Brown v. Board of Education

The Meaning of Brown v. Board of Education

      The landmark Brown case, which overturned legal segregation and reversed Plessy v. Ferguson, was the result of long preparation and meticulous research. The original case was filed in 1951 on behalf of the Reverend Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, whose daughter, Linda, was forced to attend a black elementary school 21 blocks from her home rather than the white school only 7 blocks away. The local trial court ruled against Brown and 13 other black parents recruited by the NAACP on the grounds that the segregated schools were of comparable quality. Marshall and the NAACP recognized theBrown case provided the right set of circumstances upon which to base an appeal by asserting that segregated schools were, by definition and law, unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

      By the time the Brown v. Board of Education case reached the Supreme Court,  it had been consolidated with similar cases from three other states and the District of Columbia. In keeping with the strategy that Marshall and Houston had hammered out years earlier, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund did not rely solely on legal arguments but produced voluminous social-science evidence to document the searing damage that segregation caused minority children.

      "We worked with law professors and practitioners, social psychologists, and historians," recalled Jack Greenberg, a young lawyer who worked with Marshall on the Brown case and now a law professor at Columbia University. "Marshall was like the orchestra conductor who brought everyone together and focused them into a single melody."

      The Supreme Court concluded oral arguments in December 1953 with Marshall's incisive and eloquent summation. The question, Marshall said, was "whether or not the wishes of these [segregationist states] shall prevail or whether our Constitution shall prevail."

      On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "We conclude 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." A year later, the Court stipulated that the Brown decision should be implemented "with all deliberate speed."

      Despite Marshall's triumph, the Brown decision hardly meant the immediate desegregation of America's schools, especially in the South, which engaged in a campaign of "massive resistance" to school integration that dragged on in some areas for more than a decade.

      The first critical test of whether the Court's decision in Brown would prevail over state defiance of the federal government came in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the enrollment of black students in previously all-white Little Rock High School. Marshall immediately flew to Little Rock and won a federal suit demanding the immediate integration of the high school.

      President Dwight Eisenhower responded by sending in 1,200 troops of the 101st Airborne Division and asserting federal control over the local National Guard – ensuring that the African American students who became known as the Little Rock Nine could attend school.

      "The real significance isn't that the Little Rock case produced integration," said noted civil rights historian Taylor Branch. "The real significance of Little Rock is that it showed that state politicians couldn't ultimately defy federal courts. If the president hadn't sent troops in, the Constitution would have become whatever each governor wanted it to be."

      Brown v. Board of Education may not have eliminated de facto segregation of America's schools, but it marked the beginning of the new era in American history to confront racial discrimination and seek to make the Constitution's promise of equality for all in society and before the law a reality.

      No one was more responsible for this shift than Thurgood Marshall. As biographer Juan Williams has written, "The key to Marshall's work was his conviction that integration – and only integration – would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once individual rights were accepted, in Marshall's mind, then blacks and whites could rise or fall based on their own ability."