Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was the 1954 ruling in which the Supreme Court of the United States held, unanimously, that state laws segregating public schools by race violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Announced on 17 May 1954, it rejected the "separate but equal" doctrine in public education and became a landmark of the civil rights movement, though putting it into practice took decades.

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 during the Reconstruction era, promised all persons equal protection of the laws. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), however, the Supreme Court accepted segregation as long as separate facilities were equal. By the mid-twentieth century, 17 states required segregated schools and 16 banned them. From the 1930s lawyers linked to the NAACP and Howard University chipped away at Plessy, starting with graduate and professional schools, and won important cases in 1950 that suggested segregation could itself be unequal. The Cold War added pressure, as federal officials worried that racial discrimination damaged America's image abroad.

Topeka, Kansas, ran separate elementary schools under an 1879 state law that allowed, but did not require, segregation in larger towns. In autumn 1951, at the NAACP's direction, thirteen Black parents tried to enrol their children, twenty in all, at their nearest neighbourhood schools and were turned away. The named plaintiff was Oliver Brown, a railway welder and assistant pastor whose daughter Linda, a third-grader, had to travel to a segregated school while a white school stood seven blocks from home. A three-judge federal court ruled against the families. It accepted that segregation harmed Black children, but found the Topeka schools substantially equal and felt bound by Plessy.

The Supreme Court heard Brown together with four similar cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The Virginia case had begun when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led a walkout of 450 students from her high school in Farmville. Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's chief counsel, argued for the plaintiffs. The justices heard argument in spring 1953 but were divided and ordered a rehearing. Chief Justice Fred Vinson's death in September 1953 let President Dwight D. Eisenhower appoint Earl Warren, who worked to build a single opinion that every justice would sign, convinced that a split decision would encourage resistance in the South.

Warren's short opinion found the history of the Fourteenth Amendment inconclusive and instead stressed the central place of public education in modern American life. Segregation required by the state, the Court held, was inherently unequal even where buildings and teachers were comparable, because of its harmful psychological effect on Black children; it cited research including the doll experiments of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The Court did not order a remedy at once. In a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, it left desegregation to the district courts, to proceed "with all deliberate speed".

Most white Southerners condemned the ruling. In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd led "massive resistance", and Prince Edward County closed its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate. In 1957 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students from Little Rock Central High School until Eisenhower sent army troops to protect them. Many Black teachers and principals lost their jobs as schools merged. Topeka's own district was not declared fully desegregated until 27 July 1999. Brown nonetheless stands as a major victory for the movement and a model for later lawsuits seeking change through the courts. A year and a half after the ruling, the Montgomery bus boycott carried the struggle from the courtroom into the streets.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show the United States in the years around the ruling; the case itself concerned the state of Kansas.