Brown V. Board of Education, Brown II Decision

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education decision (Brown I) that separate schools for White and Black children were inherently unequal. This landmark court decision, interpreting the equal protection of the laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, called for the end of racial discrimination in education; however, the means to achieve the integration of schools were not specified. The Supreme Court decided in 1955 to solicit arguments from the Attorney General of the United States and the Attorneys General of all states requiring or permitting racial discrimination in public education. The parties presented their views on the question of how they might implement the decree and included, in addition to the U.S. Attorney General, the states of Arkansas, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas.

According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who issued the opinion for the Court, the presentations from the states were informative and helpful as the Court ascertained the complexities that would arise during the transition to an educational system free of racial discrimination. The Court believed that the implementation of the Brown I decision would require a variety of strategies depending on the local school district and that decisions as to how well a district complied with the original order should be remanded to the local courts for judicial appraisal.

In Brown II, its 1955 decision to delegate the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts so that desegregation could occur with all deliberate speed, the Supreme Court set an ambiguous standard by which states and school districts could engage in endless delaying tactics. Indeed, many states and school districts interpreted this decision as legal justification for delaying, resisting, and avoiding school integration for many years.

In the case of Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five original cases that constituted the 1954 Brown decision, the school district failed to move on the original order. In 1959, when another court case ruled that the county's schools had to desegregate, the county board of supervisors stopped providing funding for the public schools and as a result Prince Edward County schools were closed for 5 years. Although Black children had no schooling options in the county, the county provided assistance for Whites to attend White-only private academies where their former public school teachers were teaching.

A related event during the initial Brown decision was that President Dwight Eisenhower wrote a longtime friend, Navy Captain Swede Hazlett in the fall of 1954 mentioning that he thought the issue of segregation would either intensify or lessen depending on the Brown II ruling that, he assumed, would be very moderate and ultimately relegated to the local courts. Eisenhower believed that the overwhelming sentiment toward state's rights would mitigate any aggressive attempt to enforce the Brown I decision. Thus, on one level he could be heralded on the international scene as presiding over a nation that had stood up for the rights of its Black citizens while remaining a friend of Southern constituents (or at least giving them a way to remain entrenched in their segregated school policies). It has been noted that Eisenhower was not happy about the 1954 decision, but felt duty-bound to accept it as the law of the land, having sworn to uphold the constitutional process. Further, liberals and conservatives alike contested the all-deliberate-speed language of Brown II. Those who defended the Warren court argued that they had no choice but to move slowly and cautiously so that schools might be permitted to work out the practical problems of redistricting, reassigning teachers and students, and constructing new bus routes. They also argued both then and later that great social changes take place gradually and that the Court was being realistic by applying the all-deliberate-speed standard. The empirical evidence suggests that all deliberate speed resulted in little or no change in school desegregation. In most instances school desegregation proceeded only when the court intervened in specific districts.

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