Brown v. Board of Education
The 1954 Ruling and the Long Fight to Enforce It
- 15 chapters
- 33m
- Constitutional Law
- Free · no sign-up
The book traces the slow process of implementing Brown's ruling through multiple chapters covering district court decisions, Supreme Court arguments, and reactions across different regions. It examines resistance in the Deep South, the Upper South, and the North, while detailing the legal strategies behind Brown II and the concept of "all deliberate speed." The work also explores Topeka, Kansas, where the original case began, and analyzes both criticism and praise from legal scholars.
Readers seeking to understand how one Supreme Court decision sparked decades of struggle will find this thorough examination of Brown's impact and enforcement worth their time.
Listen
-
Read this chapter
For about sixty years before the Brown case, racial segregation had shaped life across the United States, with state laws enforcing separate facilities for Black and white people. The Supreme Court had supported these policies since 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that as long as the separate facilities were equal, they didn’t break the Constitution. Segregation in schools differed from state to state, with some requiring it and others forbidding it. Starting in the 1930s, activists and scholars, especially at Howard University and the NAACP, began challenging these laws by first targeting graduate education. Their efforts led to important rulings in 1950, in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, which suggested that segregation was inherently unequal. These cases helped set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.
The plaintiffs in Brown argued that separating Black and white students in schools, even if meant to offer equal resources, actually created a system of inequality. They claimed that this separation gave Black Americans inferior treatment and facilities. The case was influenced by UNESCO’s 1950 Statement, titled The Race Question, which was signed by many prominent scholars and rejected scientific attempts to justify racism while condemning it morally. The Supreme Court also referenced An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1944 work by Gunnar Myrdal, who had himself signed the UNESCO declaration.
During the Cold War, American leaders including Supreme Court justices were deeply concerned about how segregation and racism damaged the country's image abroad. Justice William O. Douglas encountered this reality firsthand during a 1950 trip to India, where the first question he was asked was, "Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" He later wrote that "the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India." Chief Justice Earl Warren, appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, shared similar concerns. In a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, he said, "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."
-
Read this chapter
In 1951, thirteen parents from Topeka filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas. The case was heard in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs represented their own children, along with twenty other young students affected by the segregation policies in place at the time. This legal challenge would become one of the key cases leading up to the landmark 1954 decision that changed the course of American civil rights history.
The case challenged the Topeka Board of Education's practice of keeping separate schools for Black and white students. This policy came from a Kansas law passed in 1879, which allowed but didn’t require school districts with populations over 15,000 to operate different elementary schools for each race. The plaintiffs were parents recruited by the Topeka NAACP leadership. In the fall of 1951, they each tried to enroll their children in the nearest neighborhood school. Each attempt was denied, and the children were sent instead to segregated schools.
In Topeka, Kansas, the NAACP chapter was led by McKinley Burnett, Charles Scott, and Lucinda Todd. It was Todd who prompted Katherine Carper Sawyer to testify as the only student plaintiff, describing her difficulties reaching the segregated Buchanan Elementary School. Following the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling, Sawyer became one of the first Black students to attend Capper Junior High and Topeka High School.
Oliver Brown was a welder at the Santa Fe Railroad and an assistant pastor at his local church. He joined a lawsuit after being encouraged by a childhood friend, Charles Scott. His daughter, Linda Carol Brown, attended Monroe Elementary, a segregated school for Black students. She walked to her school bus stop and then rode to school, which was one mile away from her home. Sumner Elementary, a white school, was just seven blocks from her house.
The case was named Brown, chosen by the NAACP because they believed a male plaintiff would be taken more seriously by the Supreme Court. The case included thirteen people, with Oliver Brown as the main name. The other plaintiffs were Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, and Lucinda Todd. Zelma Henderson was the last of them to die, passing away in Topeka on May 20, 2008, at age 88.
