Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had ruled that racial segregation laws were constitutional as long as the facilities for each race were equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and it became a model for many future impact litigation cases.
The case involved the public school system in Topeka, Kansas. In 1951, it had refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to her home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against them, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court, where it was heard with other similar cases from the South. In May 1954, the Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in their favor. However, the Court's 14-page opinion did not spell out any specific method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
In the Southern United States, the reaction to Brown among most white people was "noisy and stubborn", especially in the Deep South where racial segregation was deeply entrenched in society. Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems, most notably immortalized by the Little Rock crisis. The Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown in Cooper v. Aaron, explicitly stating that state officials and legislators had no jurisdiction to nullify its ruling.
Background
For much of the 60 years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause ("no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws"). Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Beginning in the 1930s, a legal strategy was pursued, led by scholars at Howard University and activists at the NAACP, that sought to undermine states' public education segregation by first focusing on the graduate school setting. This led to success in the cases of Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950), suggesting that racial segregation was inherently unequal (at least in some settings), which paved the way for Brown.
The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that the system of racial separation in all schools, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Brown was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question. This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism. Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration.
The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism were doing to America's international image. When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, the first question he was asked was, "Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" Douglas later wrote that he had learned from his travels that "the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India." Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, echoed Douglas's concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, proclaiming that "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."
District court case
Filing and arguments In 1951, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas, in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children.
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate elementary schools due to an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over 15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP. As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and redirected to the segregated schools.
Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett; Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter; and Lucinda Todd. Prompted by Todd, Katherine Carper Sawyer was the only student plaintiff to testify on her challenges reaching the segregated Buchanan Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas. Following the Supreme Court's decision, she was among the Black students to integrate Capper Junior High and Topeka High School.
The named African-American plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, as well as an assistant pastor at his local church. He was convinced to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend, Charles Scott. Brown's daughter Linda Carol Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.
Brown was chosen as the named plaintiff since the NAACP felt a male representative would be better received by the Supreme Court. The 13 plaintiffs were Oliver Brown, Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, and Lucinda Todd. Zelma Henderson was the last surviving plaintiff and died in Topeka on May 20, 2008, at age 88.
District court opinion The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson. Judge Walter Huxman wrote the opinion for the three-judge District Court panel, including nine "findings of fact," based on the evidence presented at trial. Although finding number eight stated that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on negro children, the court denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers. This finding would be specifically cited in the subsequent Supreme Court opinion of this case.
Supreme Court arguments The case titled Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: the original Brown case (appealed from Kansas), Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington, D.C.).
All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only one of the five to originate with a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. The Gebhart case was the only one in which a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court, found that school segregation was unlawful; in all the other cases the plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found segregation to be lawful.
The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial equality as to all such factors. The lower court, in its opinion, noted that, in Topeka, "the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of study, qualification and quality of teachers, as well as other educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable."Brown, 98 F. Supp. at 798. The lower court observed that "colored children in many instances are required to travel much greater distances than they would be required to travel could they attend a white school" but also noted that the school district "transports colored children to and from school free of charge" and that "no such service [was] provided to white children." In the Delaware case the district court judge ordered that black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.
Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall—who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967—argued the case before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general Paul Wilson—later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas—conducted the state's defense in his first appellate argument.