Brown v. Board of Education

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is a Supreme Court case and as such begins with a syllabus presenting basic information about the case. This information includes the parties, the lower court whose decision is being appealed, and the dates that the case was argued before the Supreme Court. The case was taken on appeal from a decision by the District Court for the District of Kansas. An asterisked footnote relates that Brown is being consolidated with other school segregation cases from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The syllabus also gives a summary of the decision and lists the attorneys who made oral arguments before the Court on behalf of the parties in Brown and the companion cases. The syllabus also lists briefs filed by amici curiae (“friends of the court,” persons or organizations not party to a case who file a brief in support of a party or to inform the court with respect to a legal or policy issue) in Brown and the companion cases. Of special interest is the fact that the assistant attorney general J. Lee Rankin argued for the United States in support of desegregation.

Warren begins with a straightforward presentation of the issues. His first paragraph notes that the desegregation cases have come from different states—Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware—and that while each state presents somewhat different issues with respect to local laws and local conditions, the clear principal issue of legal segregation is common to all of the cases.

Stylistically, Warren's opinion makes extensive use of footnotes not only to cite relevant authorities but also to carry the burden of informing the reader of major legal and factual arguments. As had become common in twentieth-century legal writing, footnotes served to supply a judicial decision with a kind of supplemental narrative, augmenting the main points being made in the body of the opinion. This style of judicial writing was doubtless encouraged, perhaps mandated, by the practice of parties and amici curiae filing extensive briefs in major cases. The increasing use of “Brandeis briefs”—briefs providing wide-ranging amounts of information to the Court from the social and physical sciences, as modeled after that filed by Louis Brandeis in Muller v. Oregon (1908)—probably also hastened the development of the lengthy use of footnotes in judicial opinions.

The first footnote here discusses how Brown and the companion cases fared in the U.S. district courts. Included in this discussion are the legal and factual findings of these courts. With respect to Brown, a three-judge panel of the District Court for the District of Kansas found that segregated public education indeed had a detrimental effect on black students, but that court nonetheless upheld segregated education because the facilities for blacks and whites were held to be equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and the educational qualifications of the teachers. The district court in South Carolina found that the facilities available to black students were inferior to those of whites, but that court nonetheless upheld segregation on the ground that South Carolina officials were making efforts to equalize facilities. In Virginia, the district court ordered officials to make efforts to equalize the schools. In Delaware, the state courts had ordered desegregation, and state officials were appealing that order.

Warren moves in the second and third paragraphs to presenting the central claims of the NAACP and of the parents that were bringing suit. He zeroes in on the crux of these claims in the third paragraph, noting, “The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not ‘equal' and cannot be made ‘equal,' and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws.” Warren's opinion spends relatively little time examining the history of this argument, but it is a claim with a long history, one that antedates Brown by at least a century. In particular, the NAACP argued that segregation was inherently stigmatizing, an argument that was older than the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) and its equal protection clause, under which Brown and the other cases were brought. This argument made its first judicial appearance in the antebellum Massachusetts school desegregation case Roberts v. City of Boston (1850). In that case, African American parents argued that Boston's system of school segregation essentially stigmatized black children by setting up a caste system dividing black and white. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected the argument, in effect establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, a point Warren notes in footnote 6. The argument that segregation stigmatized African Americans and hence violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law would later be heard and rejected by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), with the Supreme Court making the “separate but equal” doctrine a part of federal constitutional law.

Part of the NAACP's aim in Brown was to have segregated schools declared unconstitutional on the ground that the system of school segregation forced black children into schools that were vastly inferior to those reserved for white students. The systems of school segregation that prevailed in the southern states usually featured vast inequalities in the levels of education provided to black and white children. Black schools were usually funded at a fraction of the level of white schools. In many districts blacks were confined to one-room schoolhouses in which all grades were to be educated, while whites had separate elementary and secondary schools. Black schools were usually separate and decidedly unequal with respect to the qualifications and pay for black teachers and the physical facilities in which black schools were housed. Correcting all of this was part of the NAACP's aim in litigating against school segregation. In addition, the civil rights organization shared the view held by its nineteenth-century predecessors that the very act of segregating, of signaling out blacks for separate treatment, was inherently stigmatizing and more appropriate to a caste system than to the practices of American democracy. The NAACP advocate Thurgood Marshall, in his oral argument before Earl Warren and other members of the Court on December 8, 1953, presented the issue starkly: “Why of all the multitudinous groups in this country, you have to single out the Negroes and give them this separate treatment?”

