This discussion and our investigation convince us that, although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem with which we are faced. It covered exhaustively consideration of the Amendment in Congress, ratification by the states, then existing practices in racial segregation, and the views of proponents and opponents of the Amendment. Reargument was largely devoted to the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Argument was heard in the 1952 Term, and reargument was heard this Term on certain questions propounded by the Court. 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. This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of theĮqual protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment.The In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court Rules on School Segregation (1966).Ĭhief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court. Mark Tushnet, The NAACP's Strategy against Segregated.Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History ofīrown v.With this decision, the nation picked up where it had left the cause of equal protection more than eighty years earlier, and began its efforts to integrate fully the black minority into full partnership in the American polity. It was.a great political achievement, both in its uniting of the Court and in Harvie Wilkinson, who is now a federal circuit court judge, dismisses much of this criticism when he reminds us that Brown "was humane, among the most humane moments in all our history. Other critics have pointed to what they claim isĪ lack of judicial neutrality or an overreliance on allegedly flawed social science findings.īut J. But the decision also raised a number of questions about the authority of the Court and whether this opinion represents a judicial activism that, despite its inherently moral and democratic ruling, is nonetheless an abuse of judicial authority. No nation committed to democracy could hope to achieve those ideals while keeping people of color in a legally imposed position of inferiority. Board of Education, which struck down racially enforced school segregation, is one of the There is no question that the ruling in Brown v. Then Chief Justice Vinson, who reportedly opposed reversing Plessy, unexpectedly died a few weeks before the reargument, and the new chief justice, Earl Warren, skillfully steered the Court to its unanimous and historic ruling on May 17, 1954. They therefore set the cases down for reargument in 1953, specifically asking both sides to address particular issues. The issue that had hung fire ever since the Civil War now had to be facedĭirectly: what place would African Americans enjoy in the American polity?Ī number of reports indicate that the justices, while agreed that segregation was wrong, were divided over whether the Court had the power to overrule Plessy. In 1952 the NAACP brought five cases before the Court specifically challenging the doctrine of Plessy v. The opinion gave the NAACP and its chief legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, the hope that the justices were finally ready to tackle the basic question of whether segregated facilities could ever in fact be equal. Whatever else the justices knew about segregated facilities, they did know what made a good law school, and for the first time the Court ordered a black student admitted into a previously all-white school. Painter that a makeshift law school the state of Texas had created to avoid admitting blacks into the prestigious University of Texas Law School did not come anywhere close to being equal. That same day, the Court ruled in Sweatt v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), a unanimous Supreme Court had struck down University of Oklahoma rules that had permitted a black man to attend classes, but fenced him off from other students. (NAACP), the leading civil rights organization in the country, had never accepted the legitimacy of the "separate but equal" rule, and in the 1940s and 1950s had brought a series of cases designed to show that separate facilities did not meet the equality criterion. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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