Brown v. Board of Education

Civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph fought for equal rights for African Americans long before the mid-1900s. But it is the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s that are viewed as the events that changed the landscape regarding race and racial discrimination in the United States. In addition, while the lawyers and activists who fought for Brown viewed themselves as dissenters, the decision sparked formidable dissent and activism against the decision itself. The Brown decision overturned an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court ruled by a vote of 7–1 that railroad companies that had separate cars for Black people and White people were within their rights as long as the railroad cars had equal facilities. While the Court acknowledged the Fourteenth Amendment, it ruled that “it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Thus, the law of the land for 58 years was referred to as “separate but equal” and was used to justify separate schools for Black and White children.

The Brown decision was the most powerful judicial act of educational reform in the United States that addressed race, and it was decided in two segments: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruled school segregation unconstitutional, and Brown II (1955) provided the law for implementing the decision. The Brown case was actually the combination of several appeals; besides Brown in Kansas, there was also Briggs v. Elliot in South Carolina, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in Virginia, Bolling v. Sharpe in the District of Columbia, and Gebhart v. Belton in Delaware. All of these cases were heard together as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first decision, which came on May 17, 1954, stated that separate education was unequal and that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In the words of the Court:

In reality, there was much work leading up to the Supreme Court ruling, and a great deal of conflict following the decision. The cases were brought [Page 116]to the Court by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an integrationist organization that was founded in 1909 by Black people and White people who were dedicated to fighting against racial discrimination in the United States. One of the organization's leaders, and long-time editor of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, was W. E. B. Du Bois, known academically for, among many other accomplishments, the book Souls of Black Folk. The NAACP legal counsel, led by Charles Houston, future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and future federal judge Robert Carter, decided to appeal a group of varied decisions and relied strongly on the psychological doll studies that were conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, mostly in South Carolina, to argue that school segregation based on race or color caused psychological damage to Black children.

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