NO CASE IN AMERICAN HISTORY has had as much impact upon the social, political, and economic fabric of the nation as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954. It did not wipe away three centuries of racism, nor did it immediately abolish racial segregation, which the Court had approved six decades earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). But it began the process, and a decade later Congress, in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, made all forms of racial separation in public places illegal. That law, and the Voting Rights Act of the following year, made it possible for African Americans to attend schools of their choice, vote for and elect public officials, and run for office themselves. Brown helped to transform the American landscape, so that in 2008 the United States could elect a black president. The opinion may not have the intellectual rigor and jurisprudential analysis of some of the Court’s other great cases, but as Court of Appeals judge J. Harvey Wilkinson reminds us, Brown “was humane, among the most humane moments in all our history. It was . . . a great political achievement, both in its uniting of the Court and in the steady way it addressed the nation.”
Linda Brown (born 1943) and her two sisters were happy and beloved children growing up in Topeka, Kansas. Their father, Oliver, was a boxcar welder at the Santa Fe Railroad, and also an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. They lived in a modest, multiracial neighborhood, and although housing was not highly segregated, the schools were. Linda later recalled that “I lived in a neighborhood that was integrated and I had playmates of all nationalities. . . . Then when school started we would go these opposite directions and, of course, your playmates who you played with everyday wanted to know, ‘Well, why don’t you go to school with us?’”
The Browns lived only seven blocks from the all-white Sumner Elementary School, but Linda had to attend the black Monroe Elementary School. To get there she had to leave her house an hour and twenty minutes before her school started, and walk through an active railway switching yard for five blocks to get to her bus station. The bus took a circuitous route to the school, and would occasionally arrive before school opened, leaving her and the other children to stand around in whatever weather the season brought—rain, snow, or heat.
In 1950 Oliver Brown tried to enroll Linda at Sumner so she would not have to make that long and dangerous trip, but he was turned away. Oliver Brown was no activist but he was mad, and he went to the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) seeking help. The association’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) had reached the point where it felt ready to challenge the separate-but-equal doctrine the Supreme Court had approved in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and it was looking for test cases. Once the LDF accepted their case, the Brown family had little involvement with the case at trial or on appeal. In addition to the Linda Brown case in Kansas, the LDF began suits in Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia.
In Farmville, Virginia, a sixteen-year-old student named Barbara Rose Johns secretly organized a student strike to protest the terrible conditions at the all-black Moton High School, which had no gymnasium, cafeteria, or teachers’ rest rooms. Neither teachers nor students had desks or blackboards, and due to overcrowding some students had to take classes in an old and decrepit school bus parked on the grounds. Requests for supplies and additional funding had been turned down by the local, all-white school board. The NAACP of Virginia agreed to take on the case, and while Barbara Johns by rights should have been the lead plaintiff, the first name alphabetically belonged to another student plaintiff, Dorothy E. Davis (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia).
In Delaware the parents of Ethel Louise Belton sued the Claymont School District in New Castle County because their daughter had been refused admission to the Claymont High School solely because of her race, and were told to enroll her in the Carver Vocational School in Wilmington, nine miles away. The Beltons won in the state court, and the school district appealed (Gebhart v. Belton).
As a young child in Clarendon County, South Carolina, Harry Briggs Jr. experienced the horrible conditions of segregated black schools—poor heating, overcrowding, and lack of basic resources such as up-to-date textbooks. His parents, Harry and Eliza Briggs, filed suit against the school board, and many white South Carolinians did not take well to the suit. Harry Sr. lost his job, eventually having to move to Florida to seek work. Harry Jr. also had difficulty finding work later on when his relationship to the case became known (Briggs v. Elliot).
Gardner Bishop was the father of a student at the segregated Browne Junior High School in Washington, D.C. In 1947 school authorities responded to complaints about crowded conditions at Browne by reopening two run-down former elementary schools for satellite classes. The black parents objected, and demanded that the better white schools be opened to all students without reference to race. On September 11, 1950, Bishop took his son and ten other black students and attempted to enroll in the Sousa Junior High School. They were turned away, and the parents filed suit; Spottswood Bolling Jr. became the lead plaintiff simply because his name headed the alphabetical list (Bolling v. Sharpe).
