• INTRODUCTION
• CHALLENGING SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
• DISMANTLING "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL"
• THE AFTERMATH OF BROWN
• IMPLEMENTING BROWN
• THE LEGACY OF BROWN - FIFTY YEARS LATER
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court boldly issued its first decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (Brown), ruling "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This landmark decision overruled Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the decision that held Jim Crow "separate but equal facilities" for Whites and Blacks as constitutional. The Jim Crow era in American history dates from the late 1890s, when southern states began systematically to codify (or strengthen) in law and state constitutional provisions the subordinate position of African Americans in society. Most of these legal steps were aimed at separating the races in public spaces. Thurgood Marshall, the attorney who argued the Brown case before the US Supreme Court (and who later became the Nation's first African American Supreme Court Justice) poignantly characterized the fundamental rationale for Jim Crow when he argued that anyone who defended separate schools was showing "an inherent determination that the people who were formerly slaves...shall be kept as near that stage as possible..."

The Brown decision is hailed as a pivotal point in the efforts by African Americans to gain equal protection under the law. Even as desegregation progressed, de facto segregated schools were frequently left untouched in the North. White flight from cities to suburbs in the North only exacerbated racial divisions in the schools. Now, national experts, such as Gary Orfield of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, point to trends of re-segregation in public schools across the country.

CHALLENGING SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

The strategy to dismantling racial barriers to equal education evolved slowly. Charles H. Houston who served as Dean of Howard University Law School, the training ground for generations of civil rights attorneys, was the first chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded in 1909. The NAACP's initial challenges to racial inequality focused on graduate and professional education, such as the successfully argued 1938 Supreme Court case, Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada. The University of Missouri denied a qualified Black applicant admission to its all-White law school. Aware that there were no separate facilities, the University then created a separate and quite inferior law school exclusively for Black students. The Court invalidated the two-tiered professional training, labeling it as providing unfair "privilege...for White law students" and denying those same privileges to qualified African Americans.

DISMANTLING "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL"

Houston's successor, Thurgood Marshall, subsequently set up the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and focused on the task of directly challenging "separate but equal" as inherently unequal even if the segregated facilities appeared to be of similar quality. Working from the determination that segregation in professional and graduate schools had denied African Americans equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, Marshall then turned the NAACP's attention onto the public schools. In South Carolina, Delaware, Kansas, and Virginia, the NAACP recruited parents to sue on behalf of their children in local federal courts. Some of the public schools were segregated by state mandated law, others by custom, and still others by local ordinances. All of these cases were consolidated into the single appeal to the Supreme Court in Brown.

Marshall recruited a talented team of attorneys, historians, and enthusiastic law school students to work on the arguments presented in Brown. The team included social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark who concluded that segregation, the mere experience of being kept apart solely on the basis of race, damaged both Black and White children. In its Brown decision, however, the US Supreme Court only included reference to the fact that Black children were psychologically damaged.

In December 1952, Marshall's team presented its first argument in the consolidated cases known as Brown v. Board of Education. After hearing the initial arguments, the Court was so divided that it requested supplemental briefings. In the interim, Chief Justice Vinson died and Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice. By May of 1954 this new court reached a unanimous decision to overturn Plessy.

The Brown decision, however, contained no remedy for desegregating public schools. Instead, the Court once again asked for supplemental arguments, and it wasn't until the Spring of 1955 that the Court ordered implementation of its 1954 Brown decision, giving power to the individual States to implement desegregation plans for public schools with "all deliberate speed."

THE AFTERMATH OF BROWN

The first 50 years of the Twentieth Century were marked by the legacy of Jim Crow government sanctioned and often mandated segregation in almost all arenas: work, restaurants, public transportation, access to government offices and benefits, and of course, public schools. Challenges to Jim Crow before Brown resulted in violence and sometimes death. Dismantling the apparatus of segregation after the Brown decisions proved to be a slow, daunting task, also marked by violence. Marshall's team had argued that desegregation begin immediately, but the Court's reticence was reflected in its more vague language of "all deliberate speed." President Eisenhower failed to endorse the ruling and powerful Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress opposed desegregation. The Supreme Court was labeled "liberal activist" and the Court's charge to desegregate public schools was initially ignored.

