenged segregation by using boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives to pressure state and federal authorities to end legal segregation. Civil Rights leaders anticipated the violent reactions from Southern officials like Commissioner Bull Connor and encouraged protestors to remain peaceful.
Some scholars argue that Brown was not a direct catalyst for ending legal segregation in the 1960s, but they all agree that it played an important role. This is because connecting violence to the legal segregation system made it more difficult for die-hard segregationists to justify their actions.
