On the seventeenth day in May 1954 a decision was made which changed things in the United States dramatically. For millions of black Americans, news of the U. S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education meant, at last, that they and their children no longer had to attend separate, and almost universally unequal, schools. Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court ruling that changed the life of every American forever.
In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help.
The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. Other black parents joined Brown, and, in 1951, the NAACP requested an injunction that would forbid the segregation of Topeka’s public schools (NAACP). 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 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 had overcome much more than just segregated schools and became very successful. The request for an injunction pushed the court to make a difficult decision.
On one hand, the judges agreed with the Browns; saying that: “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” (The National Center For Public Research). 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 yet.
Because of the precedent of Plessy, the court felt “compelled” to rule in favor of the Board of Education (Cozzens). Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951. Their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the cases on December 9, 1952, but failed to reach a decision. The judges had to decide whether or not the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind. The court ruling eventually came to be unanimous.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court asked this question in the decision read on May 17, 1954: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? ” (The National Center for Public Research). They struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy for public education saying that it “has no place”, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and required the desegregation of schools across America (The National Center For Public Research).
On that Monday in May, the high court’s ruling that outlawed school segregation in the United States generated urgent news flashes on the radio and frenzied black. One swift and unanimous decision by the top judges in the land was going to end segregation in public schools. Southern politicians reacted with such fury and fear that they immediately called the day “Black Monday. ” South Carolina Gov. James Byrnes, who rose to political power with passionate advocacy of segregation, said the decision was “the end of civilization in the South as we have known it. ”
Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge struck an angry tone. He said Georgia had no intention of allowing “mixed race” schools as long as he was governor. He touched on Confederate pride from the days when the South went to war with the federal government over slavery by telling supporters that the Supreme Court’s ruling was not law in his state; he said it was “the first step toward national suicide. ” The Brown v Board of Education decision should be regarded, he said, as nothing but a “mere scrap of paper” (Patterson). Southern whites were in strong support of segregated schools.
Newspapers for black readers reacted with satisfaction. “The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Harlem’s Amsterdam News. A writer in the Chicago Defender explained, “neither the atomic bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy,” and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who directed the legal fight that led to Brown v Board of Education, predicted the end of segregation in all American public schools by the fall of 1955 (Patterson).
This decision was one of life changing proportions for all Americans but for black people it was also one huge step toward equality and eventually total freedom. However, ten years after the decision very little school integration had taken place. True to the challenging words of segregationist governors, the Southern states had hunkered down in a massive resistance campaign against school integration. Some Southern counties even closed their schools instead of allowing blacks and whites into the same classrooms.
In other towns, segregationist academies opened, and most if not all of the white children left the public schools for the racially exclusive alternatives. Some parents of white children chose to pay for private school tuition in order to maintain segregation. In most places, the governors, mayors, and school boards found it easy enough to just ask for more time before integrating schools (Patterson). Many southerners were so racist they would do anything not to go to a school with black children. This extremely slow approach worked.
In 1957, President Eisenhower had to send troops from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock just to get nine black children safely into Central High School. In response to this Arkansas closed all public high schools for two years (Patterson). Only in the late 1960s, under the threat of losing federal funding, did large-scale school integration begin in Southern public schools. In many places, in both the North and the South, black and white students did not go to school together until a federal court ordered school children to ride buses across town to bring the races together (Cozzens).
Today, a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University finds that the percentage of white students attending public schools with Hispanic or black students has steadily declined since 1988. In fact, the report concludes that school integration in the United States is “lower in 2000 than in 1970, before busing for racial balance began. ” In the South, home to the majority of America’s black population, there is now less school integration than there was in 1970.
The Harvard report concluded, “At the beginning of the 21st century, American schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous re-segregation. ” Today, America’s schools are so heavily segregated that more than two-thirds of black and Hispanic students are in schools where a majority of the students are not white. Also today, most of the nation’s white children attend a school that is almost 80 percent white (NAACP). Hispanics are now the most segregated group of students in the nation because they live in highly concentrated clusters.