-
Read this chapter
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, relying on earlier Supreme Court guidance from Plessy v. Ferguson. Judge Walter Huxman wrote the decision for the three-judge panel, outlining nine findings based on what was shown at trial. One of those findings noted that segregation negatively affected Black children. Still, the court did not order change because it found the schools for Black and white students in Topeka were equal in quality when it came to buildings, transportation, lessons, and teachers. That particular finding would later be referenced in the Supreme Court’s final ruling on the case.
-
Read this chapter
The Supreme Court heard a case called Brown v. Board of Education, which actually brought together five separate lawsuits. The original case came from Kansas and was appealed from there. There was also a case from South Carolina named Briggs v. Elliott, another from Virginia called Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, one from Delaware titled Gebhart v. Belton, and one from Washington, D.C., called Bolling v. Sharpe. These five cases were combined for the Court's review.
All five cases were sponsored by the NAACP. The Davis case began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized a walkout at Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, after student protest. The Gebhart case was the only one to reach a trial court that found school segregation unlawful, a decision later upheld by the Delaware Supreme Court. In all the other cases, lower courts had ruled that segregation was legal.
The Kansas case stood out because there was no claim that the segregated schools were physically or educationally inferior. The lower court found that in Topeka, the facilities, curricula, and teachers in both black and white schools were comparable. It noted that Black children often had to travel farther to get to their schools, but also pointed out that the district provided free transportation for them, something not done for white students. In Delaware, however, the judge ordered Black students admitted to the white high school because the differences between the schools made them unequal, causing serious harm.
Walter Reuther led the United Auto Workers in donating $75,000 to support the NAACP’s legal effort in the case. Thurgood Marshall, who would later be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, argued the plaintiffs’ side. Paul Wilson, who became a distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas, represented the state during his first appellate argument.
In December 1952, the Justice Department submitted an unusual brief in the case, one that emphasized how school segregation hurt America’s standing abroad. The brief, filed as an amicus curiae, focused heavily on foreign-policy concerns, even though the case was about domestic issues. Attorney General James P. McGranery said that racial discrimination damaged U.S. relations with other countries and gave Communist propaganda fuel. The brief quoted a letter from Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who noted that the U.S. was constantly criticized in foreign media and international forums because of its practices of discrimination.
According to British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education was shaped by foreign policy concerns—even though the opinion itself did not mention them. The 1954 ruling set the stage for a long fight to enforce it, and Lester suggests that international considerations played a significant role in the justices’ thinking. While the Court’s reasoning may have focused on domestic issues, the broader global context was present, even if not explicitly stated. This influence reflects how the case was part of a larger shift in how civil rights were viewed around the world. The decision's impact extended beyond American borders, signaling changes that resonated internationally. These factors likely affected how the Court weighed the legal arguments, even as the ruling’s immediate focus remained on domestic law.
-
Read this chapter
In spring 1953, the court heard the case but couldn’t reach a decision, so it ordered the case reheard in fall 1953. During that second hearing, the justices focused on whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause forbade the existence of separate public schools for white and Black students.
Before the Supreme Court's unanimous Brown v. Board decision, justices held divided views. Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Harold Hitz Burton, and Sherman Minton were ready to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson believed Congress had not required desegregation, and Justice Stanley F. Reed argued that segregation helped African-American communities assimilate. Tom C. Clark admitted the Court had encouraged states to keep segregation. Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson opposed segregation but worried about judicial overreach and enforcement. Chief Justice Vinson died in September 1953, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to replace him. Warren had supported integrating Mexican-American students in California, yet Eisenhower privately 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." The Justice Department, however, backed the African-American plaintiffs.
Although most of the justices were personally opposed to segregation, a group within the court raised doubts about whether the Constitution actually gave the Supreme Court the authority to end it. Another faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment provided that power and pushed for a decisive move. Chief Justice Warren, whose appointment was only temporary, remained silent until the Senate officially confirmed his position.
