Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 let states separate the races so long as facilities were nominally equal. Starting in the 1930s, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of Howard University targeted graduate and professional schools that states could not duplicate. In Topeka, Kansas, 13 parents sued in 1951, with welder and assistant pastor Oliver Brown as named plaintiff. His daughter Linda rode a bus to Monroe Elementary instead of walking seven blocks to Sumner. A lower court found the schools substantially equal yet stated that segregation harmed Black children, and Judge Walter Huxman ruled he was bound by Plessy. The case was consolidated with suits from South Carolina, Delaware, Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
The Justice Department’s 1952 brief spent five pages on how segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War. After Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in September 1953, Earl Warren won over Robert Jackson and Stanley Reed, and on May 17, 1954 the Court ruled 9-0 that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, citing Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll studies. Brown II’s call for all deliberate speed opened the way to massive resistance, from Little Rock to Prince Edward County.
- The Virginia case began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led 450 students in a walkout.
- Prince Edward County closed its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate.
- Thousands of Black teachers and principals were fired or demoted as districts consolidated.
- Law clerk William Rehnquist’s 1952 memo argued Plessy was right, a view he later disowned.
- Topeka’s district was declared unitary only in 1999, after the 1978 case known as Brown III.
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