State checks on the judicial branch | US government and civics | Khan Academy

In previous videos, we had talked about the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy versus Ferguson, which is a good one to know in general if you're studying United States history and/or United States government. But this is where we got the principle of separate but equal. The Supreme Court said in 1896 that it was okay to have segregation; it was okay to separate folks on a racial basis as long as what they got was equal.

This was the case around whether it was unconstitutional for an African American in Louisiana to have to sit in a separate rail car from white passengers. Now, as you can imagine, this idea of segregation and separate but equal was taken to justify racial segregation in all walks of life, including in schools.

What you see here is a map of the United States, and it's colored in by the degree of school segregation, educational segregation, as we enter into the 1950s. You could see that in these red states, which are for the most part the southern states, it required the separation of races. In the green states, you see that segregation was forbidden, and in the yellow and blue states, it was kind of in between. The yellow states had no legislation, and in the blue states, it was limited; it wasn't required.

All this comes to a head as we get into the 1950s. In Topeka, Kansas, you have a situation where the NAACP, in coordination with 13 parents, tried to register African American students into white schools. The schools tried to prevent them, and it eventually went to the United States Supreme Court in the case of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, 1954. Oliver Brown was one of those 13 parents trying to get his daughter into an otherwise segregated school.

This is a seminal Supreme Court case because here the Supreme Court revisits segregation and essentially overturns Plessy versus Ferguson. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled: "We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal; therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

We cite the 14th Amendment a lot in these Supreme Court cases, and it never hurts to take another look at at least an excerpt of the 14th Amendment. This is a focus on the equal protection clause, which is part of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment: "Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Then, this is the equal protection clause: "Nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This is a big deal because it not only states that segregation is fundamentally unconstitutional, but what's also interesting about this is that this unanimous ruling by the United States Supreme Court then sets off a whole series of actions by politicians in those states that you saw where segregation was mandatory to try to go around the Supreme Court's decision.

A good example of this was Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in 1956. Shortly after the Brown versus Board of Education decision, he issued this Southern Manifesto where he got a hundred politicians in the South to essentially sign on, saying, "Hey, we are going to do what we can legislatively to try to get around the Brown versus Board of Education decision. We are going to try to ensure that that does not go into effect in segregated states like Virginia."

Later that year, in 1956, it took the form of this Massive Resistance movement, where they had the Stanley Plan, named after the Virginia governor, in which they started to pass laws to try to make Brown versus Board of Education not take effect. One of them, for example, said that any school that actually desegregated would not receive state funds and it authorized the governor to close those schools down. This Massive Resistance continued and was challenged in the courts all the way to 1959, where you actually have the first integrated schools in the state of Virginia.

Another state-level challenge to the ruling by the Supreme Court happened in 1957, where the governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, tried to actively prevent nine students, nine African American students, from attending Little Rock Central High School. What you see in this picture over here are U.S. Army troops sent by President Eisenhower to escort these nine students into Little Rock Central High School.

These nine students are famously known as the Little Rock Nine, and this is actually a picture of Governor Orville Faubus later complaining about this intervention. This continues on for some time. You fast forward to 1963. This is Alabama Governor George Wallace, physically using himself to block two African American students from registering at the University of Alabama.

Once again, in this situation, the president had to take action. This time, it was John F. Kennedy who federalized the National Guard and made them force Governor Wallace to step aside so that those students could register at the University of Alabama.

So the big picture here is that Brown versus Board of Education is a seminal case in American history, but it also tells us how the legislative branch and state governments might try to go around decisions that they don't like. Sometimes, they might just ignore the decision until they’re forced to pay attention to it, or they might try to legislate their way around it and have a fight in the court system until they're forced to go one way or the other.