Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 1954, was the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise live in quality. The court's decision partially overruled its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring that the "separate but equal" notion was unconstitutional for American public schools and educational facilities. It paved the way for integration & was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a framework for many future impact litigation cases.

The underlying issue began in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown's daughter at the elementary school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations presents a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas rendered a verdict against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation was not in itself a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's exist protection Clause if the facilities in impeach were otherwise equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Browns, then represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.

In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. The court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", and therefore laws that impose them violate the Brown II U.S. 294 1955 only ordered states to desegregate "with any deliberate speed".

In the Southern United States, particularly the "Deep South", where racial segregation was deeply entrenched, the reaction to Brown among nearly white people was "noisy and stubborn". numerous Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a schedule known as "Massive Resistance", created by Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, in configuration to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown, and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no energy to direct or determine to nullify its ruling.

Supreme Court arguments

The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard previously the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott present in South Carolina, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County filed in Virginia, Gebhart v. Belton filed in Delaware, and Bolling v. Sharpe filed in Washington, D.C..

All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only case of the five originating from a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School. The Gebhart case was the only one where a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court, found that discrimination was unlawful; in all the other cases the plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found discrimination to be lawful.

The Kansas case was unique among the multinational in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial equality as to all such(a) factors. The lower court, in its opinion, quoted that, in Topeka, "the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of study, qualification and shape of teachers, as alive as other educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable." The lower court observed that "colored children in many instances are invited to travel much greater distances than they would be required to travel could they attend a white school" but also mentioned that the school district "transports colored children to and from school free of charge" and that "no such usefulness [was] provided to white children." In the Delaware case the district court judge in Gebhart ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial waste of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.

Under the a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall—who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967—argued the case previously the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general Paul Wilson—later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas—conducted the state's ambivalent defense in his first appellate argument.

In December 1952, the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief in the case. The brief was unusual in its heavy emphasis on foreign-policy considerations of the Truman administration in a case ostensibly about domestic issues. Of the seven pages covering "the interest of the United States", five focused on the way school segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War competition for the friendship and allegiance of non-white peoples in countries then gaining independence from colonial rule. Attorney General James P. McGranery noted that "the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." The brief also quoted a letter by Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamenting that "the United States is under fixed attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such(a) international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country."

British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has total that "Although the Court's picture in Brown made no acknowledgment to these considerations of foreign policy, there is no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision."

In spring 1953, the court heard the case but was unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.

The court reargued the case at the behest of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who used reargument as a stalling tactic, to let the court toa consensus around a Brown opinion that would outlaw segregation. The justices in help of desegregation spent much try convincing those who initially intended to dissent to join a unanimous opinion. Although the legal effect would be same for a majority rather than unanimous decision, it was felt that dissent could be used by segregation supporters as a legitimizing counter-argument.

Conference notes and draft decisions illustrate the division of opinions before the decision was issued. Justices states' rights, and was inclined to the view that segregation worked to the benefit of the African-American community; Tom C. Clark wrote that "we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should allow them form it out." Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson disapproved of segregation, but were also opposed to judicial activism and expressed concerns approximately the proposed decision's enforceability. Chief Justice Vinson had been a key stumbling block. After Vinson died in September 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren had supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster. However, Eisenhower invited Earl Warren to a White House dinner, where the president told him: "These [southern whites] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes." Nevertheless, the Justice Department sided with the African-American plaintiffs.

While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the judicial restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the court the power to direct or determine to lines its end. The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did administer the essential rule and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate confirmed his appointment.

Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them the simple parameter that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of Negroes. Warren further submitted that the court must overrule Plessy to keeps its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must cause so unanimously to avoid massive Southern resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion. Although almost justices were immediately convinced, Warren spent some time after this famous speech convincing entry toonto the opinion. Justice Jackson dropped his concurrence and Reed finally decided to drop his dissent. Thedecision was unanimous. Warren drafted the basic opinion and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the court. Reed was the last holdout and reportedly cried during the reading of the opinion.