The five cases wended their way through state and lower federal courts, and their appeals arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 1952. The Court consolidated the cases with the Kansas appeal of Brown’s suit as the lead case so that, according to Justice Tom Clark, “the whole question would not smack of being a purely Southern one.” By then, the LDF had been fighting racial segregation in the courts for more than twenty years, and had slowly been making inroads. But these five cases marked a major step for the organization; for the first time it would attack the doctrine of separate-but-equal head-on.
Following Plessy, segregation had infused every aspect of race relations in the South and in some border states as well. So-called Jim Crow laws enforced the complete segregation of blacks and whites. In addition to separate cars on railroads, trolleys, and buses, there were white and colored drinking fountains and toilets, and of course, schools. Where a locality could not afford completely separate facilities, such as hospitals or theaters, African Americans had to be treated in certain rooms or sit in particular areas. As for equality in accommodations, that did not exist either. White-owned restaurants refused to serve colored customers, and blacks had to sit in the balconies of theaters and at the back of buses. White-dominated legislatures and local school boards never provided equal funding or resources to black schools, which received “hand-me-down” textbooks when white schools got new ones.
In the late 1920s the NAACP launched a plan to attack Jim Crow in the courts on several fronts. One prong of the plan called for suits against segregation on interstate facilities, and in Morgan v. Virginia (1946), a 7–1 Court claimed that railroads operating in interstate travel had to have a uniform policy, and therefore could not separate passengers on the basis of race. A few years later, in Henderson v. United States (1950), the Court unanimously held that dining cars on interstate trains could not require black passengers to sit in a segregated area behind a screen.
A second part of the NAACP plan involved forcing states to provide more equal funding for black schools and teachers, and in dozens of suits the LDF almost always won when it offered as evidence the large disparities between per-pupil funding, salary differentials between similarly qualified black and white teachers, wide variations in the conditions of school buildings, and other aspects. In fact, by the time the Supreme Court heard Brown, salary differentials for teachers in most southern states had been equalized.
The real target, and the biggest problem, was how to attack segregation itself. The LDF decided that it would start in higher education, because while all states had black and white schools for elementary and secondary students, not all states had separate university facilities. In many states if a black student wanted to go to a law or medical or engineering school, the state went to extreme lengths to avoid integrating their facilities, preferring instead to provide a stipend so that the student could attend an out-of-state university.
The first breakthrough came in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), when Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes startled the South by insisting that if it wanted to keep segregated schools, then it had to provide some form of similar or equal opportunity for black students. The Court did not have a chance to show how seriously it meant this until after World War II, when it heard the case of Ada Sipuel. After compiling an excellent record at the State College for Negroes in Langston, Oklahoma, she applied to the University of Oklahoma Law School, the only one in the state. The school refused to admit her. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the LDF, represented her at oral argument in early January 1948, and four days later a unanimous court issued an order directing Oklahoma to provide Sipuel with a legal education in conformity with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Unfortunately for Sipuel, the state set up a “black” law school in the basement of the state capital, and the justices, still leery of confronting segregation straightforwardly, refused to consider whether the state had in fact met its mandate.
At the second trial (over the quality of the rump law school) the NAACP called Professor Walter Gellhorn of Columbia University as an expert witness, and during a break Gellhorn got into a revealing conversation with Mac Williamson, the attorney general of Oklahoma, who was representing the university. Gellhorn said that even if the state could convince the court that this basement school was “equal,” what was the state going to do when a Negro applied for a medical education—build him a whole medical school? Williamson suddenly smacked his head as the revelation hit him: “Oh, my God, suppose one of them wanted to be a petroleum engineer! Why, we’ve got the biggest petroleum-cracking laboratory in the country here.”
A few years later the University of Oklahoma again tried to get around the rules. It had grudgingly admitted sixty-eight-year-old George McLaurin into its graduate school, where he hoped to earn a doctorate in education. But McLaurin had to sit in the corridor outside the regular classroom, use a separate desk on the mezzanine of the library, and eat alone in a dingy alcove in the cafeteria. When the NAACP challenged these rules, the university allowed McLaurin to sit inside the classroom but surrounded his seat with a railing that said “Reserved for Colored.” A unanimous Court struck these rules down in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) as imposing inequality on the petitioner.