Chief Justice Earl Warren called a meeting of the justices and made his case: the only reason to keep segregation was a genuine belief in Negroes' inferiority. He argued that the Court had to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson to protect its own credibility as a defender of liberty, and it had to do so unanimously to prevent strong resistance from Southern states. Though most justices were quickly convinced, Warren worked carefully to win over every last voice. Justice Jackson changed his mind about writing a separate concurrence, and Justice Reed, after being reminded by Warren that a lone dissent would only embolden the South, also agreed to withdraw his planned dissent. The final ruling was unanimous. Warren kept revising his draft opinion until all members of the Court signed on. Justice Reed reportedly cried during the reading of the decision.
-
Read this chapter
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court made a unanimous 9–0 ruling in the case Brown v. Board of Education, deciding in favor of the Brown family and other plaintiffs. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the single opinion that all justices agreed to. The Court examined whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, was meant to end segregation in public schools. After hearing oral arguments, the Court said it had been unable to determine that question fully, even with a second round of arguments focused on historical sources.
The Court's second look at the case focused heavily on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. They reviewed how it was discussed in Congress, how the states approved it, and what practices around racial segregation were like at the time. But the justices concluded that this information wasn't enough to settle the issue before them. They noted that in the late 1860s, public schools were rare in the South. White children whose families could afford it often went to private schools, while Black children's education was nearly nonexistent—sometimes even illegal. By 1954, things had changed. The Court said, "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of our local and state governments." So in deciding the case, they had to consider public education not just as it existed then, but as it had developed and its role in American life across the country.
During the segregation era, black schools often had fewer resources and poorer facilities than white schools, even under the "separate but equal" rule. The Brown Court didn’t focus on these differences, likely because some school districts had improved black schools to match white ones, which made it hard to prove a Fourteenth Amendment violation based on measurable inequalities. So the Court turned to whether "separate but equal" was ever constitutional for public education. The key question became: Does separating children in public schools just because of race—even if buildings and other tangible factors are equal—take away equal educational opportunities from minority children?
The Court ruled that state-mandated segregation in schools was inherently unequal, even when the facilities were otherwise equal. It determined that separating Black children from others of similar age and qualifications based solely on race caused harmful psychological effects. The separation generated a feeling of inferiority that could deeply affect the children's hearts and minds in ways unlikely to ever be undone. The impact of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case.
The Court found that separating Black and white children in public schools harmed the Black children, especially when the law supported it. It showed how this separation made Black kids feel inferior, which hurt their motivation to learn. The decision said this policy damaged their education and mental growth, taking away benefits they’d get in an integrated school system. The ruling rejected anything in Plessy v. Ferguson that disagreed with this conclusion, even though the legal understanding of psychology may have been different back then. This was a key moment in the fight for equal rights in schools.
The Court based its decision on psychological research, citing studies in a footnote rather than the main opinion. Among these were experiments by Kenneth and Mamie Clark from the 1940s, which showed that Black children in segregated settings tended to prefer white dolls over black dolls. The Court concluded that separate public education was unequal under the Equal Protection Clause and therefore unconstitutional.
The Court ruled that in public education, the idea of "separate but equal" had no place, declaring that separate schools were inherently unequal. It stated that the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection was being violated by segregation. The justices did not immediately order schools to integrate, instead asking the parties to return for another hearing the next term. That follow-up case would be called Brown II, where they would decide what steps should be taken to fix the problem.
-
Read this chapter
The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was met with celebration across much of America, but white Southerners reacted with fierce opposition. Many saw the ruling as a devastating blow, describing it as “a day of catastrophe—a Black Monday—a day something like Pearl Harbor.” Despite the legal victory, school integration moved slowly due to entrenched resistance in the South. American political historian Robert G. McCloskey offered his perspective on how deeply this decision was contested.
The white South responded to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling with loud opposition and refusal to change. Some "border states" that had previously kept schools separate did begin integrating, and in others, a few Black students were allowed into formerly all-white schools. But the Deep South largely ignored the court's order. In fact, in some areas, the decision actually made people more determined to resist any move toward mixing races in schools.