This was clearly an issue involving the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, and in the fourth and fifth paragraphs the new chief justice begins addressing the Fourteenth Amendment and what it mandated in these circumstances. Here, Warren begins moving into territory that would forever make Brown an object of controversy among constitutional commentators. He argues that the history of the Fourteenth Amendment is inconclusive regarding what it had to say with respect to school segregation. In fact, Warren frames Brown as a case pitting modern realities against inconclusive history. In the fifth paragraph he focuses on the history of public education at the time of the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, noting that public education had not yet taken hold in the South and that practically all southern blacks at the time were illiterate. He juxtaposes that situation with modern circumstances: “Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences, as well as in the business and professional world.” Warren uses this contrast between the relative lack of importance of public education at the time of the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment and its much greater importance at the time of the Brown decision to set up what will be his principal argument in paragraphs 8 and 9, namely, that the question of segregated education and its constitutionality under the Fourteenth Amendment had to be considered in light of the importance of public education in modern—that is, post–World War II—American society and not in light of its relative unimportance at the beginning of the Reconstruction era.

In the sixth paragraph Warren takes on the “separate but equal” doctrine, seeking to show that it is less than the solid precedent that its champions claimed. Indeed, the argument for the constitutionality of segregated schools rested on the “separate but equal” precedent provided in Plessy. The former solicitor general John W. Davis, representing South Carolina in an oral argument before the Supreme Court, emphasized the importance of Plessy, highlighting the fact that the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court had repeatedly reaffirmed the “separate but equal” doctrine and asserting that the Court should follow precedent and apply the doctrine in the case of school segregation. Davis's arguments were echoed by other supporters of school segregation.

Warren notes that the Court's earliest interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment stressed that the amendment was designed to prohibit state-imposed racial discrimination; the “separate but equal” doctrine did not become part of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence until 1896—more than a generation after the enactment of the amendment. He also notes that Plessy involved transportation, not education. Warren further states that since Plessy, the Supreme Court had only heard six cases involving the “separate but equal” doctrine, with none reviewing the essential validity of the doctrine. He next cites the decisions involving segregation in graduate and professional schools. Warren's aims in this discussion are clear. While not directly challenging the Plessy precedent, he effectively isolates it as a decision that was not consistent with judicial interpretations made close to the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment. He also gives Plessy a narrow reading so that it might be seen as a precedent that at most applies to the field of transportation. That case, according to Warren, was one that had not been thoroughly examined by the Court and in any event was made problematic, particularly in the field of education, by the graduate-school segregation cases.

Paragraphs 7–9 are used to frame the issues before the Court. Warren largely frames these issues in the way that the NAACP and the plaintiffs had presented them. The primary issue is segregation, and it is an issue that goes beyond tangible factors to encompass philosophical ones as well as the subtle reality of stigmatization. In paragraph 7 Warren uses footnote 9 to relate that the district court in Kansas had actually found substantial equality in the black and white schools. Warren indicates that regardless of this finding, segregation itself and its effect on public education remain of paramount concern.

Paragraph 8 is where Warren stakes out a clear claim as a proponent—indeed, one of the earliest explicit proponents—of the notion of a “living constitution,” the idea that jurists should go beyond the concerns and assumptions of the framers of constitutional provisions and instead look at and reevaluate the Constitution in light of modern circumstances. He starts the paragraph, “In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868, when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896, when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.” In paragraphs 9–11 Warren goes on to outline the importance of education in modern American life and to conclude that segregated schools deprive members of minority groups of equal educational opportunities even when the tangible resources are equal.