Although the justices shied away from questioning Plessy in the Oklahoma case, they came near it in a case decided the same day. After Heman Marion Sweatt applied to the University of Texas Law School in 1946, a federal district court gave the state six months to establish a law school for blacks. The state created the School of Law at the Texas State University for Negroes, a makeshift classroom in an Austin basement. Although the physical plant and the library had grown by the time Thurgood Marshall carried the case to the Supreme Court in 1950, Marshall felt confident that he could show that the absence of a good library, well-known faculty, and all the other intangibles that made the University of Texas Law School a top-flight institution denied Sweatt an equal education.
If nothing else, the justices of the Supreme Court—especially Tom Clark, a graduate of the Texas Law School—knew what made a good law school, and in Sweatt v. Painter they unanimously rejected the Texas claim that it had provided equal facilities. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson ordered Sweatt admitted to the University of Texas Law School, the first time the Supreme Court had ever ordered a black student admitted to a previously all-white school on the grounds that the state had failed to provide equal separate facilities.
For Thurgood Marshall and the LDF, the Texas opinion was “replete with road markings telling us where to go next” as they turned their attention to challenging segregation in the public schools. Seventeen southern and border states, as well as Washington, D.C., legally required segregation in public schools; another four states permitted it. The attack on segregation per se—and not just on the lack of equal facilities—had been the LDF goal for years, but Marshall and his colleagues faced formidable opposition. Many members of the NAACP opposed attacking segregation. Teachers had won the cases on equal pay and were better off than they had been; they feared they would lose not only these gains but their jobs as well. Others worried about the backlash if the LDF succeeded; it had not been all that long since black men were routinely lynched in the South.
There were also pressures to go ahead. Black servicemen who had fought for others’ freedom overseas in World War II came back to find no freedom for themselves, and they chafed at the racial prejudice they found everywhere in the South as well as in many northern states. Harry Truman had ordered the armed forces to integrate, and in Korea for the first time black soldiers fought alongside their white comrades. The Cold War also aided the drive for civil rights, as the United States and the Soviet Union fought to win the support of unaligned nations in Africa and Asia. Black diplomats discovered that they could not find hotel rooms if they traveled in the South, and even in Washington many restaurants would not accept them as customers. Soviet propaganda harped incessantly on how badly the United States treated people of color, a point that Third World countries took seriously.
The Court heard oral argument on the five public school cases in the fall of 1952, but although a majority of the justices agreed that segregation was bad, they could not reach agreement on what constitutional authority they could use to strike it down. Although the equal protection clause seemed the logical choice, it had a cloudy history in the Court, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once dismissed it as the last resort in a losing case. So the justices looked for other grounds to support an opinion. In the spring of 1953 the Court requested that counsel reargue the case in December. Specifically, the justices wanted both sides to address whether Congress in proposing—and the states in adopting—the Fourteenth Amendment had intended to ban racial segregation in the schools. Furthermore, if the Court ruled against continued segregation, how should the decision be implemented?
On September 8, 1953, Chief Justice Vinson died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and speculation now focused on how the new chief, former California governor Earl Warren, would approach the problem of racial segregation. Warren had said little about the matter, but the NAACP knew that during World War II Warren had been vociferous in his demand that Japanese Americans be taken out of California and moved to inland relocation camps.
Instead of the usual one to two hours allotted for oral argument, the justices sat through ten hours spread over three days. John W. Davis, a former solicitor general of the United States, represented South Carolina. He defended racial segregation in an emotional coda to a long and distinguished career. Only Daniel Webster had argued more cases in the Supreme Court, and at the original argument the year before Thurgood Marshall believed that Davis had outlawyered him.
But Marshall was better prepared at reargument, and his very presence in the chamber symbolized what he demanded of the Court—equality for all people regardless of the color of their skin. (Although different lawyers represented the plaintiffs in the five cases, all were associated with the NAACP and looked to Marshall, who technically represented only Harry Briggs, as the lead attorney.)
On May 16, 1954, Marshall received a telephone call from the clerk of the Court telling him that the decision would be handed down the next day. He took a train from New York to Washington, but no cab would pick him up at Union Station, so he ran the several blocks to the Court, arriving as the justices took their seats.