After the Brown ruling, Black educators in the South faced widespread displacement as the region moved to integrate schools under White leadership. According to historian Michael Fultz, "In many ways the South moved faster, with more 'deliberate speed' in displacing Black educators than it did in desegregating schools." This shift saw African-American teachers, principals, and other staff in segregated Black schools being fired or laid off as the system of integration took shape.
-
Read this chapter
In 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas Army National Guard to stop nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, an action that became known as the "Little Rock Nine." The effort to block desegregation was part of a broader resistance in the South. Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd also worked to create legal barriers to integration. When the situation escalated, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stepped in by taking federal control of the Arkansas National Guard and sending troops from the 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell to make sure the students could safely enroll and attend school.
In 1957, Florida’s response to the Brown v. Board decision was divided. The state legislature passed an Interposition Resolution that rejected the ruling and declared it null and void. Governor LeRoy Collins joined the protest against the court's decision but refused to sign the resolution. He argued that overturning the ruling through legal means was necessary.
In Mississippi, fear of violence kept people from filing school desegregation lawsuits for nine years after Brown v. Board. When Medgar Evers finally sued in 1963 to end segregation in Jackson, White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith murdered him. Two trials ended in hung juries. Beckwith was not convicted until 1994.
In June 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent two Black students from enrolling. The incident became known as the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” Wallace was acting on his promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” a vow he had made during his 1963 inaugural address. He did not move until General Henry V. Graham of the Alabama National Guard confronted him. President John F. Kennedy had ordered Graham to intervene.
In the Deep South, segregation laws affected not only Black Americans but also Native American communities, where Indigenous children were kept out of white schools. Some Native children with lighter skin were allowed to ride school buses to previously all-white institutions, while darker-skinned children from the same tribes were denied access. When tribal leaders learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in Birmingham, Alabama, they reached out for help. King responded quickly, and through his intervention, the issue was resolved.
-
Read this chapter
In North Carolina, many communities pretended to accept the Brown v. Board of Education ruling while secretly opposing it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro school board declared that it would abide by the decision. This commitment came from D. E. Hudgins Jr., a Rhodes Scholar and well-known attorney who led the board. That made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South to publicly agree to comply. Still, other residents of the city worked behind the scenes to delay integration through legal means. It wasn't until 1969 that federal authorities found the city was not following the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Full desegregation did not begin until 1971, after multiple court cases and a mix of nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have pointed out the contradiction in Greensboro's image as a forward-thinking place being among the last to integrate its schools.
In Moberly, Missouri, schools were desegregated as ordered by the courts. But after 1955, the African-American teachers from the local "negro school" were not retained. The district said their performance was poor. These teachers appealed their dismissals in a case that went to the Supreme Court. The ruling was upheld, and the high court refused to hear any further appeal.
In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd orchestrated Massive Resistance, closing schools rather than integrating them. Governor Thomas Stanley, member of the Byrd Organization, formed the Gray Commission with 32 Democrats led by state senator Garland Gray to examine the issue. The commission advised giving localities "broad discretion" in meeting new judicial requirements. Yet in 1956, the legislature passed a law allowing the governor to shut down all schools ordered desegregated by federal courts. In early 1958, newly elected Governor J. Lindsay Almond responded to desegregation orders by closing public schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County, leaving 10,000 children without education. The closures were halted after the Virginia Supreme Court ruled they violated the state constitution and a panel of federal judges determined they breached the U.S. Constitution. By early February 1959, both Arlington County and Norfolk schools desegregated peacefully.