Paragraph 12 lays a psychological basis for the opinion—one that would leave the Brown decision with a lingering controversy that persists to the present day. Warren cites the works of a number of psychologists—including, most prominently, the black psychologist Kenneth Clark—on the effects of segregation on the self-esteem of black children. These citations would lead many critics to charge that the chief justice was engaging in sociology rather than jurisprudence. Even many critics sympathetic to the outcome in Brown later expressed some discomfort with the use of psychological evidence, claiming that it gave the decision less of a firm footing, such that it could potentially be undone by shifts in findings in the social sciences. Clearly, what Warren is doing is examining the plaintiffs' arguments that segregation stigmatized black students by comparing those claims to the findings of the psychological experts of the day.

Paragraph 14 provides the Court's conclusion that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal' has no place.” Paragraph 15 provides a hint about some of the behind-the-scenes negotiations that Warren and the other justices went through in order to secure a unanimous decision in Brown. Here, Warren calls for the reargument of the cases to allow the Court to consider remedies for school segregation. Warren recognized the importance of establishing the constitutional principle that segregated public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As such, he was greatly concerned with getting a unanimous Court to agree to that constitutional principle—an achievement that had been very much in doubt during judicial conferences. Thus, as part of the strategy to obtain a unanimous opinion, Warren agreed to have Brown initially decide only the principle that segregated schools were unconstitutional, deferring the question of how the decision would be implemented for another day. Paragraph 14, the last paragraph, lays the groundwork for the second case, commonly known as Brown II, which would be heard the following year, and the more than two decades of desegregation litigation that would follow.

Additional Commentary by Karen Linkletter, California State University-Fullerton

Brown v. Board was one of Warren's first decisions as chief justice and was arguably his most high-profile case. The landmark decision overturned the 1896 Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and paved the way for the national ascent of the leaders of the civil rights movement, such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1896 case, Homer Plessy, who was of European and African descent, challenged a Louisiana law that required blacks and whites to ride in separate railroad cars. Plessy, who was by law black, sat in a “whites only” car and was subsequently arrested when he refused to change his seat. His case ended up in the Supreme Court, where the majority ruled that state laws enforcing segregation, or the provision of “separate but equal” facilities, were constitutional. After the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, laws establishing separate public areas for whites and blacks, known as Jim Crow laws, proliferated in the South.

Blacks in America continued to live under this omnipresent system of apartheid through the early decades of the twentieth century, although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched several legal challenges, with marginal success. Racial attitudes changed dramatically following World War II, as theories of scientific racism that had been almost universally accepted by the public and academia were debunked and the evidence of Hitler's implementation of racial ideology horrified the world. This new climate reenergized the NAACP, which began to pursue a number of school segregation lawsuits throughout the country. Several of these cases ended up in the Supreme Court; one such case was Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP had organized several families, including Oliver Brown and his daughter, Linda, who agreed to sue the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, for access to schools closer to their homes. Topeka provided eighteen schools for white children but only four for black children.

Brown v. Board was first heard by the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, in December 1952. A cautious jurist, Vinson shied away from the kinds of groundbreaking decisions that would epitomize Warren's term as chief justice. Vinson did not want to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, and for various reasons three of his fellow justices agreed with him. The other five judges thought that the “separate but equal” edict should be overturned. With such a divided opinion, the Vinson Court tabled the case. Warren thus inherited both the case and a divided Court when he took over Vinson's position. Personally convinced on moral grounds that segregation was wrong, Warren began to develop a consensus among his fellow judges, knowing that only a unanimous decision would send a strong enough message. Through his efforts and those of other jurists, particularly Felix Frankfurter, Warren pulled the Supreme Court together to deliver a nine-to-zero decision in favor of the plaintiffs.

In Brown, as well as in the later cases Reynolds v. Sims and Miranda v. Arizona, Chief Justice Warren voted with the majority and assigned the majority opinion to himself. Warren often assigned himself the particularly controversial cases or the ones about which he had especially strong personal beliefs or feelings. Brown v. Board was certainly both controversial and deeply personal for Warren. Yet it was a unanimous decision, and Warren was careful to craft a document that reflected the beliefs of all the judges, not just his own.