Considering its epochal significance, the decision in Brown v. Board of Education is deceptively simple, running a mere eleven pages. Chief Justice Warren wanted it to be short enough so that newspapers could reprint it in its entirety, and he read the whole opinion from the bench. He began by stating that the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and its relation to education, which the Court had asked both sides to argue, was “inconclusive”—in part because public education in the South in 1868 was almost nonexistent. Most white children at the time were privately educated, and black children not educated at all. He then briefly examined the Plessy doctrine, as well as the extent of segregation in northern and southern states. Times had changed, Warren declared, and “in approaching this problem we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.” Education played a crucial role in training people to become productive members of society, and more importantly, to be citizens and to participate in civic life. When a state undertakes to provide education to its people, it must do so on equal terms to all.
Warren read through two-thirds of the opinion before he reached the crucial question: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race . . . deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” Pausing for a moment, he continued, “We unanimously believe it does.” Reaffirming the eloquent dissent of the first Justice Harlan in Plessy, that separate could never be equal, Warren declared that to segregate black 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. . . . Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children.
As a result, the Court concluded “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate-but-equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” When Warren announced that the decision was unanimous, he later recalled, “a wave of emotion swept the room.”
(Four of the cases dealt with state laws, but the fifth, Bolling v. Sharpe, arose in the District of Columbia, which was not under the mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Warren, while noting this fact, held that “to impose a lesser duty,” i.e., to allow segregation to continue in the District, would be “unthinkable.” The Court found its justification for ending segregation in the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which did apply to the federal government.)
Brown was, and remains, a testimonial to Earl Warren’s innate humaneness and to his political skill. A majority of the justices had agreed early on that segregation was unconstitutional, and Warren had labored throughout the winter and spring to get them all to agree to decide the case on equal protection grounds, and also to have the vote unanimous. A decision of such import could be crippled if there were a dissent or a less than complete agreement. Noting the wide applicability of the decisions and the complexity of devising a solution, Warren invited the parties to assist the Court in fashioning an appropriate remedy. The “wide applicability” phrase broadcast the intention of the Court to order desegregation in all school districts—North and South, rural and urban. The reference to complexity signaled to the South that the justices recognized the social and psychological turmoil the decision would cause and that they intended to allow the states some time to accustom themselves to the idea. By inviting the parties to help compose a solution, the Court hoped that Jim Crow states would cooperate and thus avoid the necessity of having the judiciary impose a remedy. Finally, Warren carefully framed the opinion to apply to only one area, the legal segregation of children by race in primary and secondary public schools, a group most likely to win sympathy as victims of racism.
Within an hour of the opinion, the Voice of America beamed news of the decision around the world in more than thirty languages, emphasizing that the issue had been settled through a democratic process and not by dictatorial imposition or mob behavior. The immediate reaction from the international community was overwhelmingly positive. To take but one example, the Municipal Council of São Paulo, Brazil, sent a letter to the American embassy applauding the decision and joining in what it termed the universal rejoicing that had greeted news of Brown. By August 1954 the U.S. Information Agency reported to the National Security Council that “the decision is regarded as the greatest event since the Emancipation Proclamation, and it removes from Communist hands the most effective anti-American weapon they had in Black Africa.”
Northern newspapers hailed the decision as “momentous.” What the justices had done, declared the Cincinnati Enquirer, “is simply to act as the conscience of the American nation.” The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed that “in the lives of nations there are moments when the ideal blazes forth with shattering intensity. Men see the truth they have known all along and yet have somewhat managed to deny. Such a moment comes with the clear, final decision of the Court.” The Des Moines Register spoke of the Court’s effort to begin “the erasure of one of American democracy’s blackest marks.”
Within the black community reaction was mixed, as leaders waited to see how the lofty words would translate into action. The Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, called the decision a “second emancipation proclamation . . . more important to our democracy than the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb.” Local black columnist Nat Williams, writing in Memphis, said “there was no general ‘hallelujah, ‘tis done’ hullabaloo. Beale Streeters are sorta skeptical about giving out with cheers yet.” The Associated Negro Press (ANP), a national news service, while heralding the long-awaited ruling nonetheless wanted to see how the South would react, and whether some southern states “will take drastic action to circumvent” the ruling. The ANP reminded its readers that the governors of Georgia and South Carolina had promised to abolish public schools rather than abolish segregation (as indeed some localities later did).
