On May 17th, 1954 Chief Justice Warren and the Supreme Court decided that "in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate-but-equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The unanimous decision of Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation and set the stage for a number of integration victories to follow. However, the country was not unanimously elated in the decision, and as was shown in the South’s increasingly slow shift towards integration it seemed as though the idealist law would never truly be reality. Especially with the disappointing "with all deliberate speed" clause added in 1955, it seemed as though the law was almost being set up for failure.

Fifty years after the decision integration is still a compelling issue. While larger and larger numbers agree in polls that segregation is wrong, there is evidence that at least to some extent, segregation is still with us. "Studies have also shown that white Americans by large margins now embrace the principle of racial equality." (Sniderman 5) It also seems that more recently issues like busing, affirmative action and vouchers have taken the reigns of the argument. But the heart of the argument is now, as it always has been, a black and white issue.

The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Decision stated that it was not unconstitutional for Homer Plessy, a man only one eighth black, to have to sit in the "colored" section of a Louisiana train because the coaches were "separate but equal." Plessy had tried to sue on the basis of his Fourteenth Amendment rights, but the court failed to see state sponsored segregation as unlawful. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the sole dissenter on the decision, "Out constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." (Blaustein and Ferguson 98)

Many civil rights groups worked against segregation in the early 20th century, but no organization worked harder than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. Thurgood Marshall and the legal team of the NAACP took on case after case and built up a strong reputation before trying to tackle school desegregation.

An early victory for Marshall actually came to him in Prince George’s County in Pearson v. Murray (1936). Donald G. Murray was denied admission to the University of Maryland law school, but the Board of Regents agreed to pay his tuition at any out of state school where he could gain admittance since Maryland did not have a black law school. Murray sued under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and won admission.

Another big win was McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), where the Supreme Court ruled that a public institution of higher learning could not provide different treatment to a student solely because of his race, doing so deprived the student of their Fourteenth Amendment rights of Due Process. Mr. McLaurin was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma and sued for admittance on the basis that there was no equal facility for African Americans. He won but the school provided separate facilities, so McLaurin sued again on the basis that the new facilities were unequal. He lost in the District Court but won when he appealed to the Supreme Court.

That same year another victory for integration came in the Supreme Court's Sweatt v. Painter decision. An African American student was accepted to a new separate law school in lieu of admittance to the University of Texas Law School. The Supreme Court ruled that the new school was not equal because of quantitative differences in facilities and intangible factors such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact.
While the McLaurin and Sweatt decisions made strides for secondary education in single cases, no universal legislation was yet in place. The NAACP went searching for plaintiffs to take on segregation at the elementary level. While Marshall and others worried that such a case might be asking too much, they realized that it was necessary. Unfortunately, finding parents willing to put their children’s names down was not an easy task. In the South, African Americans who chose to fight for equality often found themselves fired from their jobs, chased off their land or threatened by the Klu Klux Klan. Eventually people came forward, and there were soon five suits to defend that would become Brown v. Board of Education.

The first was Briggs v. Elliott, a collection of 20 plaintiffs in Clarendon County, South Carolina spearheaded by Reverend Albert Joseph DeLaine. The case initially targeted racial inequality, not segregation, but with Marshall's help it grew. The resources for African American students were appalling in comparison to the white schools. Only a fraction of the money spent per student on white children was allotted for black children, and in some cases “colored” schools lacked running water and electricity.

The four other cases came from Virginia, DC, Delaware and Kansas. In Virginia the case came from black students at Robert R. Morton High School in Farmville. In April of 1951, a junior, Barbara Johns led 450 students in a strike at Morton. Gardner Bishop in Washington D.C. led a case on behalf of his daughter who was bused to an overcrowded black school. In Wilmington, DE Sarah Bulah sued on behalf of her daughter who couldn’t attend the town’s well-equipped local school and was bused to an old school in Wilmington. Ms. Bulah turned to Louis Redding, the first black member of the Delaware bar, and one of Marshall's aides, Jack Greenburg for help. Redding and Greenburg had already won a case against the University of Delaware, requiring them to admit black undergraduates.

