Brown v Board of Education of Topeka remains one of the most important court decisions in US history. On this day in 1954, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in this landmark case.
The Brown in the case title was Linda Brown, a young African American who had to walk miles from her home to attend an inferior school in Topeka, Kansas. Not only did the Supreme Court find in her favor, Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregated schools discriminated in all cases because they branded students with a stigma based on color.
Many interesting aspects of what happened next deserve mention. One is that the decision was unanimous. All knew the ruling would be earthshaking should the Supreme Court find in favor of Brown and strike down segregated schools. Warren wanted to leave no room for segregationists to fight back against the ruling by pointing to a dissenting opinion.
Reaction to Brown v Board of Education
The most infamous aspect of Brown v Board of Education is the southern reaction to the decision. Many pledged “Massive Resistance,” a typically southern response to unpopular legal decisions. From Nullification to the present, southerners have first opposed laws they dislike by refusing to obey them on a grand scale. Only when faced with force do they fall back on their next option, crying “states rights” while sulking and continuing to defy the law through more subtle means. (Lest anyone think this is overgeneralizing on a grand scale, I once proposed this interpretation of Southern legal history to my professor of Southern History at the University of Arkansas. She thought about it for a minute before replying that I wasn’t far off.)
Most notorious, perhaps, in its outrage was Prince Edward County in Virginia. When faced with integrating its public schools in 1959, it closed them instead. All of them. For five years. In their place it set up a private school system for white students funded by state tuition grants and tax credits (using public funds for private purposes) that the courts ultimately declared unconstitutional.
The reason for Massive Resistance probably seems clear-cut: southern racism. There’s more, however. Or, at least, the foundations of that racism are broader than most suspect. Besides the belief in the inferiority of African Americans held by many southern whites, they also feared miscegenation. Although it doesn’t receive as much attention as other facets of segregation, the fear of racial mixing was one of the pillars of segregation. I once spoke on this matter with a fellow professor who’d graduated from the University of Alabama in the 1960s and had been a member of the civil rights organization known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He told me that Brown v Board of Education was the most hated and important event of the entire Civil Rights Movement in the South.
Other Interesting Aspects of Brown v Board of Education
I want to comment on one more aspect of this case I find critical before I leave the story to rest. That is the philosophy followed by the Supreme Court in its decision. It has always struck me that the court probably didn’t have to go as far as it did in its ruling. It could have ruled that segregation was permissible as long as the educational opportunities given to black and white students truly were equal. That would have caused much less uproar while also addressing the stigma created by segregated schools.
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But it didn’t. The US needed to end segregation to draw closer to its founding principles. (There were other, more concrete reasons, too, like the Soviet Union using segregation as propaganda against the US in the Cold War.) The Warren Court saw the need for a more just society and interpreted the law to move the US in that direction. This is remarkable because, often, the Supreme Court has failed to act in this manner, instead using legalisms as cover to ignore acts of injustice.
One Example
A complete list of these instances would require dozens of blog posts, but here’s one of the more notorious. In 1873, in Louisiana, the Colfax Massacre took place. Former Confederate soldiers, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and another similar organization called the White League massacred more than sixty African Americans. Reconstruction officials indicted more than ninety of the perpetrators, and nine went to trial for conspiracy under the Ku Klux Klan Act. (Murder would seem the obvious thing to charge them with, but a murder trial would have taken place in a state court which, in Louisiana, would not uphold the rights of African Americans.)
When the Supreme Court ruled on the case in 1876, it overturned the convictions of these men in the lower courts. How could this happen? The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only protected people against actions from the states (“No state shall . . .”), not individuals. Because the state of Louisiana had not ordered the murders, the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t protect the rights of those killed. The ultimate result was that crimes committed against blacks in the South were never prosecuted successfully because the national government couldn’t do so, and southern state governments wouldn’t do so. The letter of the law was more important than its purpose, providing justice to African Americans. Nearly a century of segregation followed.
Thanks for reading to the end if you’ve gotten this far. This is a topic I find very important and wanted to explain in some detail.
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