Initially the South heard voices of moderation, more so than one might have expected. Gov. Thomas Stanley of Virginia called for “cool heads, calm study, and sound judgment.” “Big Jim” Folsom, Alabama’s governor, declared that “when the Supreme Court speaks, that’s the law.” The governor of Arkansas promised that “Arkansas will obey the law. It always has.” The respected Louisville Courier-Journal assured its readers that “the end of the world has not come for the South or for the nation. The Supreme Court’s ruling is not itself a revolution. It is rather acceptance of a process that has been going on for a long time.” The editors urged southerners to follow the Court’s example of moderation, advice akin to that of the Atlanta Constitution, which called on Georgians “to think clearly.”
Warren’s strategy assumed that the states would accept the inevitability of desegregation by the time the Court reconvened to devise an implementation plan, and initial signs seemed encouraging. Some southern communities did not wait for the Court to act. Baltimore adopted a freedom of choice plan, which enabled 3,000 blacks to attend previously all-white schools starting in September 1954. Louisville changed over its school system within a semester, while St. Louis initiated a two-year plan. Counties in West Virginia, junior colleges in Texas, and public schools in Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware, all enrolled blacks in previously segregated schools.
Initial optimism soon faded as ominous signs appeared. Governor Stanley abandoned his early moderation, and in June announced he would do everything possible to continue segregation in Virginia. In Mississippi, White Citizens Councils began to form in July, pledged to total war in defense of segregation. But no one knew exactly what the Court would demand in terms of implementation, and in the twelve months following the initial decree much of the South cautiously marked time.
The Court heard arguments on proposed remedies that winter and again in April. The problem was difficult and controversial on its own, but the justices also had to decide whether to abandon, at least in this instance, the Court’s traditional policy of ruling only on the case before it. Normally, if a party raises a valid claim that his or her constitutional rights have been violated, the decree is directed only to that petitioner’s case; other persons “similarly situated” do not immediately gain the benefit of the decision. Lower federal courts then take notice of the decision and apply it prospectively to future petitioners raising such a claim. In the school cases, however, that would mean that every black child wanting to enroll in a previously all-white school would have to go to court to secure the same rights that had been awarded to Linda Brown in Topeka. Determined states and localities, armed with sufficient resources, could tie up the desegregation process for years, even decades, by litigating each claim.
The Court also usually takes little notice of practical matters. Once a right has been defined, it has to be available to all citizens, despite institutional obstacles. Circumstances in public education, however, varied enormously from state to state, and even from locality to locality within a state. In some instances desegregation would mean just a few blacks sitting in predominantly white classrooms, and in other schools just the opposite—and this made a difference. Even recognizing the enormous emotional and logistical problems, how long could the Court give the South? Every day that black children attended inferior, segregated schools they suffered a loss of their constitutional rights. On the other hand, too precipitate an order could lead to widespread obstruction, even violence.
The NAACP wanted full integration in the shortest possible time. Blacks had been waiting three and a half centuries to be treated as equals and should not have their constitutional rights denied one more day.
Southern states were equally intransigent. Virginia urged the Court to face the “reality” of major differences between the two races, and offered statistics to prove the inferiority of blacks. Florida informed the justices that it had conducted a poll and only one out of seven police officers would enforce attendance at racially mixed schools.
The federal government, appearing as a “friend of the Court,” suggested a middle position between “integration now” and “segregation forever.” States should submit timetables within ninety days, and then implementation should be supervised by local federal district courts. The courts would have discretion to make adjustments in the schedules to reflect local conditions. An immediate start, however, would have to be made, and the decision would have to be enforced by all federal officials, all of whom had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.
On May 31, 1955, Chief Justice Warren, again for a unanimous Court, handed down a seven-paragraph decision, commonly known as Brown II. School segregation had to be ended everywhere, but the Court recognized that differing local conditions required varying solutions. Local school districts must “make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance,” and oversight would be lodged in federal district courts. Local judges should exercise “practical flexibility,” but delay and noncompliance should not be allowed. Desegregation of public schools should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”
The Court did not fix a date for the end of segregation, nor even require that initial plans be filed within ninety days, as the Justice Department had recommended. Why the Court did not demand more has been debated ever since, but some evidence indicates that Felix Frankfurter, worried about violent resistance, convinced Earl Warren that it would be better to go slowly at first, and suggested the “all deliberate speed” criterion.