The last case was in Topeka, where the issue was not as much equal facilities but that children were denied admittance to schools in their area and sent to segregated schools far away. Oliver Brown agreed to fight for his daughter Linda with a little persuasion from the NAACP. The highlight of the Topeka case was the use of a psychological argument that "children who were part of such an officially sanctioned system were made to feel inferior. And children who felt inferior would necessarily lose motivation to learn." (Patterson 34)

When the cases were all collected Marshall and the NAACP realized the case would not be an easy one. Fighting against history, and precedents like Plessy, the outcome of the suit was uncertain. So Marshall used the argument from the Brown case that segregated schools damaged the psyches of black children. Kenneth Clark, a psychologist and his wife Mamie did tests on African American children by showing drawings of brown and white dolls to black children. The children were more likely to call the white dolls "good" or "nice," or say they preferred the white dolls.
It was just the luck the plaintiffs needed when Eisenhower named Governor Earl Warren of California successor to the late Chief Justice Vinson. Many say it was Warren who pulled the court together and was able to produce the unanimous decision in favor of desegregation.

But on May 31, 1955 the Court issued what would become known as Brown II, where it was said that the Court "should not issue what it cannot enforce." This is the decision that brought about the hotly debated "with all deliberate speed" clause, stating that integration should occur within a "reasonable" timeframe to work out all the issues that came along with it, such as new districts and busing. However, it seemed to turn into an excuse not to integrate.
Nine years later, in 1964 the mandate to desegregate reached higher education in the Florida ex rel. Hawkins v. Board of Control, but the new ruling did little to change higher education in the South. Fortunately, one of the most promising pieces of legislation was on the horizon; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was designed to eliminate discrimination, and specifically Title VI of the act restricted spending of federal funds in segregated schools and colleges. No longer could the South rely on "all deliberate speed," since Title IV allowed credible lawsuits against discrimination almost guaranteed success. It seemed as though integration had finally gotten the push it needed from the federal government.

While the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare conducted compliance reviews, a larger case was brewing. In 1970 Kenneth Adams, a black student from Mississippi, filed a suit against Elliot Richardson, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, basically for the Department's inability to enforce Title VI. Adams v. Richardson (1973) was technically a victory for integration but it left public black colleges in a bind. Basically the plaintiffs and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education wanted to eliminate the dual system without eliminating the strong public black colleges that had emerged in the last century. In 1990 the Adams case was dismissed as a result of the Court's ruling in the Women's Equity Action League v. Cavazos, which some believe to have been a huge setback for desegregation.

While the Women's Equity Action League case ended federal monitoring of desegregation compliance, it could not refute Title VI that "no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

While for a steady period in the late 20th century the numbers showed increasing integration, it seems as though the figures have started to shift back down. White flight from inner cities to suburbs is still a very real issue, and more and more people are writing off busing as a thing of the past, a waste of resources with little or no results. In 2003 a very controversial Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the right of universities to consider race in admissions in order to achieve a diverse student body. This affirmative action victory has been hotly debated, as the split Court’s 5-4 ruling showed. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
The future of integration is obviously still uncertain. Some are more hopeful than others, but most agree there is still work to be done. Although the Civil Rights Act and victories like Brown have put us on the right path, 229 years after our Founding Fathers declared that "all men are created equal," the fight is not yet over to ensure the continued prosperity of equal treatment under the law and "liberty and justice for all."

References

1. Brown, Christopher. The Quest to Define Collegiate Desegregation: Black Colleges, Title VI Compliance, and Post-Adams Litigation. Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1999.

2. Patterson, James. Brown v. Board of Education: a Civil Rights Milestone and it’s Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

3. Sniderman, Paul. Race and Inequality: A Study in American Values. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1985.

4. Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Random House, 1998.