Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was an extremely important court ruling aimed at the dismantling of legal segregation and discrimination in the United States. Indeed, in this 1954 ruling, a unanimous Supreme Court, under chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had legalized segregation. The ruling provided hope that discrimination against blacks was finally coming to an end.

This discrimination has a long history. After the Civil War, Reconstruction substantially improved the conditions of blacks, economically and politically, in the Southern states. For example, blacks served in legislatures of Southern states and even served as senators in the U.S. Congress. This progress, however, quickly dissipated as the North abdicated responsibility and the South reverted to conditions that in cases were worse than the conditions blacks experienced prior to the Civil War. During this period, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist societies, the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, and legislation that disenfranchised and denied blacks access to education and public facilities, all created conditions of extreme terror for blacks in the South. This culminated in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, in which the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that upheld segregation as long as the separate facilities available to the races were equal. For all practical purposes, very little attention was paid to the “equal” part of this ruling, while great emphasis was placed on the “separate” part.

Beginning in the 1930s, several efforts were made to chip away at the Plessy ruling, most of which were attempts to force states to provide equal facilities to blacks. However, the legality or the morality of separation was never questioned. With the onset of World War II, the challenge to legal segregation began to build momentum. Several executive orders by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and President Harry Truman eliminated segregation in the armed forces and related agencies. The Brown v. Board of Education decision is considered the culmination of these efforts.

Thurgood Marshall served as the principle lawyer of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) defense fund that argued the case in front of the Supreme Court. Aided by notable lawyers such as James M. Nabrit, Jr., Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, and William T. Coleman, Jr., and assisted by the pioneering research of psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, the Court asserted that separate schools could not be equal because [Page 172]segregating children on the basis of race “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

It is argued, however, that the Brown decision alone had little impact on ending segregation, for it failed to define what constitutes segregation and to provide a timeline for dismantling it. Although the Brown decision is important and symbolic, the 1964 Civil Rights Act of the Johnson Administration, which barred discrimination in all schools and other institutions receiving federal funding, is believed to have played a more significant legal role in ending segregation.

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