No state legislature counted an African American among its ranks in July 1868, not even those that formed the necessary three-fourths for ratification. It was not about whether the “framers” of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to bar segregated public schools, evidence for which the Court ruled in Brown was “inconclusive.” Congress did not have a single African American member when it approved the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866. Ferguson, a rule the Court rejected in Brown as it applied to public education but a decision it failed to overturn outright. It was not about whether elementary and secondary public education for African Americans met the “separate but equal standard” of Plessy v. he Court’s opinion read more like an expert paper on sociology than a Supreme Court opinion.” In 1959, just as massive resistance to Brown was beginning to wane and the South would begin the slow process of desegregation, the noted Columbia law professor Herman Wechsler – certainly no segregationist – criticized the Court’s decision in a famous and influential law review article for failing to rely on what he called “neutral principles of constitutional law.”Īll this criticism of Brown misses the point of what that case was really about. Elite legal academics and prominent newspaper columnists in the North, such as James Reston of the New York Times, faulted the Court for rejecting “history, philosophy and custom” and instead relying on “the social scientists than on legal precedents.” In what would become a common refrain among Brown’s “respectable” critics in the coming years, Reston wrote that the Court “insisted on equality of the mind and heart rather than on equal school facilities. In a nod to the South’s “unique culture,” the Court substituted original draft language in the opinion requiring de-segregation at the “earliest practicable date” to “all deliberate speed.” We all know how that turned out.īut it was not just the editorial pages and governors of the Jim Crow states that condemned Brown as wrong as a matter of law and wrong as a matter of history. Not by accident, the Court did not even hear arguments in Brown IIuntil April 1955 and would not hand down its decision until six weeks later, towards the very end of the term. Warren concluded his reading of Brown by announcing that the Court would hear new arguments during the October 1954 Term on how to implement the ruling. No immediate desegregation was required, noted McGill, and the decision did not mean that “Negro and white children” would attend school together in the fall. Naturally, criticism from the editorial pages in the seventeen Southern and border states that required racial segregation in public education was almost uniformly critical, with the exception of moderate progressives like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution and a few others who noted that, for all the bluster coming from unreconstructed segregationists throughout the region, the Court’s decision was moderate in tone and order. Board of Education (1954), generations of trees have given their lives to a still-ongoing debate over Brown was correctly decided, whether it mattered then and matters now and what the decision said about the possibilities and limits of judicial power. Since that historic moment in the early afternoon of Monday, May 17 th, 1954, when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s unanimous judgment and opinion in Brown v. Less than a year later, Oliver Brown would take the witness stand in a federal courtroom after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had been carefully recruiting African American plaintiffs around the country to challenge racial segregation in elementary and secondary public education, made him the principal litigant in what would become, less than three years later, the most famous case ever decided by the Supreme Court. If not, Linda would walk to Monroe, whether in the bitter cold of winter or the oppressive heat of late summer. Linda literally walked by Sumner to catch a bus, if it showed up, to get to Monroe. But, like all black children, Linda was required by law to attend the all-black Monroe School, located about a mile and a half further away. The Browns lived in an integrated neighborhood and played with white children who attended Sumner. Although the Browns lived just a few blocks from Sumner, Linda was not permitted to attend school with white children. Linda Brown, who passed away early last week, became the most famous school-age child in American history when, in September 1950, her father, Oliver, attempted to enroll her at the all-white Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas.
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