Brown v. Board of Education: The case that ended legal school segregation

For decades, the United States Supreme Court had upheld the idea that racially segregated schools remained legal under the doctrine of "separate but equal."

Since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that principle permitted state governments to build racially divided educational systems while claiming equal treatment.

In practice, white schools typically received more funding, better buildings, and greater resources, while African American students often attended overcrowded institutions with outdated supplies and underpaid teachers.

Eventually, Brown directly challenged the legal framework that allowed such conditions to continue. 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was known as the NAACP, led the campaign.

As early as the 1930s, its legal team had begun challenging segregation in higher education by targeting graduate and professional schools that clearly failed to provide equal opportunities.

In 1938, the Court ruled in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada that states could not send black students to out-of-state institutions in order to avoid admitting them into white universities.

Later, Sweatt v. Painter (1950) forced the University of Texas to desegregate its law school, since the separate institution created for African Americans lacked the academic reputation, faculty qualifications, and professional opportunities that the white school offered.

These early victories had established legal ground for attacking inequality in elementary and secondary schools. 

Next, the NAACP lawyers, under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, prepared a broader strategy that focused on public primary and secondary schools.

By the early 1950s, they had coordinated five separate lawsuits from different states and districts: Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.

The five cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Gebhart v. Belton, and Bolling v. Sharpe.

The first four were consolidated under Brown and argued on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Bolling involved schools in Washington, D.C., and was decided separately under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In each case, black students were denied access to white schools, which had obvious inequalities in facilities and distance.

For example, Oliver Brown filed a suit on behalf of his daughter, Linda, a third-grader who had been forced to travel a long route across a railroad yard to attend Monroe Elementary, which was an all-black school in Topeka, Kansas, even though Sumner Elementary was a white school and was only seven blocks from their home. 

Initially, lower courts upheld the status quo. At the trial in Kansas, the judges agreed that segregation harmed black children’s self-esteem but ruled that it remained legal under Plessy at that time, which led the NAACP to appeal directly to the United States Supreme Court.

By December 1952, the Court had heard oral arguments from the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who had presented both legal precedents and social science research.

However, internal disagreements among the justices had delayed a ruling. Then, in September 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, which led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to appoint Earl Warren to succeed him and led Warren to change how the Court approached the case. 

To build consensus, Warren persuaded his colleagues that racial segregation in education could not be reconciled with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

During the reargument phase in December 1953, the NAACP lawyers had presented further evidence, which had included the famous "doll tests" conducted by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark.

These psychological studies had shown that black children overwhelmingly preferred white dolls over black dolls and had attributed positive characteristics to them, which had shown that segregation had fostered internalised racism and feelings of inferiority.

As a result, on 17 May 1954, the Court issued a unanimous opinion declaring that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

In his opinion, Warren wrote that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Therefore, state-mandated segregation no longer met the standards of equal protection under the law. 

Following the ruling, the Court faced the problem of how to put the ruling into practice.

In May 1955, it issued a second decision, Brown II, which instructed school districts to desegregate "with all deliberate speed."

That phrase aimed to allow flexibility in enforcement, but it created uncertainty that some Southern states used to delay compliance, as across the South elected officials passed laws to preserve segregation, closed public schools to prevent integration, and encouraged the creation of private schools for white students.

In Virginia, the Massive Resistance movement led by Senator Harry F. Byrd created a blueprint for obstruction.

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, the most dramatic confrontation happened in Little Rock in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus used the state’s National Guard to prevent nine black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, from entering Central High School.

That prompted President Eisenhower to send the 101st Airborne Division to ensure federal law prevailed.

Among the students were Elizabeth Eckford and Ernest Green, who later became national figures. 

Over time, federal courts gradually increased enforcement of the Brown ruling. By 1968, the Supreme Court had ruled in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, which found that token integration plans were not enough, and the decision introduced "Green factors" for evaluating desegregation, including transportation, student assignment, facilities, staff, and extracurriculars.

Then, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), the Court approved busing and redrawing school zones as valid tools for addressing segregation and correcting racially imbalanced school zones. 

Over subsequent years, Brown influenced a range of other legal fights for equality.

Civil rights activists had often cited Brown in court cases that challenged discrimination in housing, voting, and employment.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American justice appointed to the United States Supreme Court, which showed the growing influence of legal victories secured through persistence and careful constitutional argument. 

Those successes did not immediately end separation in many American schools because, in some urban districts, residential segregation combined with unequal funding formulas to produce conditions that district zoning then reinforced, which produced the same results that Brown had tried to end.

Court supervision gradually declined, and some communities resegregated through school choice policies or local resistance to busing.

In 2007, the Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 limited the use of race as a factor in school assignments, which further made it harder to keep schools integrated.

Still, Brown v. Board of Education became widely regarded as a landmark decision that ended the legal basis for segregation and set a clear constitutional standard for equal treatment.

It did not remove all barriers to fair education and forced the country to begin to face the contradiction between its laws and its ideals.