The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in
1868, gives all Americans, regardless of race, equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws. Yet at the beginning of the 1950s,
American society was still separated into black and white. Hotels, trains,
parks, restaurants, apartment houses, and even state voting precincts
were segregated by race through state statutes called Jim Crow laws.
African Americans were criminally prosecuted and jailed for attempting
to ride the same trains or eat in the same restaurants as whites.
Racial segregation (the separation of races) had been established by
law in the United States in 1896 in the Supreme Court case called
Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy was an African American man who attempted to ride in a whites-only railroad car in Louisiana. When he was
charged with violating Louisiana’s Jim Crow law, Plessy argued all the
way to the Supreme Court that the law was unconstitutional. In a sevento-one vote, the 1896 Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment
did not prohibit state laws from treating people differently according to
the color of their skin as long as that treatment was “equal.” The “separate but equal” doctrine created by the Plessy decision lasted for nearly
sixty years, until the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education.
Topeka, Kansas, 1950s
In 1950, Oliver Brown was told that his eight-year-old daughter could
not attend the Topeka, Kansas, neighborhood elementary school four
blocks from their home because Kansas law required African Americans to attend separate schools. Brown joined with other African American
families to engage the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP; a prominent civil rights organization) to file
a lawsuit against the board of education of Topeka. They claimed that
segregation violated their children’s constitutional rights under the
Fourteenth Amendment. For four years, the families lost their case but
appealed it to progressively higher courts. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education reached the U.S. Supreme Court along with three similar
cases.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), later a
Supreme Court justice, argued that racially segregated public schools
were not equal and could not be made equal. He believed, therefore, that
the laws were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He claimed
that the only way for the Court to uphold segregation in 1954 was “to
find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.” The Supreme Court agreed and unanimously rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, stating that “in the field of
public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
Reaction
The Brown decision hit the country like a bombshell. At the time of the
ruling, 40 percent of public-school students lived in areas that required
segregation by law. Mandatory-segregation laws were in effect in
Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West
Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
Heated opposition to Brown came immediately. Several states defied
the court decision. Louisiana and Georgia voters enacted bills to permit
racially segregated education in November 1954. Georgia allowed public educational funds to be provided to individuals to establish private
segregated schools. Michigan voters approved, almost two to one, a state
constitutional amendment to permit the abolition of public schools if
there was no other way to avoid racial desegregation of schoolchildren.
Similar actions were taken in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and
South Carolina.
“All deliberate speed”
Reversing segregation was not going to come easily, and the Court realized the tremendous resistance local politicians and school boards would
have to its decision. Therefore, the Brown decision was argued again over
the issue of how to bring about desegregation. In Brown II (1957), Chief
Justice Earl Warren (1891–1974) and the Supreme Court required local
federal district courts to assess local obstacles to integration and decide
whether local school boards were making honest attempts at the desegregation of public schools. The nation’s public schools were ordered to
desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”
Desegregation was extremely unpopular. Attempts by African
American students to follow court-ordered integration resulted in riots
in cities such as Milford, Delaware; Mansfield, Texas; Clinton,
Tennessee; and New Orleans, Louisiana. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower (1890–1969; served 1953–61) believed that the Supreme
Court had attempted to force the nation to integrate too quickly and offered no help. Even many African American leaders and intellectuals,
such as writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and activist W. E. B.
Du Bois (1868–1963), disliked the idea, doubting that African
American children would be treated equally in desegregated schools.
White southerners continued to use tactics of obstruction and delay.
Desegregation did not occur in the Deep South until the mid-1960s.
Nonetheless, Brown had an immediate effect on the hearts and
minds of African Americans, and many historians consider it the start of
the modern civil rights movement. Movement leaders stated that
Brown influenced their activities, if only because it showed that the nation’s highest court believed that the Constitution supported their civil rights.