School Desegregation

Though segregation existed in practice prior to the Civil War, state governments during Reconstruction passed a series of black codes, commonly referred to as Jim Crow laws, to enforce segregation and disenfranchise people of color throughout the United States. The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of these laws and provided an overarching justification of segregation based on race in the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which stated that segregation by race was constitutional as long as the separate facilities were equal. The state and federal courts used the Plessy decision to justify segregation based on race as constitutional. The history and process of desegregation hinged upon the effort to overturn the decision in its theoretical manifestations, and more important, to enforce the order to desegregate institutions throughout the country.

A series of court cases in the early half of the 20th century provided the precedent for overturning Plessy. Charles Hamilton Houston and a notable team of lawyers, primarily educated at Howard University, eventually established the legal strategy for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This strategy relied on a series of court cases that posed a legal challenge to the “equal” portion of the “separate but equal” edict that had emerged from Plessy. In Missouri v. Gaines (1938), the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Missouri must provide African American law students with educational facilities equal to those offered to white students. Some states used the Gaines decision as legal justification for equalization plans across the country in which white legislators attempted to equalize the facilities and resources of segregated black schools and salaries of segregated black teachers. Often, states used this as justification to equalize segregated systems rather than desegregate. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas failed to provide equal law facilities and therefore ordered the white law school to admit students of color. In an important precedent, the Ninth Federal District Court of Appeals ruled in Mendez v. Westminster (1947) that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American children in California's system of education was unconstitutional. Then California Governor Earl Warren, who later served as the chief justice in the monumental Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, repealed all laws requiring segregation within the state of California. These court cases, among many other similar cases, composed the legal background, history, and precedent for the decision that ultimately ruled that segregation was unconstitutional.

School desegregation popularly began with the passage of Brown v. Board of Education. The Brown case extended and built upon the precedent established in previous cases that attacked the “equal” portion of “separate but equal.” Using evidence from five cases and the first use of social scientific evidence based on Kenneth Clark's “doll test,” which illustrated feelings of inferiority among African American children, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense team argued that separate education was inherently unequal. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation based on race was unconstitutional. The decision argued that segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision effectively overturned the Plessy decision. Thus, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that undergirded the Jim Crow legal and social codes that had dictated strict segregation in the southern states since Reconstruction and the latter part of the 19th century. At the time of the Brown decision, 17 states required segregation and another four states permitted varying degrees of segregation.

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