brown vs board of education essay

brown vs board of education essay

The Impact and Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education

1. Introduction to Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education is an unequalled landmark in the course of the American social imaginary. Reach any course in American history, and you learn about the history behind William Marbury and James Madison or you get placed not far away into the colonial period: middle passage, colonization, and expansionism, race, class, and poverty. Brown mandates multiple readings to existing and future Americans because it narrates, in the religious imagery so popular for all Americans, Gods weeping: Brown is epic, a recording of, an announcement about the procedures, protocols, and doctrines Americans have typed and relied upon, the battles they have fought and continue to struggle against.

By now, it seems impossible to even begin to discuss the issues involved in the case of Brown v. Board of Education comprehensively. So often are the dates, the names, and the general facts relating to the case cited, so familiar are the praises and controversies enumerated by now, that one’s first impulse is to enter upon the cliche and reassert the need for defenses of arguments advocating certain interpretations; to reprise the reasons questioning, however, the judicial opinion, interests, and school politics. As central as it is, however, my topic traverses none of this old ground. My citation of themes, periods, and disciplinary means is cast in a new light. The crux of the paper will be intending, therefore, to prove that we must impress upon our analyses of Brown v. Board of Education, all similar cases, and of American social life, a properly social historicist and Black feminist reach; to show, I will argue, that in this way we reveal the case’s and its policies’ unthought via an additive dimension of feminism.

2. Historical Context and Significance

The Brown cases originated in a 1951 challenge to racial segregation in public schooling located within five states – Karst emphasizes that there were more than a hundred segregation cases considered by the NAACP that year – and Brown was initially argued before the Supreme Court on December 9, 1952, a year before Senator Claghorn communicated through the pages of M. D. Herschner’s White Patriotic Front magazine Southern States that even discussion of public desegregation was “nothing short of sedition,” “against the Southern states, and is meant to destroy their authority, and take away property rights of the white citizens.” In this environment of intense, intractable segregation and unyielding resistance from those in power, it took nearly three years for the Court to rule on Brown.

Developed in the context of widespread white American support for racial segregation policies and practices, along with concurrent social hierarchies that facilitated these divisions, Brown’s challenge to “separate but equal” segregation of African Americans out of formal education must itself be surveyed within a wider social history. Historical understanding of Brown v. Board of Education explicates not only the origin of existing racial inequality, but also internal limits to Brown’s power to rectify the ongoing legacy of past inequalities. Despite the important – indeed, central – role of plaintiffs’ lawyers and the structure of the legal arguments made before the Court, the African American people were always the ultimate makers of their own history. Emphasizing the active part played by the African American community in their own self-emancipation and insisting upon Brown’s origins in wider conceptions of social justice, then, casts Brown not just as the outcome of a legal strategy but potentially as a virtual social movement.

3. Legal Arguments and Supreme Court Decision

The Court’s decision in Brown is widely assumed to be based on a rejection of the “separate but equal” argument, long considered among constitutional litigators – and by Bickel – to be one of the worst decisions ever handed down by the Court. At the same time, Bickel quickly points out that the “equal protection decision is straightforward and infelicitous at the same time.” The constitutional principle supporting the result in Brown is Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which provides that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

In his 1954 book “The Legitimacy of the Court,” Yale Law School Professor and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Nobel laureate Alexander Bickel explained that the “impact” of judicial decisions very often revolves around the “basic social and political forces” set in motion by decisions and the adjustments “to those forces that will seem most immediate” and most acute. That is, the “legacy” of a Supreme Court decision is not an immediate byproduct of what the decision said, but rather of how the political system digests the decision. The legacy of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown is a subject of endless fascination, legal scholarship, civil rights history, and of the “popular constitutionalism” at the heart of ongoing debates about diversity, “critical race theory,” and the state of American politics.

4. Impact on Education and Civil Rights Movements

The Brown decision also inspired and served as a catalyst for a variety of civil rights movements and protests that influenced other spheres of American life and law in the 1960s. After Brown, African-American leaders, civil rights activists, their attorneys and legal advocates increasingly turned to legislation and litigation to enforce the means as well as the end of racial desegregation outlined in Brown. Before long, anti-discrimination and desegregation education laws replaced, or at least weakened, the constraint of de jure doctrine. The peaceful and highly mature civil rights protests in the 1960s, which formed part of the Black Freedom movement, were to sear the nation’s collective conscience and influence political priorities in turn. The far wider legal, political, social, and economic dimensions of the Black Civil Rights movement could thus be seen as, if not a legacy of Brown, then, heavily shaped by it. The overruling of Plessy and the enforcement of equal protection anti-subordination must jolt the political system and the society wide awake, blessedly or not, ended up being unprecedented and unrepeatable legal wake-up calls—the kind that knocks one out.

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark case on multiple fronts. Arguably, it was one of the most important Supreme Court decisions handed down in the 20th century because its immediate impact and wider legacy reverberated in both educational and civil rights spheres. On the educational front, the plaintiff victory in Brown, to state the obvious, was a breakthrough in the post-war campaign to desegregate Southern schools. With the legal stamp of unconstitutionality to bolster their case, more than 300 African-American and mixed-race plaintiffs sued school districts in the South between 1954 and 1955. Crucially, the Brown decision affirmed the rights of minority children to obtain an equal educational opportunity in the public schools. Brown also provided a foundation for subsequent legal struggles over educational resources in courts and legislatures by clarifying that racial segregation itself violated the Constitution. The language of Brown’s holding and its companion case, known as Brown II, respective ‘all deliberate speed’ likewise advanced the principle of fundamental equal educational opportunity.

5. Legacy and Ongoing Challenges in Achieving Educational Equity

In some ways, then, progress has been made toward establishing the foundations of educational equity framed by Maurice Bell in his 1968 “Foreword” to the Little Rock Report, a progress that would ultimately improve the life chances of black Americans and others struggling for fair treatment in public life. But unfortunately, the promise of the decision and its legacy remains unfulfilled in critical respects. Intense, enduring disparities, often concentrated within geographic areas, profoundly impact the life chances of children of color today. These disparities—generally originating in the disempowerment of minority districts in the labor and housing markets, and in parents’ opportunities in the political economy of cities—consistently pose obstacles to children, obstructing full access to educational resources, opportunities, and outcomes. Thus, inequalities continue to plague educational opportunities for those children who are most deeply mired in policies and norms created and reinforced from the time of slavery into the present era.

The court’s decision in Brown triggered tremendous societal transformation in the United States. The mobilization for civil rights, especially in the 1960s, produced a range of national policy changes that afforded more people of color access to education, work, housing, and political participation, among other dimensions of life. No longer distorted by an explicitly race-based machinery of segregation, many attribute the decision itself and the social movement that grew from Brown with expanding conceptions of racial justice and the rights of individuals, protecting marginalized communities from discrimination and violence by legal and extra-legal measures. And while the form and character of major, successful public policy around civil rights have evolved, it is no understatement to say that these changes have created opportunities for many, and did so in a way that shapes public sensibilities regarding justice and fairness in all dimensions of social life.