Brown v. Board of Education

People

Thurgood Marshall

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine that had governed American law since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and stands as one of the most consequential rulings in the history of the Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the unanimous bench, declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and that segregation generated "a feeling of inferiority" in African American children that undermined their educational and psychological development. Brown v. Board of Education was not a single case but five consolidated lawsuits from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, each challenging school segregation in different local contexts but raising the same constitutional question. The cases were brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund under the leadership of chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, who assembled a team of attorneys including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, James Nabrit, and others. A critical element of their strategy was the use of social science evidence, particularly the "doll test" experiments conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which demonstrated that segregation inflicted psychological harm on Black children by instilling a sense of racial inferiority as early as age three. The ruling provoked fierce and often violent resistance across the South. In 1955, the Court's follow-up decision in Brown II ordered desegregation to proceed with "all deliberate speed," language that critics saw as an invitation to delay. In 1956, 101 members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto vowing to resist the decision, and Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for "Massive Resistance," a legislative campaign to close public schools rather than integrate them. Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five original case locations, shut down its entire public school system for five years rather than comply. In 1957, nine Black students attempting to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were met by the National Guard and a violent mob, requiring President Eisenhower to deploy the 101st Airborne Division to protect them. Despite these obstacles, Brown set the legal and moral foundation for the civil rights movement and remains the defining judicial statement that state-sponsored racial segregation is unconstitutional.