Every day, eight-year-old Linda Brown wondered why she had to ride five miles to school when her bus passed the perfectly lovely Sumner Elementary School, just four blocks from her home. When her father tried to enroll her in Sumner for fourth grade, the Topeka, Kansas, school authorities just said no. In 1951, Linda Brown was the wrong color for Sumner.
In 1951, the law of the land remained “separate but equal,” the policy dictated by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. “Separate but equal” kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that many public facilities, from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, were either segregated or for whites only.
Exactly how these “separate” facilities were “equal” remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn’t white people want to use them? Nowhere was the disparity more complete and disgraceful than in the public schools, primarily but not exclusively in the heartland of the former Confederacy. Schools for whites were spanking new, well maintained, properly staffed, and amply supplied. Black schools were usually single-room shacks with no toilets, a single teacher, and a broken chalkboard.
If black parents wanted their children to be warm in the winter, they had to buy their own coal. But a handful of courageous southern blacks—mostly common people like teachers and ministers and their families—began the struggle that turned back these laws.
Urged on by Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), the burly, barb tongued attorney from Baltimore who led the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, small-town folks in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware balked at the injustice of “separate but equal” educational systems. The people who carried these fights were soon confronted by threats ranging from loss of their jobs to dried-up bank credit and ultimately to threats of violence and death.
In 1951, one of these men was the Reverend Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter in the all-white Topeka school. Since Brown came first in the alphabet among the suits brought against four different states, it was his name that was attached to the case that Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953.
There had been a change in the makeup of the Court itself. After the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education were first heard, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a Truman appointee, died of a heart attack. In 1953, with reargument of the case on the horizon, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren (1891–1974) chief justice of the United States.
Certainly nobody at the time suspected that Warren would go on to lead the Court for sixteen of its most turbulent years, during which the justices took the lead in transforming America’s approach to racial equality, criminal justice, and freedom of expression.
In the Brown case, Warren led the Court to a moment of needed unanimity. The decision was announced on May 17, 1954. As the New York Times banner headine proclaimed, “High Court Bans School Segregation”
“Separate but equal” was no longer the law of the land.
In Simple Justice, a monumental study of the case and the history of racism, cruelty, and discrimination that preceded it, Richard Kluger eloquently assessed the decision’s impact:
The opinion of the Court said that the United States stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate. . . . The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.
Of course, Brown did not cause the scales to fall from the eyes of white supremacists. The fury of the South was quick and sure. School systems around the country, South and North, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts toward desegregation. The states fought the decision with endless appeals and other delaying tactics, the calling out of troops, and ultimately violence and a venomous outflow of racial hatred, targeted at schoolchildren who simply wanted to learn.
This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About® History which will be reissued on June 21, 2011 in a newly revised, updated and expanded 20th Anniversary Edition.
