"Brown v. Board of Education" and the Desegregation of Schools

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (often shortened to Brown v. Board of Education) is a 1954 United States Supreme Court case that outlawed school segregation on the basis of race. It began as a class-action lawsuit, making its way through lower courts and federal district courts before reaching Chief Justice Earl Warren and his compatriots on the highest bench in the United States.

The Supreme Court decision relied prominently on a reinterpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Rather than rely on the “separate but equal” reasoning of prior rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education insisted that due process and equal protection of the laws were innately inconsistent with segregation. This opened up public schooling to Black Americans across the country. As a result, there would no longer be separate white and Black schools but instead integrated schools for all Americans.

This landmark case sent shockwaves throughout the country.

• The case officially began in 1950 with Oliver Brown. Along with other plaintiffs, Oliver Brown was a Black father who was upset that his child couldn’t attend the school closest to her house in Topeka, Kansas, simply because of her race. Brown’s daughter had to ride the bus rather than walk to school because closer white school districts denied entry to Black children. After the US District Court in Kansas struck down the plaintiffs’ suit, Brown and the others began appealing their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
• Broader political and social changes were afoot. The United States’ treatment of Black people and other communities of color tarnished its reputation abroad as it sought to engage with other countries as a rising superpower. This led to federal government officials believing it was time to act on segregation and racial injustice for self-interested and moral reasons. For instance, Eisenhower’s attorney general, James P. McGranery, believed allowing segregation to persist could allow Communist countries to whip up resentment toward the United States. As for US citizens themselves, popular opinion began shifting strongly away from separating Black and white children throughout the mid-twentieth century in most regions of the country.
• Other prominent cases paved the way. Cases similar to Brown v. Board of Education included Delaware’s Gebhart v. Belton, South Carolina’s Briggs v. Elliott, Virginia’s Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, and Washington, DC’s Bolling v. Sharpe. Each lawsuit involved plaintiffs seeking remedy for discrimination in schooling (some in elementary schools, others in high schools). The fundamental question of each case was whether it was constitutional for state and local governments to separate school systems on the basis of race.
• A prominent civil rights attorney argued Brown’s case. From late 1953 to early 1954, Thurgood Marshall, who was chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), presented Brown’s case before the Supreme Court. Prior to this, Marshall represented Douglas Gaines Murray—a Black man seeking entrance to a white law school that refused him entrance—before the Supreme Court and won. Marshall contributed to the favorable unanimous decision of all nine Supreme Court justices in 1954.
• The case centered on segregation being innately unequal. Rather than seeking to prove Black educational facilities were worse off materially than white ones, the Supreme Court ruling held that racial segregation in and of itself put Black children at a disadvantage. The inequalities perpetuated by the system overrode any material inequities between schools, whether or not they existed. The justices relied on social science research by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, among others, to back up their decision.
• Schools across the country began to integrate. A secondary Supreme Court ruling—known as Brown II (1955)—insisted states integrate Black students and white students with “all deliberate speed.” Public school boards in Southern states especially rebelled against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, believing it wrongfully overrode their state laws on segregation. Still, some Northern states and even the District of Columbia itself also had to desegregate their schools. As time went on, officials integrated schools across the nation as a result of the Supreme Court decision.

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