Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark Supreme Court case that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, 169 U.S. 537 (1896), ruling that blacks and whites be allowed to attend the same public schools. The decision was a major blow to the system of southern de jure segregation, which required by law that blacks and whites be separated in all areas of public facilities, such as waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, buses and trains, drinking fountains, and even cemeteries.

Racial segregation in public schools was especially problematic because it was clear that schools for white children and schools for black children were not equal and could not be made equal if they were to retain racial separation. The average amount spent by southern cities for each black pupil was usually less than half that spent on each white pupil. In many parts of the South, black children were forced to travel long distances to attend schools lacking basic facilities and qualified teachers. Some rural schools provided instruction for only 3 months out of the year; others provided no high school for black children. Even in urban areas of the South, schools were overcrowded and lacked the amenities of whites-only schools.

The case of Brown v. Board of Education rested on a class action suit filed in 1951 against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas, by the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) on behalf of 13 plaintiffs. Among those plaintiffs, Oliver Brown—for whom the case is named—served on behalf of his daughter, Linda Brown. Miss Brown lived in a racially mixed neighborhood but had to travel more than an hour to attend school because her neighborhood school was segregated white. Because Kansas was a border state, and Topeka was not racially segregated in all areas of public facilities (e.g., waiting rooms), the NAACP strategically chose the city as its next battleground in the effort to desegregate public life. It was just one of five cases decided within the Brown decision, which included cases from South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott), Delaware (Gebhart v. Belton), Virginia (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County), and Washington, D.C. (Boiling v. Sharpe). Out of the five cases, Brown v. Board of Education was the only case predicated on black parents' constitutional right to send their children to local neighborhood schools. This was a major shift in the argument for dismantling a system of racial inequality and segregation: that racial segregation is inherently unequal regardless of the quality of public facilities.

One of the compelling arguments used in the Brown decision against segregated schools was that segregation causes psychological harm to individuals forced into segregation by the dominant group. This argument was based on the social scientific work of psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark. Clark and Clark conducted experiments in which they showed black children in segregated schools and non-segregated schools pictures of brown and white dolls. A majority of black children tested in a southern segregated school said that they preferred white dolls over brown dolls, leading the researchers to conclude that segregation caused self-loathing and acceptance of racist stereotypes in these black children.

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