Separate is not equal: sixty years ago, the supreme court changed America when it banned segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.

AuthorMajerol, Veronica
PositionTIMES PAST 1954

All 7-year-old Linda Brown wanted was to go to school with her friends.

But when her father, Oliver Brown, tried enrolling her in Sumner School, seven blocks from their home in Topeka, Kansas, they were turned away. It was 1950, when public schools in Kansas--and 20 other states--were segregated.

The schools reserved for blacks were often in shoddy buildings, with fewer textbooks, chairs, and basic supplies. In some places, classes were held in buses or one-room shacks. Topeka had only four elementary schools for blacks, compared with 18 for whites. So while Linda's white neighborhood friends could walk to Sumner, she had to walk six blocks, then take a half-hour bus ride to get to the closest school for blacks.

Fed up with the system of discrimination, Oliver Brown and other black parents around the U.S. sued their local school boards in a coordinated effort led by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Their five cases were eventually folded into one case that went all the way to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education.

On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled 9-0 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional--a decision that 60 years later is still hailed as a watershed moment in civil rights history.

"In the South, segregation was literally cradle to grave," says Paul Finkelman, a professor at Louisiana State University Law School and Albany Law School in New York. "Brown was the most important ruling affecting American race relations in a positive way. "

Threats From the KKK

Brown was a total reversal of the Supreme Court's position on segregation. In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which involved segregation on trains, the Court established the doctrine of "separate but equal" that served as the legal underpinning for segregation (see Timeline, p. 18). Blacks and whites throughout the U.S. often lived in separate neighborhoods and attended separate schools. But in most of the South, state and local laws required separation of the races in transportation, restaurants, movie theaters, and schools.

In the 1930s, the NAACP began its fight to end segregation in education. It first challenged segregation at colleges and graduate schools, where it was thought there would be less resistance to change. NAACP lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall--who became the first black justice of the Supreme Court in 1967--won several cases that helped establish the legal framework Marshall would rely on in Brown.

A few years before the 1954 Brown decision, nearly 200 men, women, and children, aided by the NAACP, challenged school segregation in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.-often at great risk to themselves. Some received death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, lost their jobs, or suddenly found they could no longer shop on credit. Their cases were later rolled into Brown.

John Stokes, a high school senior from Virginia who was a plaintiff in Brown, remembers going to school in a makeshift building covered in tar paper because his district wouldn't build a proper high school for black students.

"We knew we were being programmed for failure," says Stokes. "All we wanted was a chance."

When it first began its fight against segregation, the NAACP didn't challenge Plessy head-on; instead, it argued that blacks actually weren't getting an equal education. But in Brown...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT