What happened
On 17 May 1954, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Brown rejected separate educational facilities as compatible with equal protection.
The opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Warren, decided together cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. They had been argued in December 1952 and reargued in December 1953. In each, children had been refused admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation. The Court held that in public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place, and it rejected any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to its finding that segregation harms the children it separates.
How we know it
The opinion survives in Supreme Court records. Reading it alongside the 1955 implementation decision distinguishes the constitutional holding from the Court’s directions about carrying it out.
The National Archives holds the opinion among the Records of the Supreme Court, Record Group 267, and publishes a transcript. The transcript includes the Court’s syllabus as well as the full opinion.
Why it went that way
The case challenged state-sanctioned separation under the Fourteenth Amendment. The question concerned the consequences of segregation itself, not merely whether buildings or supplies could be made comparable.
The opinion says the history of the Fourteenth Amendment was inconclusive on schools. Proponents of the post-War Amendments intended to remove all legal distinctions, it says, and their opponents wanted the least effect, and what others in Congress and the state legislatures had in mind could not be determined with certainty. It adds that public education in 1868 was far less developed than in 1954: in the South, free common schools supported by taxation had not taken hold, and the education of Black children was almost nonexistent. The Court therefore said it could not turn the clock back to 1868, or to 1896, when Plessy was decided, and had to consider public education in light of its full development.
The lower courts in the Kansas, South Carolina and Virginia cases had denied relief on the separate-but-equal doctrine. In the Delaware case the state Supreme Court adhered to the doctrine but ordered the plaintiffs admitted to the white schools because of their superiority. The Court noted findings that the schools in these cases had been equalized, or were being equalized, in buildings, curricula, teachers’ qualifications and salaries and other tangible factors. For that reason it looked at the effect of segregation itself. It held that separating children solely because of race generates a feeling of inferiority about their status in the community, and it quoted a Kansas court finding that the impact is greater when segregation has the sanction of law. It said that finding was amply supported by modern authority, and it added that it did not need to decide whether the same segregation also violated the Due Process Clause.
What is still contested
A unanimous judgment did not mean immediate desegregation. The later direction to proceed with deliberate speed left room for delay, and the National Archives documents substantial resistance.
The 1954 opinion did not settle the remedy. It restored the cases to the docket for further argument on the forms of the decrees, and it invited the Attorney General of the United States and the attorneys general of the states requiring or permitting segregation in public education to take part. On 31 May 1955, in what is now called Brown II, Warren read a second unanimous decision instructing the states to begin desegregation plans “with all deliberate speed.”
The National Archives also records disagreement over how the Court reached its result. Some constitutional scholars felt it went against legal tradition by relying heavily on data supplied by social scientists rather than on precedent or established law, and supporters of judicial restraint believed the Court had overstepped by essentially writing new law. Proponents of judicial activism believed it had appropriately used its position to adapt the Constitution to new problems.
What it changed
Brown removed constitutional legitimacy from state-imposed school segregation and strengthened further civil-rights challenges. Its effects depended on additional legal, political and community action.
The National Archives says minority groups and members of the civil rights movement were buoyed by the decision even without specific directions for implementation. It adds that the Warren Court stayed this course for the next 15 years, in cases that affected not only race relations but also the administration of criminal justice, the operation of the political process, and the separation of church and state.
Is it worth your time
Worth studying as both a ruling and an implementation problem. A court can declare a right while leaving difficult questions about who will enforce it, when institutions will change and how resistance will be overcome.
