Segregation, De Jure

Court-Supported Segregation

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), its first case directly on this point, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld de jure segregation as long as facilities for Whites and Blacks were “separate but equal.” Three years later, the Court extended de jure segregation that was not equal in Cumming v. County Board of Education of Richmond County (1899), wherein the justices allowed a school board to close a Black high school while maintaining high schools for Whites. The Court explicitly applied “separate but equal” to K-12 education in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927) when it concluded that school officials could deny a child of Chinese extraction access to a school for Whites. De jure segregation was the rule in the South during the Jim Crow era, not only in schools but in all areas of life.

The Supreme Court began to change its course with regard to de jure segregation in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). In Gaines, the Court ruled that because graduate and professional schools for Blacks could not be both separate and equal, both Blacks and Whites had to be admitted to the same programs. Even so, de jure segregation continued in elementary and secondary schools in the South and six border states as merely one part of a vast and elaborate superstructure that was the segregated South. Subsequently, the success that the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund had in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), wherein the justices struck down inter- and intrainstitution segregation, respectively, in higher education, led Thurgood Marshall and others in the organizations he worked with to believe that the Court would uphold the rights of Blacks to attend desegregated K-12 public schools.

The Impact of Brown

In 1954, the Supreme Court's landmark judgment in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in striking down segregation in public schools based on race, declared “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (p. 495). A year later, in a follow-up case, Brown II, the justices directed lower federal courts to proceed in dismantling segregated, or dual, school systems “with all deliberate speed” (p. 301).

Yet, a decade after Brown, only a small fraction of schools in border states and the South had complied with the Court's order, signaling that the battle to end segregated schools would rage on for years. As evidence of ongoing disputes with regard to school segregation, the Department of Justice's fiscal year 2008 performance budget for its Civil Rights Division shows that about 308 school systems continue to operate under desegregation orders nationwide (p. 22).

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