Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, which declared that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal.

The decision overturned the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court ruled that segregation laws were constitutional if equal facilities were provided to whites and blacks. Segregation was therefore justified under the doctrine “separate but equal,” but in few cases were segregated facilities actually equal. The disparity was particularly clear in public schools, where the amount of financing and the standard of education for all-black schools lagged far behind all-white schools.

In 1951, the NAACP recruited families from Topeka, Kan., to take part in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school segregation. The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, had a daughter who was forced to take a bus to an all-black school rather than attend the all-white school blocks from her house. The case was combined with similar cases from other parts of the country and argued before the Supreme Court by a team of NAACP lawyers headed by the future justice Thurgood Marshall.



The New York Times summarized the NAACP’s case: “Their main thesis was that segregation, of itself, was unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment, which was adopted July 28, 1868, was intended to wipe out the last vestige of inequality between the races, the Negro side argued. … The Negroes also asserted that segregation had a psychological effect on pupils of the Negro race and was detrimental to the educational system as a whole.”

The defense argued that there was nothing in the Constitution outlawing segregation and that therefore it was a matter for the states to decide. The court, in a 9 to 0 decision, sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that segregation violated the clause of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing that states could not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

In the most famous comment on the case, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared, “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

In a separate 1955 case that became known as Brown II, the court ruled that school districts in the 17 states that required segregation and the four that allowed it (including Kansas) integrate their school systems “with all deliberate speed.” The ambiguity of the phrase encouraged many school districts to strongly resist integration, often by shutting down public schools and financing private schools (which were not affected by Brown) for white students. In some places, it took more than 10 years for public schools to become integrated.

Connect to Today:

Even after the implementation of Brown, many schools remained virtually segregated because of neighborhood patterns. In the 1970s, some school districts sought — and some were forced by courts — to achieve a racial balance in schools using tactics like busing students to schools outside their neighborhood. However, in 2007, a divided Supreme Court ruled that public schools “cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.”

In January 2012, The Times reported on a study by the Manhattan Institute that found that segregation in U.S. neighborhoods had greatly declined and that “the nation’s cities are more racially integrated than at any time since 1910.” While, as the article noted, the findings were generally accepted by a number of experts, some argued that the decline in busing to achieve racial integration has resulted in some public schools that are more segregated than before.

What are your thoughts on the evolution of integration in the United States since Brown? How do you think we should consider the issue of continued school segregation in the context of increased urban integration? Why?



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