After most Virginia counties reopened and integrated their schools, Prince Edward County made the extreme choice to stop funding its system, which shut down all public schools. In response, the county offered tuition grants to every student, no matter their race, to attend private, nonsectarian schools. But because no private schools existed for Black children in the area, those students either had to leave the county or get no education at all between 1959 and 1963. The situation continued until the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in a decade later, ruling in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County that giving tuition aid exclusively to white private schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
-
Read this chapter
In Harlem, New York, schools for Black students had not seen a new building since the start of the century, and there were no nursery schools at all, even as the Second Great Migration led to overcrowded classrooms. The schools that existed were in bad shape and often taught by inexperienced teachers. Northern officials ignored this segregation, but the Brown v. Board decision helped push African-American parents like Mae Mallory to take action. With support from the NAACP, Mallory started a lawsuit against New York City and the State of New York based on Brown’s principles. Parents joined the effort by boycotting schools in 1959, and during that time, some of the first Freedom Schools began to form. In response, the city allowed more students to transfer to higher-performing, historically white schools.
-
Read this chapter
In Topeka, Kansas, where the Brown case began, the junior high schools had already been integrated since 1941. Topeka High School, which started in 1871, was integrated from the very beginning. Its sports teams followed suit in 1949. The law in Kansas that allowed separate schools only applied to those below the high school level.
After the district court ruling, things changed in Topeka. The Board of Education began ending segregation in elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts. By January 1956, all the Topeka elementary schools became neighborhood attendance centers, though students could still go to their old schools if they chose. Plaintiff Zelma Henderson, in a 2004 interview, said there were no protests or chaos during desegregation: "They accepted it ... It wasn't too long until they integrated the teachers and principals."
The Topeka Public Schools administration building bears the name of McKinley Burnett, the NAACP chapter president who helped organize the case. Monroe Elementary School was designated a National Historic Site by the National Park Service on October 26, 1992, and later redesignated as a National Historical Park on May 12, 2022.
-
Read this chapter
Future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a 1952 memo as a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson, arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson's decision should be upheld despite its unpopularity, claiming the majority would ultimately determine constitutional rights for minorities. During his 1971 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rehnquist claimed the memo reflected Justice Jackson's early thoughts, not his own. By 1986, while considering him for Chief Justice, Rehnquist distanced himself further, saying the memo did not reflect his true beliefs at the time. Still, while serving on the Court, Rehnquist never tried to overturn Brown v. Board and often cited it as precedent.
Chief Justice Warren's opinion in Brown drew sharp criticism from legal experts of the era. Judge Learned Hand said the Court had "assumed the role of a third legislative chamber," and Herbert Wechsler argued that the decision could not be supported by neutral legal principles. Some elements of the ruling remain contested today. In 1995, Justice Clarence Thomas, an African American, wrote in Missouri v. Jenkins that Brown I had at minimum been misunderstood by the courts.
Brown I did not claim that schools separated by race were inherently unequal; the harm it recognized came only from laws enforcing separation, not from schools that happened to be separate without legal mandate. In fact, Brown I didn’t require psychological or social-science studies to declare a basic principle: the government cannot treat its citizens differently based on race. Segregation wasn’t ruled unconstitutional because it might cause feelings of inferiority. Even if a system separated Black students and gave them better resources—making them feel superior to White students in other schools—it would still break the Fourteenth Amendment. It wouldn’t matter if the White students felt hurt or stigmatized. The same rule applies if the situation were reversed. What matters is not whether someone feels inferior or superior, but whether the law allows such discrimination.
Some critics have questioned whether desegregation actually led to better outcomes for Black students, suggesting they might learn just as well in environments with peers of their own race. Others argue that Black schools serve important roles within their communities, acting as centers of leadership and achievement. Constitutional originalists like Raoul Berger have challenged the Brown decision by pointing out that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 didn’t prohibit segregated schools, and that Congress both passed the Fourteenth Amendment and later voted to segregate schools in the District of Columbia. Michael W. McConnell, a federal judge, argued that the Radical Reconstructionists who pushed for the amendment supported integrated schools. Evidence for this view comes from Congressional records showing debates over federal legislation to enforce school integration shortly after the amendment was ratified.
