Nettie Hunt, one of the plaintiffs, and daughter Nikie celibrate on the Supreme Court Steps. |
On May 17, 1954 a unanimous decision by
the United States Supreme Court over turned legal precedent and established custom
to rule in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The ruling sent shock waves across the nation
and it took more than a decade of turmoil and violence before this precedent
was enforced across the land.
Previous to this
ruling school segregation flourished not only in the Deep
South but across much of
the rest of the nation under the protection of the 1896 court decision in the
case of Plessy v. Ferguson which ruled that “separate but equal” public
accommodations were legal.
The Justices based the Brown decision on the post Civil War
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which called for “equal protection
under the law.”
Filed in 1951 by 13 parents, the suit was a result of segregation in
the Topeka, Kansas school system under a 1873 state law that
allowed—but did not compel—separation by race.
At the instigation of the local chapter of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the parents attempted to
register their children a neighborhood schools reserved for whites. The registrations were, of course,
rejected.
The lead plaintiff was Oliver O. Brown, a welder with the Santa
Fe Railroad and the associate pastor of a local church. The Federal District Court upheld the
law citing the Plessy case. A three
judge Appeals Court acknowledged that segregated facilities could be
harmful to the interests of Black student, but said it was powerless to act
because the Topeka schools were equal in terms of quality of facilities,
transportation, curriculum, and quality of the staff.
At the Supreme Court level, the case was combined with four other NAACP
test cases from Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, and the District
of Columbia. In the Delaware case a
lower court had supported the plaintiffs on the grounds that the segregated
schools were manifestly unequal with Black schools housed in substandard
building with restricted budgets that impacted education quality.
Arguing for the NAACP was Thurgood Marshal. Defending the Board of Education,
somewhat reluctantly—and some claim less than diligently—was Kansas Assistant
Attorney General Paul Wilson.
According to notes, the Justices were split as the case moved
forward. Four members, William O.
Douglas, Hugo Black, Harold Burton, and Sherman Minton were described as “predisposed” to overturn
segregation. Fred Vinton was
leery to act in the absence of action by Congress to outlaw
segregation. Stanley Reed cited States’
Rights in opposition to Federal action and seemed to regard segregation as
a positive benefit to Blacks. Tom
Clark wrote that, “we had
led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it
out.” Two of the most respected legal
scholars on the Court, Felix Frankfurter and Robert H.
Jackson were personally opposed to segregation but were skittish about
“judicial activism.”
The makeup and temper of the Court
changed dramatically as the case moved forward when Vinton died and Earl
Warren of California was appointed by President
Dwight Eisenhower as the new Chief Justice. Warren made a majority in favor of
overturning the Kansas law.
Realizing the impact of the decision,
the majority members spent a great deal of time bringing around their dubious
colleagues. The felt that anything less
than a unanimous decision would result in years of doubt and instability. One by one, they won over the doubters based
largely on Marshall’s arguments. In the
end, they achieved a unanimous decision that left no doubt where the Court
Stood.
Topeka schools, which had only been
segregated on the elementary level anyway, easily adapted without much in the
way of opposition. But across the South,
the alarm was high and the angry voices of defiance heard loudly.
Virginia Senator
Harry F. Byrd, Sr. organized the
Massive Resistance Movement across his state in which public
school shut down entirely rather than face integration. In other states white fled the schools and
established private “academies.” With
only Black and Whites too poor to afford the private schools left in the public
system, they were starved of state and local tax funds.
In 1957 President Eisenhower had to
mobilize the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the
desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School when
Gov. Oval Faubus tried to use the state National Guard
to block Black students. As
late as 1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace “stood in the
door” of the University of Alabama to defend segregation. He was moved aside by his own National Guard,
which had been federalized by Lyndon Johnson.
Northerners who smugly assumed that all
the brouhaha was isolated in the South were shocked when their own school
systems were sued and desegregation orders, including “forced busing” was
applied to them. Boston
saw ugly resistance through the ‘60’s into the early ‘70’s.
Today schools are generally
desegregated, although recent decisions to limit bussing have allowed more
schools in racially isolated areas to become de facto single race. Whites still shun public schools across much
of the South and flee majority Black urban school districts in the North for
White exurbs.
And a new generation of conservative
judicial activists openly talks about reverting to the Plessy v. Ferguson standard.
Yet even the most hide bound conservative on the Supreme Court today
would be hard pressed to overturn that unanimous 1954 decision.
Three cheers for judicial activism when
it counted!
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