Brown v. Board of Education at 50: The Multiple Legacies for Policy and Administration

• Date: 01 May 2004
• Author: Lenneal J. Henderson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2004.00371.x
• Published date: 01 May 2004

270 Public Administration Review •May/June 2004, Vol. 64, No. 3

Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr.

University of Baltimore

Brown v. Board of Education

at 50: The Multiple

Legacies for Policy and Administration

On May 17, 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1954

Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of

Topeka (347 U.S. 483, 495), we critically reflect on at

least five of this decision’s interrelated policy and admin-

istrative legacies. First, Brown represents the most potent,

clear, progressive, and compelling ethical statement of

racial policy in the twentieth century by the Supreme

Court. Second, as a challenge to policy implementation,

Brown continues the discourse, dialectic, and even dia-

tribe about whether and how to best achieve its ethical

ends in race relations, school facilities, busing, parent

choices about schools, and school funding. Third, Brown

represents a strong statement about federalism, particu-

larly in the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to

the rights of citizens in all states and localities, including

local school districts. Fourth, as a Supreme Court deci-

sion, Brown is a strong statement about the separation of

powers at the federal level, particularly considering that

between 1875 and 1954, Congress resisted the passage of

civil rights legislation and refused to address school seg-

regation, and the executive branch could approach racial

desegregation policy only through the use of executive

orders. Fifth, Brown underscores the controversial role of

social science research and policy analysis in litigation.

The Court referred to evidence provided by several ex-

perts that school segregation severely damaged the psy-

ches of black school children while circumscribing their

educational opportunity.

Background to a Momentous Decision

Brown consolidated five cases ascending from the U.S.

Court of Appeals in Delaware, the District of Columbia,

Virginia, South Carolina, and Kansas. All of these cases

addressed the constitutionality of racial segregation in lo-

cal public schools. It was the name of the Kansas lawsuit

by which the entire set of cases would become known:

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Roberts and

Stratton 1995). The National Association for the Advance-

ment of Colored People (NAACP) brought the suit through

its Legal Defense Fund on behalf of plaintiff Oliver Brown

because his young daughter Linda had been forced by the

local public schools in Topeka, Kansas, to walk across rail-

road tracks miles away from her home to attend a segre-

gated school when Charles Sumner School, an all-white

school, was in her immediate neighborhood.

The NAACP brought suits in the other four cases on

similar grounds. In the Clarendon County, South Carolina,

case, children at the Scots Branch Colored Schools were

forced to walk as much as five or six miles daily to and

from school because the school district had denied them

bus service, as well as improved facilities such as school

buildings, instructional materials, and certified teachers.

These suits challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine

that had been firmly established in the 1896 Plessy v.

Ferguson (163 U.S. 537) Supreme Court case. In this case,

the eloquent dissent of Justice John Harlan presaged the

precepts of Brown by rejecting the separate-but-equal prin-

ciple as a contradiction of the intent of the Fourteenth

Amendment (Leonard 1980).

The Brown cases were initially argued on December 9,

1952. Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal

Defense Fund, and his colleagues Robert Carter, Spotswood

Robinson, and Jack Greenberg argued that the original in-

tent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to abolish segrega-

tion. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson was troubled by this

argument because, he contended, the same Congress that

had passed the Fourteenth Amendment had also sanctioned

segregated schools in the District of Columbia. But it was

Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter who recognized the

strategic problem for the NAACP in advancing this argu-

ment. Frankfurter persuaded the Court that the parties

should reargue the case, admonished Marshall to demon-

strate through history and social science the adverse im-

pact of segregation on black children, and acquired time to

better shape his own briefs and oral arguments to support

Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr., is a distinguished professor of government and

public administration and senior fellow in the William Donald Schaefer Cen-

ter for Public Policy and in the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics at

the University of Baltimore. His interests are in public policy and administra-

tion, race relations policy, and international and comparative administra-

tion. E-mail: lennealh@cs.com.