Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka[1] was a landmark 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in publicly-funded schools are unconstitutional even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality. That doctrine came to be known as "separate but equal".[2] The Court's decision in Brown laid the groundwork that required racial integration of all U.S. schools and was a major victory of the civil rights movement,[3] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.[4]
The case originated in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll the child of an African American resident, Oliver Brown[5], in the elementary school closest to their home. Instead, the Topeka school system required the child to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. Brown, and twelve other local black families in similar situations, filed a class-action lawsuit[6] in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education claiming that the school district's segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit rendered a verdict against Brown and the families, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. Their council, then NAACP head attorney Thurgood Marshall, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.
In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the 14-page decision did not spell out the method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II () only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
In the U.S. South, where racial segregation was strongly entrenched, the reaction to Brown from the white majority was "noisy and stubborn".Template:Sfnp Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown, and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no power to nullify its ruling.
The process of integrating schools racially did not go smoothly for many years even in other parts of the U.S. There were riots over busing/integration in cities such as Boston and Chicago. Nevertheless, by around 1970, it was accomplished.
Provenance
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Notes
- ↑ This case is commonly referred to by the shorter name Brown v. Board of Education, dropping the of Topeka from the end.
- ↑ Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson in its entirety, Brown and several other Supreme Court decisions have severely weakened Plessy to the point that it is usually considered to have been de facto overruled. (Schauer, 1997, p=280)
- ↑ Hartford, Bruce. Brown v. Board of Education Decision (May).
- ↑ Schuck, P.H. (2006). Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-3961-7.
- ↑ Wikipedia has an article about Oliver Brown.
- ↑ A class action lawsuit is one in which the plaintiff represents, collectively, other people who are in the same situation.