brown v board of education essay

brown v board of education essay

The Impact and Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education: An In-depth Analysis

1. Introduction to Brown v. Board of Education

This article offers an in-depth analysis of the impact and legacy of Brown through an exploration of its actual procedural history. It argues that the popular understanding of Brown as a relatively narrow holding depended on events that postdate the decision and ignores the deep roots of the lawsuit. It uncovers a procedural history regarding the selection of the legal attack that catalyzed increased public involvement and interest, culminating in the due process holding that rocked American law and society. It suggests that viewing Brown as the result of an evolving legal and public response to an evolving lawsuit, rather than an episodic spark from a singular decision, recovers some lost nuance in our understanding of the Brown legacy and prompts us to reconsider more pointedly the 1950-1951 remand and the discourses of “choice” that Murch describes. Drawing on Howard published oral history interviews with Charles Purcell, lawyers for the NAACP, and a variety of poorly-used/unknown law review articles, the article also offers new details and insights into the text and interplay of the rival causes of action.

School desegregation cases continue to shape American education and law, decades after the last holdout districts were released from court order. However, the leading case decided by Brown v. Board of Education is rarely a major player. Much of the most significant doctrinal development after 1954 has revolved around issues that Brown did little to resolve, such as the implementation of Brown and its interpretation under the compatible concept of “colorblindness.” Brown transformed the discourse about race in this country and initiated the end of the legal sanctions of Jim Crow. But illuminating how it accomplished that feat, without overestimating its immediate impact or diminishing the hard work of civil rights lawyers and activists, presents challenges.

2. Historical Background and Context

In 1954, Brown was decided at a time when it was being seen as the fulfillment of various kinds of black activism. Brown was monumental and impressive. However, a very small percentage of Americans ever viewed it as the carefully plotted and strategic triumph of a consummate professional. Brown, for example, occurred in an era in which cases of segregation were not unusual but, as Clive Webb has observed, they were often local and as a rule both fleeting and superficial. In 1954, twelve states and the District of Columbia still mandated segregation. Brown had been contested and fought in the courts for almost a decade. It had been orchestrated and fought on the front lines by various civil rights organizations committed to dismantling segregation within the context of intensive pressure on the federal courts for months.

Brown v. Board of Education, a social and historical event whose legacy has never ebbed, can only be fully appreciated within the context of the times during which it unfolded. Brown was more than just an accomplished organization pressing for judicial change. It was also the only explicitly radical court case ever heard by the Supreme Court of the U.S. and it came to constitute a political response to a variety of legislative strategies. The historical and social dynamics that set the legal stage for Brown, then, comprise the preconditions for the decision that initiated months and, in some cases, years or even generations, of far-reaching change in the U.S.

3. Legal Arguments and Supreme Court Decision

The National Citizens Political Action Committee, interested in lobbying the President, the Attorney General, and Congress, presented a brief that argued racial segregation in public schools “offends the dignity and social equality” of the African American children attending those schools. The U.S. Congress presented a brief that argued that in 1896 the Court “lacked the power to read into the Fourteenth Amendment’s personal guarantee of equality any prohibition of state-imposed segregation and discrimination such as was here involved.” This brief argued that such a reading would “set at naught the meaning of the [Fourteenth] Amendment, and give it an effect which the Supreme Court never intended it should have.” The Supreme Court decision in Brown overruled the 1896 Plessy decision and agreed with the National Citizens Political Action Committee and the U.S. Congress that a law permitting or requiring racial segregation “demeans, stigmatizes, defiles, and classifies Negro children and compares them to animals, and thereby humiliates them with a guilt not inherent in their birth.” The Supreme Court decision also said: “the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted in the states as denoting the inferiority of the negro group and is an infirmary of humiliation and a sense of inferiority that affects many great at a tender year.” That is the key part of the Brown decision.

Key to the Brown case are the successful legal arguments of Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and a team of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers. They built their case on the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment declares: “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The NAACP lawyers also mentioned the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property.” The NAACP asked the Supreme Court to “declare the law” that the state laws permitting or requiring racial segregation violates the Constitution, “because any such action so racially separated and so tangible in denial of the equal protection of the laws, now denied [African Americans] solely because of their race, is in full conflict with equality under law guaranteed to the colored plaintiffs and others in violation of Amendment 14.” The NAACP in its brief also stated that “racial segregation of children in public schools is unconstitutional.”

4. Impact on Education and Civil Rights in the United States

Denoting a sea-change in American society, Brown represents a transmogrification in performing public education with implications beyond the realm of race and racialism. Many of the educationists, renowned scholars, and sociologists of the time believed that the colored people can only be incorporated into White society if they can stamp out this deluded parochialism of adults with the incipient point generation. The NAACP supported Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders confirmed the momentum of Brown in developing equal rights for all Americans. The formation of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) gave up its original commitments to integrate the transportation system during the war while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded by Martin Luther King.

Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court case in the United States. In this case, it was decided that separate facilities provided for the education of black and white children were inherently unequal. This landmark decision of the Court ended half a century of legal support for segregation in schooling. This ruling brought an end to legally sanctioned segregation in American schools, a central tenet of the system of Jim Crow laws that operated in many states. This decision signaled the Court’s desire to fully incorporate black citizens of the country into American society. Brown v. Board of Education was an important decision providing a way for the Civil Rights Movement.

5. Legacy and Ongoing Relevance of the Case

In recent years, efforts to alter the decision’s symbolic meaning have also been pivotal. Some politicians and commentators would suggest that Brown was largely a failure, raising false expectations for quick and effective remedies, and setting into motion a harmful wave of litigation and period of social unrest. It falls upon Brownagians to recover the decision’s reputation and to remind all Americans of the moral grandeur of the Court when it stated “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Millions of other Americans secretly agree with this assessment, but are also increasingly convinced that contemporary conditions are far removed from the days of Brown. The Brown case may be celebrated as a singular act of judicial valor and wisdom, yet it scarcely signals the end of a continuing effort to connect the values of the Constitution to the de facto condition and aspirations of people on the ground. Creating practices and policies that further democratic dignity and integrity, the legacy of Brown, is the difficult and ongoing challenge of the twenty-first century.

Given this approach, several critical issues and questions have arisen about the impact and meaning of Brown as a historical event. First, what actually changed as a result of Brown? Second, if Brown did not accomplish more than it did, why is it still widely discussed and celebrated as a milestone in the development of constitutional protections for equality? Third, in assessing both the impact of Brown and its symbolic significance, it is important to explore the legitimate expectations of different legal actors, including those who initially sought relief in the case, as well as the larger significance of the doctrines and principles suggested by the decision.