In the southern states, post-Brown, young Black children still had to face angry mobs when trying to enroll in all-White schools. A county in Virginia closed its public schools for 5 years rather than desegregate, forcing Black children to go without instruction until 1963 when a Free School was opened. In Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), the Supreme Court forced the County to reopen its schools. This was a bittersweet victory because by then 100% of the White parents had decided to send their children to private schools rather than to the re-opened desegregated public schools. A new generation of segregation had begun.

Desegregation was also slow coming to Northern States, including New York. It wasn't until 1964 that the New York State Education Department issued a statewide desegregation order. By then African American parents had already sought relief from segregated schools through the federal courts. In 1964, in a case called Blocker v. Board of Education of Manhasset, the federal district court stated "...maintaining and perpetuating a segregated school system" was an equal protection violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

IMPLEMENTING BROWN

Although marked by successes, the legacy of desegregation contains many disappointments. In its 1967 report, "Racial Isolation in the Public Schools," the US Commission on Civil Rights identified several desegregation strategies in small cities that seemed promising as devices to create a racially mixed student population in individual schools: enlarging attendance areas and merging schools. The report identified factors contributing to successful desegregation efforts: leadership of state and local officials; the inclusion of all schools located in a district in the desegregation plan; intentional efforts to minimize racial conflicts in the newly desegregated schools; the maintenance or improvement of educational standards; desegregation of individual classes within schools as well as the schools themselves; and assistance for students who lag in performance.

The Commission's investigation also looked at student performance in some racially isolated schools that created compensatory programs offering remedial instruction and cultural enrichment for African American students. The Commission did not see evidence of lasting effects in improving the achievement of these students. For Black students attending integrated schools, however, even without compensatory education, the investigation concluded that there was early evidence that Black student achievement did improve. For White students the report states "...evidence suggests that academic achievement of White students in desegregated classrooms generally does not suffer by comparison with the achievement of such students in all-White classrooms."

Even though hundreds of schools initiated desegregation efforts, many school systems did not devise comprehensive school integration plans that involved all of the schools within a district, as suggested by the Commission's report. Token efforts were ruled insufficient in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) where the Supreme Court invalidated a voluntary Freedom of Choice plan in a rural county near Richmond, Virginia. No White parents volunteered to send their children to Black schools and only a few of the Black families risked sending their children to the White schools. Brown's requirement of "all deliberate speed" necessitated a "unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch."

In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Board of Education (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that busing was an appropriate tool to promote racially desegregated schools. Integration was not without challenges in Charlotte, North Carolina, but White and Black leaders joined forces to make the plan work. By 1974 all of the district's schools achieved racial balance. Busing, a frequent tool of desegregation plans across the country, was not universally successful. Often it was met with resistance, even violence, and over time even some Blacks questioned the merits of a remedy that was so burdensome and dangerous to Black children.

Brown v. Board of Education ruled that legally mandated segregation was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause and laid the groundwork for subsequent court cases that ruled that purposeful actions or inactions on the part of government officials to support segregation were also illegal. The courts had avoided, however, ruling that de facto segregation due to "White flight" or due to segregated housing patterns was unconstitutional and in need of a remedy. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the court ruled against a proposed interdistrict remedy that would combine Detroit and the surrounding suburban schools into a metropolitan school system. In Milliken v. Bradley II (1977), the court forced the state of Michigan to fund remedial programs for children in segregated schools in Detroit as an alternative to the court-rejected busing plan.

THE LEGACY OF BROWN - FIFTY YEARS LATER

What is the Brown legacy? Eventually, with the help of federal legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act, Brown changed the face of the Jim Crow South, and for all Americans it fundamentally altered the dialogue about race. At the same time, the legacy reflects broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. In 1994, in Topeka, Kansas, the birthplace of Brown, forty years after the Supreme Court issued its decision, a federal district court finally approved a new desegregation plan for the schools. In 1999, a federal judge, in response to a White parent claiming discrimination, ordered an end to busing as a remedy to segregation, ending 30 years of successful efforts by Blacks and Whites to maintain desegregated schools in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2003, a study by the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University found that the percentage of White students attending public schools with Black students "is lower in 2000 than in 1970..." The authors go on to say "At the beginning of the twenty-first Century, American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous re-segregation."

