Brown versus Board of Education
The Supreme Court has judged many landmark cases in its over 200 years history but the one which springs to mind and which perhaps is the most far reaching is the famous 1954 case and decision Brown vs Board of Education where it ruled that segregation in schooling was unconstitutional. This decision obviously gave way to a wave of protests across the South where blacks began clamouring for their rights and the whole Civil Rights movement took fire. It is indeed a landmark case as initially it appeared pretty straightforward and nondescript but the end result was to have a cataclysmic effect on the United States as whole.
The case:
The case was filed in 1951 by thirteen parents from Topeka, Kansasa who argued that the system of segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The parents asked the court to reverse an 1879 law which allowed certain districts to maintain what were deemed as ‘’separate but equal’ facilities for black and white children when the reality was far from the truth. The case received national attention and was supported by the local NAACP. An interesting aside to the case was that one black child was forced to attend the coloured school which was over 1.6 km from her house while the white school was just seven blocks away, a clear case of injustice and impracticality.
There were other cases which were heard alongside the Brown case in the Supreme Cort and these included Briggs vs Eliot in South Carolina, Davis vs County Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia) Gebhart vs Belton (Delaware) and Volling vs Sharpe (Washington DC). All the cases had been lost in state courts so they were petitioned before the Supreme Court.
The case was argued for the plaintiffs by the distinguished attorney Thurgood Marshall who later became himself a judge of the US Supreme Court in 1967. Intriguingly there were judgements in court which found the doctrine of separate but equal to be lawful although in the Delaware case, the court actually ruled that segregation caused harm and was essentially immoral.
An excerpt from the court’s eventual decision makes for stirring reading:
“Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group”.
The words ‘we believe it does’ are strong and very clear as is the statement that the impact of segregation is largely harmful to coloured children and that is clear enough anyway as we have seen over several years and decades. Intriguingly the court decision was unanimous although Justice Robert Jackson held openly segregationist views and his clerk was William Rehnquist who would eventually become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and who argued extensively in favour of the Plessey vs Ferguson ruling in his notes to Jackson on the Brown case.
Interestingly there were several instances where the ruling of the Supreme Court was not accepted and several senators who hailed from the Deep South went in open defiance of the court’s decision. The most infamous was Senator Harry byrd’s ‘Massive Resistance’ campaign which called for the blocking of the integration decision. Other senators with openly racist views such as Olin Johnston, Richard Russel and John Stennis campaigned heavily for the decision to be overruled although they were perhaps less vocal and more diplomatic than others. The Supreme Court decision in Brown led to the opening of the floodgates regarding racial discrimination cases and unfortunately this also led to instances of violence especially with regard to states where lynching had been commonplace such as Mississippi and Alabama. The Emmett Till murder in 1955 set the stage for a brutal civil rights campaign which also looked forward even when the 1957 Little Rock case showed that it was extremely difficult to implement the Brown decision if local authorities and populations stubbornly resisted it.
References:
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)". FindLaw. Retrieved 2008-02-04.
Brown v Board of Education Decision ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
Toward a World without Evil: Alfred Métraux as UNESCO Anthropologist (1946–1962)”, by Harald E.L. Prins, UNESCO (English)
"Desegregation to diversity?". American Psychological Association. 2004. Retrieved 2008-05-15.
Kluger, Richard (1975). Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-47289-6
Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row
Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. (2004). All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05897-2
