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The Little Rock 9 was the first step towards public integration.

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Legislation influence and impact on society

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Legislation influence and impact on society

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Plessy vs. Ferguson was a court case that influenced this case. The ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education was ruled 9-0 (unanimous).  It also impacted society by creating more tension between blacks and whites.

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Brown v. Board of Education | Case, 1954, Definition, Decision, Facts, & Impact

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Brown v. Board of Education, case in which, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. It was one of the most important cases in the Court’s history, and it helped inspire the American civil rights movement of the late 1950s and ’60s.

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How it Influenced Other Civil Rights Groups.

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How it Influenced Other Civil Rights Groups.

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It helped other groups like the Little Rock Nine gain enough confidence to do things most people wouldn't and it helped move forward the Civil Rights Movement.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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The leaders used nonviolence in order to get public segregation changed. The case went to the Supreme Court and no violence was necessary

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This political cartoon shows how the decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education was such a big deal. It shows how the decision blew up and created a lot of controversy.

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The 14th Amendment was violated by the Board of Education under the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment.

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Summary

Celebrate Black History month with materials on two landmark Supreme Court cases on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. How could the same words have been interpreted so differently in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and sixty years later in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)? Read some background on the cases, excerpts from the rulings, and thought-provoking discussion questions.

Activity

As a condition of re-joining the Union after the Civil War, former Confederate states had to ratify what have become known as the "Civil War" Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to and protected the civil rights of former slaves; and the Fifteenth gave adult black men the right to vote. Unfortunately, the amendments alone proved insufficient to protect African Americans' rights.

Beginning in 1877, laws curbing the civil rights of Blacks began sweeping through Southern state legislatures. These laws became known as "Jim Crow" laws after a black minstrel character. Segregation became a legal requirement and not merely a cultural norm in every Southern state as well as some Northern ones. In 1896, Homer A. Plessy challenged a Louisiana statue necessitating separate rail cars for black and white passengers. Plessy claimed the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection clause, which requires that a state must not "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The Supreme Court disagreed with Plessy's argument and instead upheld the Louisiana law. In the process, the Court established the doctrine of "separate but equal." Though the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision never actually used that famous phrase, the ruling upheld the constitutionality of racially separate public accommodations as long as those accommodations were otherwise equal. The lone dissenting Justice in Plessy, John Harlan, objected to the majority's decision: "[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."

Public schools were able to remain segregated under the Plessy ruling. As public education became more common in the Twentieth Century, the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" doctrine began to have more of an effect on children. Black schools and white schools often received disproportionate funding from state and local governments. In Washington DC, lack of new construction caused overcrowding in black schools, while nearby white schools were under-used. In the Twentieth Century, community-based groups paired with the NAACP to conduct targeted legal challenges to the "separate but equal" doctrine. Their goal was to overturn the "separate but equal" doctrine by building a case that would force the Supreme Court to declare that even if accommodations were "equal" in other ways, segregation itself was unconstitutional. One of the most promising fronts was in the arena of public education.

Topeka, Kansas' school system provided the perfect case because the school buildings, textbooks, materials and teacher salaries were virtually equal in black and white schools. Topeka's Board of Education operated under an 1879 law, "Schools in Unorganized Counties," that permitted, but did not require, segregation. In 1951, thirteen parents sued on behalf of their twenty children. Oliver Brown, father of third-grader Linda Brown, became the named plaintiff. After making its way through the District Courts, the Brown case went to the Supreme Court.

In 1954, sixty years after Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court cited a series of tests performed by two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, demonstrating that segregation had a negative effect on the psyche of black children, instilling in them a sense of inferiority: "To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Plessy was officially overturned, as separate accommodations were judges to be "inherently unequal." Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice Earl Warren stated, "Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal. The 'separate but equal' doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson has no place in the field of public education."

After the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared state-mandated segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the case was re-argued to determine how to correct the violations. In a directive known as Brown II, the Supreme Court ordered District Courts to determine whether local governments were pursuing integration "with all deliberate speed." Some states and localities began earnest efforts to integrate, while others used the "deliberate speed" provision to delay integration. In the case of Little Rock Arkansas, integration came only after the President mobilized the National Guard to enforce it.

Discussion Questions

1. What Supreme Court decision established the doctrine of "separate but equal"?

2. What Kansas law did the Brown plaintiffs want struck down?

3. How did the Court rule, and what was the constitutional reasoning?

4. What was the Brown II ruling?

5. What role was there for other branches and levels of government in enforcing Brown II?

6. Why might it have taken nearly sixty years to the Supreme Court to get to its current interpretation of the 14th Amendment?

7. What might this suggest about the importance of looking at the historical context of Supreme Court rulings?

Extension

What role was there for other branches and levels of government in enforcing the Court's ruling? Create a brief PowerPoint presentation in which you develop your response.

Though Brown is perhaps the most known public education case, it is not the only suit brought against the segregationist laws governing state and local education systems. Brown itself was actually a combination of five cases- Brown (Topeka, Kansas), Davis (Farmville, Virginia), Belton (Wilmington, Delaware), Bolling (Washington, D.C.), and Briggs (Clarendon County, South Carolina). You can learn more about the other four cases using the resources below:

Answer Key

1. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

2. A law that permitted but did not require segregation. The law's name was "Schools in Unorganized Counties"(1879).

3. The Court ruled for Brown and held that separate accommodations were inherently unequal and thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. The Court cited the psychological harm that segregation had on black children.

4. The Brown II ruling ordered District Courts to ensure that schools were taking steps to ensure nondiscrimination "with all deliberate speed."

5. Accept reasoned answers.

Extensions Answer Key

It was the executive branch's responsibility to enforce the decision, and it was up to state governments to actually implement integration in practice. Congress could have tied funding to states passing laws that banned segregation. The president could have issued an executive order or (as was the case with the Little Rock 9) federalize the state's National Guard and have the troops escort the children to school.

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) - Bill of Rights Institute

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Summary Celebrate Black History month with materials on two landmark Supreme Court cases on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. How could the same words have been interpreted so differently in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and sixty years later in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)?

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There are a lot of events that led up to the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education.
1. 1879- Kansas State Law allows any city with 15,000 or more people to segregate elementary schools.
2. 1903- William Reynolds attempts to enroll his son into an all white-school but is denied and he takes his case to the supreme court where he is denied the right.
3. February 28, 1951- Brown vs. Board of Education is filed in the federal district court in Kansas.
4. June 25, 1951- Brown vs. Board of Education trial has begun.
5. November 1951- The NAACP Legal Defense Fund files an appeal against the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and other appeals from other states are also filed.
6. In Brown II the Supreme Court states that desegregation of schools should happen with deliberate speed.

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The BROWN V BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA Trial: A Chronology

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Esther Brown, a white woman from Merriam, Kansas, asks the Kansas NAACP branch to mount a legal challenge to segregated schools. In response, the NAACP branch presents a petition to the Topeka Board of Education on behalf of "The Citizen's Committee" asking it to end its policy of segregation.

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The NAACP, National Association for the Advanced of Colored People, was the organization challenging segregated laws in public schools

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education

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Oliver Brown was the lead plaintiff of the case.

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Youtube Video explaining Brown Vs. Board of Education.

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Youtube Video explaining Brown Vs. Board of Education.

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Brown v. Board of Education | BRI's Homework Help Series

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Before 1954, schools were segregated in the United States. However, the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. This was on of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that "separate-but-equal" was actually not equal.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.