Warren opens his opinion with an overview of the case. As he explains, Brown v. Board was one of four segregation cases that the Court considered together. The Supreme Court often consolidates a number of related cases under one lead case; this was the situation in Miranda v. Arizona as well. In Brown all of the cases concerned children who were denied admission to white public schools, and all plaintiffs claimed that their Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “all persons born or naturalized within the United States… equal protection of the laws.” Warren clearly states that this case hinges on the Court's conclusion as to whether separate, or segregated, schools can ever be considered equal.

Following a brief reference to the 1952 hearing by the Vinson Court, Warren addresses a concern that surfaced early in the reargument. One of the reasons the Vinson Court had been so divided was that the judges could not agree on the intent behind the Fourteenth Amendment. Were its authors, in 1868, in favor of segregation, and, if so, could that intent be clearly established? Warren knew that this question needed to be addressed if he hoped to achieve a unanimous decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who favored striking down Plessy v. Ferguson, researched the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and found that there was no clear intent on behalf of the framers of the amendment either against or in support of segregation. Warren states that the Court can never truly know the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment's authors—“We cannot turn the clock back to 1868”—but that this is not the important question. In effect, Frankfurter and Warren took the constitutional question off the table and changed the nature of the discussion. The Court's decision would hang no longer on a legal issue but on a social and moral matter: the nature and role of public education in modern America.

Once he changed the nature of the debate from a legal one to a question of social justice, Warren sums up the importance of education to a functioning society. He emphasizes that education is crucial to “democratic society,” meeting “basic public responsibilities,” preparing citizens for “service in the armed forces,” and fostering “good citizenship.” By linking public education to American values and civic ideals, Warren persuasively argues for the importance of equal opportunity in language accessible to the public.

Warren succinctly delivers the judgment of the Court regarding whether segregation deprives children of equal educational opportunities: “We believe that it does.” He then makes his case for why “separate” cannot be “equal,” even if the actual school facilities are the same for black and white children. Here, Warren turns to past Supreme Court decisions to justify the current ruling. Sweatt v. Painter was the 1950 case of a black man who was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School. The Court ruled unanimously that Sweatt must be admitted, finding that the segregation of black students in a separate school would in and of itself have a negative impact on their potential to succeed as lawyers. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, another case decided in 1950, had to do with a black student admitted to the University of Oklahoma's graduate school who was assigned a special seat designated for black students in his classroom, in the school cafeteria, and in the library. Warren notes that the Court ruled that such treatment hindered the plaintiff's ability to learn. Interestingly, he also cites specific wording from an earlier lower-court ruling and references “modern authority,” which included sociological and psychological publications of the time. Thus, Warren not only draws on specific cases in which the Court ruled against segregation but also invokes language used in prior court arguments against the Brown plaintiffs as well as opinions of experts outside the legal community.

Having decided that the concept of “separate but equal” cannot exist in public education, Warren next had to argue as to how to solve the problem of desegregating educational facilities. His language changes markedly in this section of the decision, as Warren and the other judges believed that it was not the Court's place to mandate the schedule or methods for desegregation. Warren states that the situation “presents problems of considerable complexity,” which signals that the Court believes that each case will need to be readdressed by the lower courts. He articulates the Supreme Court's role in this decision very clearly: The question of “appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated” to the larger question of the constitutionality of segregated public education. As such, the cases aggregated under Brown v. Board were “restored to the docket,” or referred back to the lower courts in which they were originally argued, so that the solutions could be worked out there.

Driven by his personal feelings, Warren argued the immorality and social injustice of segregation rather than dwelling on the technical aspects of constitutional law to reach a unanimous decision in Brown. As southern schools fought the mandate to desegregate, the Court eventually issued another decision in 1955, known as Brown II. Also written by Warren, this decision reiterated the principles of the first decision and furthermore stated that the courts and schools must act with “all deliberate speed” to end segregation. Warren's language inflamed many, but his decisions had propelled a movement. In December 1955, Rosa Parks would refuse to move from the white section of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and what had started in public education would spread to still other public spaces in America.