In response to Michael McConnell’s research, Raoul Berger argued that lawmakers from the 1870s who supported school desegregation were trying to reshape the Fourteenth Amendment to match their political goals, rather than sticking to its original meaning. Berger pointed out that McConnell couldn’t find any mention of school segregation—let alone a desire to ban it—in the congressional records of the 39th United States Congress, and he criticized McConnell for using 1950s civil rights ideas to interpret an amendment from 1866. Some liberal critics also weighed in, like Drew S. Days III, who said constitutional standards for racial classifications don’t require proof of psychological harm or social science evidence. Instead, he referenced the 1943 Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States, which holds that distinctions based on ancestry are inherently odious to a free people founded on equality.
-
Read this chapter
In 1955, the Supreme Court heard arguments from school districts struggling with how to end segregation. The ruling, called Brown II, sent the responsibility for desegregation back to lower courts. Those courts were told to make sure integration happened, but with the phrase “all deliberate speed.” That wording came from a poem by Francis Thompson titled "The Hound of Heaven."
Supporters of the earlier ruling were disappointed by the new instructions. The court’s phrase “all deliberate speed” was seen as too vague to guarantee timely compliance with desegregation. Many Southern states and school districts used this language as a way to resist change, delaying or avoiding integration for years, sometimes even decades. They employed tactics like shutting down public school systems, using state funds to support segregated private schools, and allowing only a few select Black students into formerly all-white schools—what was called “token” integration—while leaving the majority in underfunded, unequal Black schools.
After Brown II, a district court let Prince Edward County, Virginia delay desegregation. When ordered in 1959 to begin integrating schools, the county board stopped funding public education instead. Schools stayed closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. White students were bused to all-white "private academies" run by former public school teachers, while Black students received no schooling unless they left the county. The Supreme Court later overturned Brown II in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, saying "the time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out" and that the county had to provide public education for all children.
-
Read this chapter
In 1978, attorneys Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson, and Charles Scott Jr.—the latter being the son of a member of the original Brown team—along with the American Civil Liberties Union, asked Linda Brown Smith to become a plaintiff in a renewed challenge to school segregation in Topeka. With her own children now in the district's schools, she agreed. The group feared that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open enrollment" was leading to further separation and that white parents might choose certain schools, creating predominantly African-American and predominantly European-American classrooms. After a 25-year pause, the district court reopened the Brown case, but refused to declare the schools "unitary." In 1989, the Tenth Circuit ruled 2–1 that remnants of segregation still existed in student and staff assignments. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1993, sending it back to the district court to enforce the Tenth Circuit's decision.
After a plan was approved in 1994 and a bond issue passed, Topeka worked on adding magnet schools and redrawing attendance zones to meet court requirements for racial balance by 1998. The district eventually earned unified status on July 27, 1999. One of the new magnet schools was named for the Scott family’s attorneys, who played a key role in the Brown case and the broader civil rights movement.
-
Read this chapter
In 1977, the Supreme Court addressed the limits of federal court power in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, ruling that the authority of courts to reshape local school systems is not unlimited. The decision emphasized that such intervention may only occur when a significant constitutional violation has taken place. Drawing on precedents from Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Milliken v. Bradley, the Court held that if a constitutional breach is established, the appropriate remedy must be tied to the scope of that violation. Under the Swann standard, the solution should aim to correct the gap between the actual impact of discriminatory practices on school demographics and what those outcomes would have been without such violations.
I lived in an integrated neighborhood and had playmates of different nationalities. When I learned I might be able to go to their school, I was thrilled. I walked over to Sumner School with my dad that day and went up the steps. The school looked so big to a small child. Inside, my dad spoke with someone, then went into the inner office with the principal, leaving me outside with the secretary. While he was in the office, I heard voices, including his raised, and then he came out immediately, took my hand, and we walked home. I couldn’t understand what happened because I was so sure I would go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.
Read
Free to download, keep and share. For general information only — not professional medical, legal or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional.