Brown v. Board of Education

Context

The NAACP began to develop its strategy to attack segregation in state schools in the 1930s. The organization began cautiously enough by attacking segregation in professional schools, principally law schools, of state universities. Law schools were selected because state university systems usually had only one law school each, and it would be relatively easy to make the case that providing a state law school for white students while providing none for blacks violated the principle that a state had to provide equal facilities. The NAACP also believed that litigation designed to force states to permit black students to attend state law schools would provoke less adverse political reaction than lawsuits designed to integrate public primary and secondary schools. The architect of the NAACP's litigation strategy, Charles Hamilton Houston, would achieve success before the Second World War with his victory in the 1938 case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. In that case the Supreme Court held that Missouri's exclusion of African Americans from the state's law school was unconstitutional even though Missouri was willing to pay tuition for black students to attend law school out of state. The NAACP met with success in similar litigation in other states.

While the NAACP had some success with litigation designed to desegregate professional schools before the Second World War, the changes in racial attitudes brought about by the war played a key role in paving the way for the decision in Brown. In particular, the war brought about a new assertiveness on the part of African Americans, as many blacks left the rural South and traditional patterns of racial domination for the armed forces and the industrial cities of the North and West. With these changes came a new willingness to struggle for equal rights. The fight against Nazi racism also caused many white Americans to question traditional racial attitudes. Furthermore, the social sciences were increasingly calling established racial prejudices into question. The publication in 1944 of the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal's book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy also had a significant impact, causing many university-educated people to question the practice of segregation.

The changes in the racial atmosphere in postwar America spurred the NAACP to confront legally mandated segregation. While the organization achieved significant victories in its fight against segregated professional education, other important victories came in the legal struggle against general discrimination. The 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer, in which the Supreme Court declared that courts could not enforce restrictive covenants barring minorities from buying homes in white neighborhoods, was an indication of the Court's willingness to give the Fourteenth Amendment a broader reading than it had in the past. Following this decision, many in the NAACP believed that the time was right for a frontal assault on segregated education.

Between 1950 and 1952 the NAACP, under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall and his associates, began preparing the cases that would come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education. The case by which the litigation is known arose in Topeka, Kansas—a state that, unlike those in the South, did not have statewide segregation. Instead, the state gave localities the option to have segregated schools. The elementary schools in Topeka were indeed segregated, and Oliver Brown, a black resident of the city, filed suit so that his daughter might attend a school reserved for whites. That school was nearer to the Brown home and had better facilities.

In 1952 the Supreme Court consolidated the different desegregation cases. The first set of oral arguments were heard by the Court in December of that year; in June 1953, the Court asked for a second set of oral arguments designed to specifically address the issue of whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to mandate school desegregation. As that issue was being researched, Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson died, in September 1953. He was replaced by Earl Warren. Most observers agree that the new chief justice made a critical difference to the outcome of the case.