Clearly, Brown was a catalyst for the series of court decisions that dismantled constitutionally-sanctioned Jim Crow laws in the South. De facto segregation, prevalent in the North in places like suburban Long Island, remains in full force, and with it, segregated public schools that are racially isolated and unequal. But the story does not end here. For information about Long Island and more recent strategies to intervene in de facto segregation, visit the section entitled "The Future" on this website.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

• Continuing Challenge: The Past and the Future of Brown v. Board of Education. Notre Dame, Indiana: The University of Notre Dame Center for Civil Rights; and Evanston, Ill.: Integrated Education Associates, 1975.
• Cottle, Thomas J. Busing. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1976.
• Grant, Carl A., and Christine E. Sleeter. After the School Bell Rings. Philadelphia, Penn.: The Falmer Press, 1989.
• Greeley, Kathy. "Why Fly That Way?" Linking Community and Academic Achievement. New York: Teachers College Press, 2000.
• Greenberg, Jack. Crusaders in the courts: how a dedicated band of lawyers fought for the civil rights revolution. New York: Basic Books, ca. 1994.
• Hauser, Robert Mason. Socioeconomic Background and Educational Performance. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association, 1971.
• Jencks, Christopher et alii. A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
• Kluger, Richard. Simple justice: the history of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's struggle for equality. New York: Knopf, ca. 1975.
• Kozof, Jonathan. Savage Inequities: Children in America's Schools. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
• Lieberman, Jethro. Milestones!: 200 years of American law: milestones in our legal history. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• McBridge, James. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997.
• Metcalf, George R. From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School Desegregation. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.
• Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education; A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Persell, Caroline Hodges. Education and Inequality: The Roots and Results of Stratification in America's Schools. New York: The Free Press, 1977.
• U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. 2 volumes. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967.

Articles

• Anyaso, Hilary Hurd. "Educate, Don't Segregate." Black Issues in Higher Education 20.5 (2003): 4.
• Barker, Paul. "All Things to All Accusers. (Institutional Racism)." New Statesman 12.548 (1999): 25-27.
• Clinchy, Evans. "Needed: A New Educational Civil Rights Movement." Phi Delpha Kappan 82.7 (2001): 492-98.
• Davis, O. L., Jr. "Fifty Years PastÉand Still Miles To Go: Curriculum Development and the Brown v. Board Decision." Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 19.2 (2003): 95-98.
• Days, Drew S. III. "In Search of Educational Equality Forty-Six Years After Brown v. Board of Education." SMU Law Review 54.40 (2001): 2089-99.
• Fong, Marko. "Brown v. Board of Education: The Journey Continues." Principal Leadership (High School edition) 2.4 (2001): 6-9.
• Klein, Dora W. "Beyond Brown v. Board of Education: The Need to Remedy the Achievement Gap." Journal of Law & Education 31.4 (2002): 431-57.
• Lucas, Samuel R. "Sociodemographic Diversity, Correlated Achievement, and De Facto Tracking." Sociology of Education 75.4 (2002): 328-49.
• Morgan, Denise C. "The New School Finance Litigation: Acknowledging That Race Discrimination in Public Education is more Than Just a Tort." Northwestern University Law Review 96.1 (2001): 99-190.
• "Nation's Public Schools Have Become Resegregated, Study Finds." Black Issues in Higher Education 19.26 (2003): 8.
• Roach, Ronald. "When Academia Meets Activism." Black Issues in Higher Education 20.16 (2003): 36.
• Romero, David W. "Precedent, Parity, and Racial Discrimination: A Federal/State Comparison of the Impact of Brown v. Board of Education." Law & Society Review 37.4 (2003): 809-26.

Web Sites

• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html
• http://www.kawvalley.k12.ks.us/brown_v_board/segregation.htm
• http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu