Brown V the Board of Eddecision and Impact on African Americans

Brown V. The Board of Education

Education has long been regarded as a valuable asset for all of America's youth. Yet, for decades, the full benefits of education were denied to African Americans as a result of the prevailing social condition of Jim Crowism. Not until the verdict in Brown V the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, would this denial be acknowledged and slowly dismantled.

Jim Crow laws, in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and munici-palities, beginning in the 1880s, legalizing segregation between blacks and whites (Woodward, 6). One of the most cited cases serving as the basis of Jim Crow was the Supreme Court case Plessy Vs Ferguson . The Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson stated that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional. This encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that undermined and basically voided any progress that had been made on the behalf of blacks during the post civil war Reconstruction. These separate, but equal laws were passed for not only for railways and street cars, put for railways and streetcars, but eventually expanded to include almost all other aspects of life including public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, hospitals, schools as well as many other public institutions. The general contention of the separate institutions created for blacks was that generally they were of inferior quality.

Since the early twentieth century, the NAACP pursued avenues of legal change in order to gradually dismantle Jim Crowism. By the middle of the twentieth century it

seemed they were making remarkable progress and inching closer and closer to their goal of legally creating an integrated society. In 1949 there was the case of Briggs v Elliot. Harry Briggs, as well as 19 other parents, with the help of the NAACP filed suit against R.W. Elliot, the president of the school board for Clarendon County, South Carolina. Initially, parents had only asked the county to provide school buses for the black students as they did for whites. When their petitions were ignored, they filed a suit challenging segregation itself. The first of the five cases consolidated into Brown.

The NAACP's noted success began noted in 1950 with both the Sweatt v Painter, and McLaurin V Oklahoma Board of Regents cases. The Sweat V Painter case ruling enabled Herman Marion Sweatt, a black man, to gain admission into the all white University of Texas Law School, on the grounds that the state did not provide equal education for him. McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents challenged the set of limitations that were set on a black doctoral student who attended the University of Oklahoma. The Supreme Court also ruled in favor of the plaintiff on this case, citing that McLaurin "handicapped in his pursuit of effective graduate instruction. Such restrictions impair and inhibit his ability to study, to engage in discussion and exchange view with other students, and in general to learn his professions " (Kluger, 283).

In 1950 the Topeka NAACP, led by McKinley Burnett, set out to organize a legal challenge to an 1879 Kansas State law that permitted racially segregated elementary schools in certain cities based on population. For Kansas this would become the 12th case filed in the state focused on ending segregation in public schools. The local NAACP assembled a group of 13 parents who agreed to be plaintiffs on behalf of their 20

children. Following direction from legal counsel they attempted to enroll their children in segregated white schools and all were denied. Topeka operated eighteen neighborhood schools for white children, while African American children had access to only four schools. In February of 1951 the Topeka NAACP filed a case on their behalf. Although this was a class action it was named for one of the plaintiffs Oliver Brown (Kluger, 395).

The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown's case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were inherently unequal. The Board of Education's defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not necessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver had overcome more than just segregated schools to achieve what they achieved (Knappman, 467). Initially The Court found itself unable to come to a unanimous decision. On the one hand, the judges agreed with the expert witnesses; in their decision, they wrote: Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children...A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn (Knappman, 468).On the other hand, the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy. Because of the precedent of Plessy, the court felt "compelled" to rule in favor of the Board of Education (Knappman, 468).

Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 and their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the case on December 9, 1952, but failed to reach a decision. They too found it difficult to come to a conclusion that most of the justices would be able to accept (Kluger, 587). In the rearguing, heard from December 7-8, 1953, the Court had to make its decision based not on whether or not the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind when they wrote the amendment in 1868, but based on whether or not segregated schools deprived black children of equal protection of the law during the time that the case was being argued.

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the monumental unanimous court decision,

"We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment... "(Martin, 174)

The Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy for public education, by ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, and required the desegregation of schools

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