ASALH CELEBRATES THE 70 TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BROWN DECISION

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board Education of Topeka case that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. This case was brought before the court by NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, who wrote the original complaint and was recently celebrated by the United States Postal service for her work as a civil rights pioneer and judiciary trailblazer. Motley became the 47 th honoree in the Black Heritage stamp series. The Brown v. Board case was the culmination of twenty years of legal cases against the enforcement of segregation in American public education.

Starting in 1931 with the Margold Report, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) adopted a strategy to attack segregation in public education and to overturn the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that affected all aspects of life for African Americans. After visiting the South in the early 1930s newly appointed NAACP General Counsel and Howard University law professor Charles Hamilton Houston produced a report on the condition of public schools for African Americans. The report documented clearly that schools for Black children were separate but definitely not equal. Houston developed a three-pronged strategy to attack segregated and inferior education for Black children in the South and it consisted of the following:

• Force southern states to provide transportation (school buses) for African American
  students;
• Require southern school districts to equalize the salaries of African American teachers with those of white teachers; and
• Require southern states to provide graduate and professional schools and training for African American students in the South to end the practice of sending them to northern colleges and universities to obtain degrees in law, medicine, pharmacy and other professional careers.

From 1935 to 1950, Houston and his replacement as NAACP General Counsel, Thurgood Marshall, and a team of lawyers who were trained at Howard University’s Law School to be “social engineers,” won cases to desegregate graduate and professional schools. They won cases in Maryland (1935), Missouri (1938), Oklahoma (1940) and Texas (1950). These cases served as the legal precedents under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause that Marshall used to take on segregation in the nation’s public schools in the early 1950s.

Starting with a case that originated in Clarendon County, South Carolina in 1947, where Black parents advocated for a school bus to transport their children to and from school, Marshall began a frontal assault on segregation in the nation’s public schools. In 1950, after arguing the case of Briggs v. Elliott in the U. S. District Court in Charleston, the Judge J. Waties Waring urged Marshall to expand the case from just asking for equalization of the colored schools with the white schools to full desegregation.

The Briggs case became a part of five school desegregation cases under the name of the lead case, Brown v. Board of Education of, Topeka. The Brown case was significant not only because of its outcome, but also because of the methodology and the scholars that Thurgood Marshall employed to develop the argument to win the case. Marshall used the research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark about the negative impact of segregation on Black children (the “Doll Studies”). He also used the research of scholars such as Drs. John Hope Franklin and Rayford W. Logan (two deceased members of ASALH) to prepare his successful brief.

After hearing these well-prepared arguments and deliberating among themselves, the justices of U.S. Supreme Court voted 9-0 that segregated public schools were indeed unconstitutional.

As we know, much has happened since the 1954 Brown decision. Some of our fellow citizens and some of the nation’s political leaders have spent a considerable amount of time and effort to reverse the Brown decision and to defend racial segregation. So, while we celebrate the 70 the Anniversary of this landmark case and the role it had in the African American freedom struggle, we know that the fight is not over. In fact, African Americans and their allies still have to fight to teach our history, to defend our voting rights, and to be treated as full citizens of the United States of America.