Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

The Facts and the Question:

Brown v. Board of Ed. was a landmark court case that ultimately set the standard for desegregated public schooling, ruling that separate schools for blacks and whites was unconstitutional. Overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, the Warren Court's unanimous decision on May 17, 1954 stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. It paved the way for integration among public schools and spurred the start of the civil rights movement, ultimately answering the question: is separate actually equal, and even so, is segregation ever Constitutional?

Racial segregation dominated the United States for almost 60 years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. This segregation, though, did not prove constitutional in those years as the Supreme Court Case, Plessy v. Ferguson, allowed that schools separate based on race were still deemed equal. Challenged repeatedly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the doctrine of “separate but equal” was beginning to crack. Beginning in 1938, the Supreme Court had, in a number of cases, struck down laws where segregated facilities proved to be “demonstrably unequal.” However, the 1950s brought a new wave of challenges to official segregation by the NAACP and other groups.

Linda Brown, an eight-year-old African-American girl, was denied access to an elementary school five blocks from her house in Topeka, Kansas. School officials refused to register her at the nearby school, assigning her instead to a school for nonwhite students some 21 blocks from her home. Separate elementary schools for whites and nonwhites were maintained by the Board of Education in Topeka. Linda Brown's parents filed a lawsuit to force the schools to admit her to the nearby, but segregated, school for white students.

The Path to the Supreme Court and the Court:

The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown's case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were inherently unequal. One of the expert witnesses, Dr. Hugh W. Speer, testified that:

if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school c

urriculum cannot be equal under segregation.

The Board of Education's defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not neccessarily harmful to black children. Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 and their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.

Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson lead the Court in 1952, when Brown v. Board of Education was granted certiorari and first argued, but died before the justices reached a verdict. The case was reargued in 1953 with Chief Justice Earl Warren presiding over the Court (liberal majority). The Associate Justices include Hugo Black, Stanley F. Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Robert H. Jackson, Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark and Sherman Minton.

The Outcome:

For a unanimous Court (9-0), Chief Justice Warren wrote in his first and probably most significant decision, “Segregation [in public education] is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.” Accepting the arguments put forward by the plaintiffs, Warren declared: “To separate [some children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal…. segregation [in public education] is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

The Brown decision did more than reverse the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal.” It reversed centuries of segregationist practice and thought in America. For that reason, the Brown decision is seen as a transforming event—the birth of a political and social revolution. In a later case called Brown II (Warren had suggested two decisions—the first dealing with the constitutionality of segregation and the second with the implementation of the decision), the Court directed an end to school segregation by race “with all deliberate speed.” The Brown decision became the cornerstone of the social justice movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It finally brought the spirit of the 14th Amendment into practice, more than three-quarters of a century after that amendment had been passed (Brown v. Board of Ed.).

Evaluation:

The unanimous court decision in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is clearly the only decision that should have been made and anyone who disagrees is an idiot, to be frank. Segregation in public schools is in no way Constitutional, and though at the time it did not sum up all problems of inequality, one of the biggest ideas that the Constitution offers us today is the notion of freedom. Separating based on race is like separating based on hair color, and seeing people as unequal or lesser than another is the exact ideology that led to catastrophic events in history. Hitler's part in World War II, for example, is an extreme case where segregation didn't exactly work out. Equal education offered opportunity and possibility, ultimately paving the way for the Civil Rights Movement we know of today.

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