Desegregation/Integration

Pre-Brown Litigation

Almost 60 years prior to Brown, the pernicious concept of “separate but equal” entered the national legal consciousness in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case from Louisiana wherein the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8–1 judgment, upheld racial discrimination in public railway accommodations. The sole dissent of Justice John M. Harlan later served as a partial basis for the opinion in Brown. Even so, the concept traces its origins to an earlier case in which the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld “separate but equal” in denying an African American student the opportunity to attend a school for White children that was closer to her home than the school that she was assigned to attend (Roberts v. City of Boston, 1850). The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly extended “separate but equal” to K–12 education in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), a dispute from Mississippi in which it permitted officials to exclude a student of Chinese descent from a public school for White children.

By the time Brown reached the U.S. Supreme Court, proponents of equal educational opportunities had begun making judicial headway in the fight against racial segregation. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), the Court repudiated interinstitution and intrainstitution segregation, respectively, in higher education. In both of these cases, the Court emphasized the importance of “intangible factors” in connection with equal educational opportunities. Still, the Court did not focus on purely psychological considerations until Brown. Relying in part on the precedent set in these cases, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, led by its chief counsel and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, challenged racial segregation in K–12 schools.