Fifty years later, the Brown v Board of Education decision looks different. The real impact of the legal, political, and cultural eruption that changed America is not exactly what it first appeared to be. Segregated housing patterns and an increase in the number of black and Hispanic immigrants have concentrated minorities in poverty-stricken areas of big cities and created a new reality of public schools segregated by race and class. Today, it is hard to even remember America before Brown v Board of Education because the ruling completely changed the nation.
Before the Brown v Board of Education decision, the federal government lent its power to enforcing the laws of segregation under an 1896 Supreme Court ruling that permitted “separate but equal” treatment of blacks and whites. Blacks and whites who tried to integrate factories, unions, public buses and trains, parks, the military, restaurants, department stores, and more found that the power of the federal government was with the segregationists. Before Brown v Board of Education, the federal government had struggled even to pass a law banning lynching (Cozzens).
But after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was a violation of the Constitution, the federal attitude toward enforcing second-class citizenship for blacks shifted on the scale of a change in the ocean’s tide or a movement in the plates of the continents. Once the highest court in the land said equal treatment for all did not allow for segregation, then the lower courts, the Justice Department, and federal prosecutors, as well as the FBI, all switched sides (Patterson). They didn’t always act to promote integration, but they no longer used their power to stop it.
An irreversible shift had begun, and it was the direct result of the Brown v Board of Education decision. The change in the attitude of federal officials created a wave of anticipation among black people, who became alert to the possibility of achieving the long-desired goal of racial equality. The year after the Brown v Board of Education case, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That led to a year long bus boycott and the emergence of massive, nonviolent protests for equal rights.
That same year, a 27 year-old man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nation’s prophet of civil rights for all Americans (NAACP). Kings grandfather had earlier led the protests resulting in Atlanta’s first black high school and his father was a minister and community leader as well. King encouraged others to organize peaceful protests. In 1960 a group of black college students rose to King’s challenge and organized a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter designated “whites only” in Greensboro, South Carolina.
News reports of the sit-in and the resultant harassment the students endured, inspired a sit-in movement that spread across the nation to combat segregation (Patterson). Black Americans were taking full and long awaited advantage of the Brown v Board of Education decision. Stand like Rosa Parks became more common. Blacks were determined to get their freedom and were stopping at nothing to get their word heard. This change in black and white attitudes toward race also had an impact on culture. Churches began to grapple with the Christian and Jewish principles of loving thy neighbor, even if thy neighbor had a different color skin.
Major league baseball teams no longer feared a fan revolt if they allowed more than one black player on a team. Black writers, actors, athletes, and musicians, ranging from James Baldwin to the Supremes and Muhammad Ali, began to cross over into the mainstream of American culture (Cozzens). The other side of the change in racial attitudes was white support for equal rights. College-educated young white people in the 1960s often defined themselves by their willingness to embrace racial equality. Bob Dylan sang about the changing times as answers “blowing in the wind.
Movies like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” found major audiences among all races, and previously all-white private colleges and universities began opening their doors to black students (Cozzens). The resulting arguments over affirmative action in college admissions led to the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in the University of California v Bakke case, which outlawed the use of quotas, and its recent ruling that the University of Michigan can take race into account as one factor in admitting students to its law school. The court has also had to deal with affirmative action in the business world, in both hiring and contracts (Patterson).
All of these questions were a result the questions of equality in the Constitution raised by the Brown v Board of Education decision. However, the most important legacy of the Brown v Board of Education decision, by far, is the growth of an educated black middle class. The number of black people graduating from high school and college has soared since Brown v Board of Education, and the incomes of blacks have climbed steadily as a result. Home ownership and investment in the stock market among black Americans have rocketed since the 1980s.
The political and economic force of that black middle class continues to bring America closer to the vision of racial equality that Dr. King might have dreamed of 50 years ago. The Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954, ruling in Brown v Board of Education remains a landmark legal decision. This decision is huge not only because it changed the history of America forever but also because it was a huge step for blacks in the United States. This decision would eventually lead to the full freedom of blacks in America. Brown v Board of Education is the “Big Bang” of all American history in the 20th century.