The South exulted, since many had been braced for a specific schedule for the dismantling of segregation; now it looked as if real implementation could be delayed indefinitely. Assignment of primary responsibility to local federal courts led some southerners to assume that the decree could be totally ignored. Ernest Vandiver, lieutenant governor of Georgia, rejoiced when he heard the news. District judges, he announced, “are steeped in the same traditions that I am. . . . A ‘reasonable time’ can be construed as one year or two hundred. . . . Thank God we’ve got good Federal judges.”
Most federal judges, however, soon made it clear that they took seriously their oath to support the Constitution. John Minor Wisdom, Elbert Tuttle, John R. Brown, and Richard Rives of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (which covered a broad swath of southern states), as well as district court judges Frank Johnson of Alabama and J. Skelley Wright of Louisiana defied friends and death threats to become forceful advocates of desegregation. By January 1956 federal judges had rendered opinions in nineteen cases and in every one reaffirmed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown.
The South dug in its heels. Refusing to enact statewide desegregation statutes, the states bitterly fought the NAACP in court, forcing one delay after another, so that as late as 1961 few school districts in the Deep South had faced a school desegregation suit. (In many places black plaintiffs were afraid to file suit, while the LDF, stretched beyond its resources, could only handle so many cases at once.) The southern press ground out articles and books purporting to show not only the inferiority of black people, but the unconstitutionality of the Court’s decision. The White Citizen Council movement spread and soon claimed 500,000 members in eleven states. Whites and blacks who signed desegregation petitions lost their jobs and found they could not get credit from stores or banks. In 1956, 101 southern members of Congress, including all but three senators from the former Confederate states, signed a belligerent “Southern Manifesto” opposing the Court’s decision.
In Virginia, usually seen as moderate in its race relations, Sen. Harry F. Byrd called for “massive resistance” to desegregation, and there and elsewhere in the South politicians resurrected the long-discredited theories of John C. Calhoun. Alabama claimed that it had the right to “interposition” in order to protect its citizens from unconstitutional federal action, and the state legislature resolved Brown to be “null, void and of no effect.” Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and North Carolina all adopted resolutions proclaiming that Brown had no legal force and they would ignore it.
Aside from the overblown rhetoric, southern states adopted numerous measures to thwart the courts and evade compliance. Georgia made it a felony for any school official to use tax money for mixed-race schools, while Mississippi declared it unlawful for the races to attend school together from kindergarten through high school. Mississippi and South Carolina amended their constitutions to abolish public schools, and all southern states designed one program after another to keep the races separate. John Temple Graves, an Alabama newspaperman, declared “there is not one way, but many” to nullify Brown.
The opening of school in September 1956 found that 723 districts in the seventeen southern and border states had accomplished some measure of desegregation, 186 more than the previous year. Three thousand school districts remained totally segregated. About 300,000 black students went to school in so-called integrated situations, which could mean many different things, but 2.4 million remained totally segregated. Total separation remained the rule in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Virginia. The Ku Klux Klan came alive again, and bombings, murder, and cross burnings spread across the southern states. All over the South, as the noted southern-born scholar C. Vann Woodward lamented, “the lights of reason and tolerance began to go out under the insistent demand for conformity and a malaise of fear spread over the region.”
The Supreme Court, as Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist No. 78, has neither the power of the purse nor the sword, and it must rely on the other branches of government as well as its own moral authority to enforce its decisions. Congress, dominated by southerners, refused to act, and so did President Dwight Eisenhower, who privately complained that he believed Brown had set back the cause of progress in the South by at least fifteen years. Yet Eisenhower had signed off on the government’s amicus brief in Brown, and he knew from the State Department that continued segregation was hurting American foreign policy in Africa and Asia. The day after the Court handed down its decision he ordered the commissioners for the District of Columbia to set an example of peaceful integration in the city’s schools. But Eisenhower, who enjoyed near-universal respect and admiration for his role as supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II, did not provide any moral leadership to the nation or to the southern states in dealing with the shame of American apartheid. When officials at the University of Alabama defied a court order to admit a black student, all Eisenhower said was, “I certainly hope that we could avoid any interference.”
