Brown v. Board of Education – 1954
Public education for all children was not realized until the twentieth century. School districts across the country routinely underfunded schools for African Americans. Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto understandings in the North meant that most school boards consisted of all white members or a majority of whites. Underfunding of separate but equal schools occurred throughout the nation. Not until the early 1950s did education change.
In 1951 and 1952, five lawsuits were filed. African American parents were tired of the inferior and underfunded education school boards were giving to their children. Numerous families joined lawsuits in South Carolina, Delaware, Kansas, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Four of the lawsuits claimed that the school boards were in violation of the Equal Protection Under the Law Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The remaining lawsuit argued that an inferior and underfunded education for blacks was in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, black students attended colored schools. Some of the schools had no heating, electricity, or indoor plumbing. Most colored schools did not have gymnasiums or cafeterias. According to one lawsuit, the school board refused to provide transportation for black students stating there was no money in their budget while that district used thirty buses to transport white students.
While school boards maintained that they were providing an equal education, albeit separate for both blacks and whites, an increase in national desegregation efforts was gaining results. Most importantly, President Harry Truman issued an executive order on July 26, 1948, that abolished racial segregation in the armed forces. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its Legal Defense Fund searched for local cases that were challenging education.
The five cases that became know as Brown v Board of Education were Harry Briggs, et al. v. R.W. Elliot, chairman, et al from Clarendon, South Carolina; Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County from Farmville, Virginia; Gebhart v. Belton from Claymont, Delaware; Bolling v. Sharpe from the District of Columbia; and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka from Kansas. All of the cases argued that because of ongoing underfunding of the black schools in each respective district, black students were not receiving the same education as white students.
The US Supreme Court heard the Brown case in December 1952. When no decision could be made to announce in the Spring of 1953 and with the death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, the case was argued again on December 8, 1953. Chief Justice Earl Warren wanted a unanimous ruling to show that the nation had reached a consensus on legal segregation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to Chief Justice Warren stating that southerners did not want their girls to sit next to big black men in class, but that they were not bad people.
Finally, on Monday, May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision. Chief Justice Warren read for the majority in the unanimous decision. Stating that the importance for public education in the Republic had evolved into a requirement for good citizenship, the support of segregating children solely based on their race could no longer exist. As such, the Court ruled that separate education for the races was not equal and no longer constitutional.
With the announcement of the decision, the burden of responsibility to ensure equal public education for white and black children fell to the states. Many states were tasked with amending parts of their constitutions that were now unenforceable and formulating plans to comply with the Court’s Brown decision. To state that the issue remained contentious would be a massive understatement. Throughout the South, North, and even West, public educators, board members, parents, and students viciously and sometimes violently attacked each other in attempts to prevent school desegregation.
In the end, it was the Court’s ruling in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that was overturned. No longer could separate but equal be the law of the land in public accommodations. The Warren court had decided that equal meant together, not separate. The last word was yet to come.