Brown v. Board of Education

Impact

It is probably no exaggeration to say that Brown was the most significant case decided by the Supreme Court in its history. While the decision would take decades to implement, Brown was critical as a harbinger of the federal government's return to the civil rights arena, an arena from which it had been largely absent since Reconstruction. Brown would also provide a tremendous boost to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The knowledge that the Court was now going to interpret the Constitution as prohibiting the kind of caste-like distinctions that had been a feature of black life in the United States from the very beginning helped encourage a greater assertiveness on the part of African Americans, who proceeded to successfully protest the formal segregation of Jim Crow laws in the South and, later, more subtle forms of discrimination throughout the nation.

Brown's impact in the courts was a little more complicated. The case commonly known as Brown v. Board of Education led to a successor case of the same name, known as Brown II, in 1955. That case resulted in a ruling that required the desegregation of separate school systems with “all deliberate speed.” This order, in turn, led to protracted battles in federal district courts over the precise details and timing of school desegregation plans, which lasted decades. Nonetheless, the decision in Brown effectively led to the death of the “separate but equal” doctrine as well as to the negation of the idea that governmental bodies could practice the kind of formal discrimination against members of minority groups that had been common before Brown.