Finally, events forced the reluctant Eisenhower to act. In the fall of 1957 the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board agreed to a court order to admit nine black students to Central High School. Gov. Orville Faubus, previously considered a moderate, called out the national guard to prevent blacks from entering the building. He withdrew the guard on a court order, but when the black students tried to enter Central High, a mob attacked the school. Eisenhower, who only two months earlier had said he could not envision any situation in which he would use federal troops, could no longer sit by passively and watch federal authority flouted. He ordered 1,000 paratroopers into Little Rock, and nationalized the 10,000 Arkansas national guardsmen to protect the black students and maintain order. The president who had tried for the past three years to ignore the growing racial tensions in the South had been forced to act, and he became the first president since Reconstruction to use federal troops to enforce black rights.
The Supreme Court, which had been silent on school matters since Brown II, now spoke in Cooper v. Aaron (1958) in an unusual, unanimous per curiam decision signed by all nine justices. Cooper not only reaffirmed Brown, but also reasserted the Court’s authority as the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution. Arkansas had claimed not to be bound by Brown since it had not been a party to that case, and the justices could have limited themselves to a sharp reminder that states have no power to nullify federal court orders. Instead, they reminded Arkansas and the nation that ever since 1803 it had been, in Chief Justice John Marshall’s words, “the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” That principle remained in effect, and therefore the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Brown, or for that matter of any constitutional provision in any case, became the supreme law of the land and bound not only federal officials but state governments as well.
Not until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the 1965 Voting Rights Act did southern schools begin to desegregate. The growing infusion of federal money into primary and secondary education had became substantial in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and the Civil Rights Act denied federal funds to any school district that continued to enforce racial segregation. More important was the voting bill, which made African Americans a major political force in every southern state. As the federal government enforced the rights of blacks to register and to vote, they began electing black sheriffs, council members, and school boards, which did away with segregation. Even white southern officeholders recognized that blacks held the balance of electoral power in many districts and states, and they could not win if they antagonized those constituents.
Some southern schools never became truly integrated. In some areas the overwhelming population made even integrated schools predominantly black. In many places middle-class whites took their children out of public schools and enrolled them in all-white private academies, or moved to the suburbs where blacks could not afford housing. But even if de facto segregation remained in many parts of the nation, de jure separation—segregation mandated by and enforced by the law—ceased to exist.
Linda Brown remembered the day the case bearing her name was decided, with the whole family excited. Her father rushed in from work, embraced his wife, and said, “Thanks be to God for this.” Linda went on to become a civil rights activist in her own right. At age thirty-six, in protest at the failure of the Topeka School District to completely desegregate the system, she asked the local court to reopen Brown v. Board of Education on behalf of her own children. Her son, Charles, said, “I had a funny feeling when I heard the judge agreed to reopen the case. I began to wonder whether my kids will be in this lawsuit too someday.” She won the suit, and in 1994 Topeka agreed to a new plan that aimed at a truly integrated school system. Since then she has been involved in the Brown Family Foundation, which works to provide educational resources regarding the significance of the original decision.
Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954)
Brown v. Board of Education I, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
Brown v. Board of Education II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955)
Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958)
Henderson v. United States, 339 U.S. 816 (1950)
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 339 U.S. 637 (1950)
Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938)
Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946)
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents, 332 U.S. 631 (1948)
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 626 (1950)
The literature on Brown and its progeny continues to grow, but two books serve as good starting points. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (1976) is a classic, but should be supplemented by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (2003), which brings in more recent scholarship and also has a broader understanding of the social, economic, and cultural concerns of the African American community at the time. The NAACP’s role is detailed in Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (1987), and Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (1994). The best biography is Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998). A rather unique perspective can be found in Paul E. Wilson, A Time to Lose: Representing Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education (1995). The role of the Eisenhower administration is explored in David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginnings of the Civil Rights Revolution (2007). For Little Rock, see Tony A. Freyer, Little Rock on Trial: Cooper v. Aaron and School Desegregation (2007). The importance of foreign policy in the case is detailed in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000). The response to Brown II is explored in a series of essays in Brian J. Daugherty and Charles C. Bolton, With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education (2008).