Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka | National Constitution Center | Khan Academy

Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy, and today we're learning more about Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka. Decided in 1954, Brown vs. Board was a landmark case that opened the door for desegregation and the modern civil rights movement. In Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools for white and black children, which had been prevalent throughout the American South since the 1896 decision in Plessy versus Ferguson that legalized segregation, were in fact inherently unequal.

The named plaintiff in this case, Oliver Brown, was the father of Linda, a third grader who had to take a bus to a segregated elementary school that was much farther from her home than the nearby school for white children. To learn more about the Brown case, I sought out the help of two experts. Theodore Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Michael McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallory Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

So, Professor Shaw, could you just kind of set the stage for us? What was the overall social and political context behind this case? Well, Brown was decided in the Cold War era. I think that's important for reasons that I'll come back to, but it also was decided, I guess, 58 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy versus Ferguson that separate but equal railway cars were constitutional. Of course, that extended to all walks of life in the South, and so what you had was Jim Crow segregation sustained and set in place by law. Brown was the case that cracked the edifice of Jim Crow segregation, so it was enormously important.

It came after a long campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to overturn Plessy. One thing that I think is really confusing about Plessy versus Ferguson is how it interacts with the 14th Amendment. So immediately after the Civil War, Congress passed and the states ratified the 14th Amendment, which gives equal protection under the law to all citizens. But then, Plessy versus Ferguson, just a couple of decades later, legalizes segregation.

Can you talk a little bit more about how the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment has been interpreted in Plessy and then later in Brown versus Board? The doctrine of separate but equal was itself a departure from the prior understanding of what the 14th Amendment meant. In the immediate wake of the 14th Amendment, segregation was understood to be a violation of equal rights. Thus, the Congress of the United States passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited mandatory segregation of, among other things, railroads. Now, that was struck down in 1883, I believe it was 1886, but for reasons not related to separate but equal or segregation.

It's only in the late 1880s and 1890s that states begin passing Jim Crow legislation, like the law in Plessy versus Ferguson. I think Plessy very likely would have come out a different way had it come up 25 years earlier. It's really very difficult to understand the logic of Plessy because Plessy takes the point of view that segregation is okay because it treats everyone the same way. And the sense of inferiority or insult that comes from segregation, the court just ignored. You can read the opinion different ways, and people do and have read the opinion different ways.

A portion of the opinion makes it sound as though this is a kind of social science conclusion that segregation breeds a feeling of inferiority that has a deleterious effect on the black student's performance in school. There's a famous footnote in Brown versus Board of Education, footnote 11, in which some social scientists, particularly Dr. Kenneth Clark, did a series of tests—the doll test—in which they showed black and white dolls, who were otherwise identical, to little children, little black children, and they asked who was the good doll, who was the bad doll, who was the pretty doll, who was the ugly doll. The black children would invariably choose the white dolls as the better dolls and the black dolls as the inferior dolls.

Then, finally, the bombshell question: which one looks like you? And they would stop and choose the black doll, and many times tears would come to their eyes. So this whole notion of the inferiority that segregation imbued in black school children was important, and the Supreme Court had some very eloquent language about that. Everyone knew that the only reason to have laws requiring black and white to be separate was because of the feeling on the part of the dominant white group that the African race was inferior.

I think it was a failure of political will, really, rather than a matter of constitutional or legal logic that led to that, and then it took almost 60 years before the Supreme Court would turn itself around. The late Leon Higginbotham, who sat on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, used to say that Plessy was wrong the day it was decided, and I believe he was right about that. If you go back and look at the rationale stated in Plessy, it doesn't hold up; it's not an intellectually honest decision.

Having said that, if you look at Brown, it really did not overrule Plessy on its face with respect to segregation and Jim Crow across the board. What it did was say that in the field of public education, separate but equal is unconstitutional; separate schools cannot be equal. What followed Brown was a series of cases in all kinds of areas in which the court, sometimes without much of an opinion, cited Brown but struck down segregation in public libraries, public accommodations, transportation, etc. The case that settled the long-running boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that catapulted Martin Luther King into the national world stage— you know, it was resolved finally.

The boycott was important, but it was resolved by this case that the Supreme Court decided, and it cited Brown. So Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund had kind of been chipping away at the edges of segregation, and then they turned directly to school segregation in the Brown cases. So, what kind of arguments did they use to challenge the system of school segregation? Thurgood Marshall and his co-counsel and the NAACP established a very careful strategy of one case at a time, sort of pushing the envelope of this idea that segregation is inconsistent with the demands of equal protection.

And the interesting thing about Brown itself, the case challenging segregation in Topeka, Kansas— you know, why Topeka, Kansas? Why was this such an excellent place to raise the challenge? The reason is that the schools in Topeka were very substantially equal in quality. In Topeka, they actually had integrated high schools and middle schools. It was only the elementary schools that were segregated. The district court found, and the Supreme Court did not disagree, that in terms of their material advantages, the black school was essentially just as good as the white school.

That's why the NAACP wanted to go after Topeka, because then it went to the principle of the thing. You know, it's one thing to attack a segregation when separate but equal is really just a fiction, but when separate but equal is a reality—at least pretty close to it, as in Topeka—you have to go after the actual principle that segregation is wrong in principle and not just wrong because it tends most of the time to lead to a material disadvantage.

Brown was actually five cases. The Brown case itself came from Topeka, Kansas. In many ways, the Supreme Court might have chosen to lead with the Brown case because it wasn't part of the South, and so in some ways it might have been viewed as taking pressure off of the South. But there were five cases altogether: there was a case out of South Carolina, a case out of Virginia, a case out of Delaware, a case out of Washington, D.C., and then the Topeka case.

The Brown family was actually not even the only family named Brown in the Topeka case, and the other Brown case did not have their father available as the lead voice. They wanted a man, and so Oliver Brown was the one they chose. They stipulated that the schools were in fact equal in all respects, and of course they weren't. It was never possible to make separate but equal equal, but they stipulated that these schools were equal—the black and the white schools—because they wanted the court to confront the issue of whether separate but equal per se was unconstitutional.

Interesting. So, it's this place where they're hoping not to have a ruling that, for example, oh, the schools for black children need to be brought up to code to be the same as white children, but they're trying to strike down the idea of segregation altogether. Indeed, they ruled unanimously that separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal. The Supreme Court in Brown says, "Well, whatever may have been the status of education as a civil right back then, back in the 19th century, by now it surely is a civil right, and therefore there can be no discrimination with regard to it."

Then, one other thing that changed, that I think the Supreme Court doesn't refer to but many historians think was surely in the back of their minds, has to do with foreign policy of all things. During this time, the United States, in the wake of World War II, was playing a very major role in opposing colonialism, opposing communism, and trying to spread the gospel of liberty around the world. When we had segregation at home, this looked like rank hypocrisy. This was the Cold War period.

These soldiers came home from fighting a form of racism in Europe—Nazi Germany, you know, the Holocaust—and when they came back, they came back to segregated America. There are many stories that are painful about what their experiences were. But meanwhile, the United States is having this cold war with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was exploiting this inconsistency in what America said it was and what it was. Though the Supreme Court never said a word about that in the Brown cases, that was very much context for that decision.

So, what did it take for desegregation to really come about? Do you think we've achieved desegregation? Yes and no. There was a long battle to implement Brown, and in fact, for the most part, Brown was not implemented fully to the extent it ever was until the early 1970s, when the Supreme Court decided a case called Swan v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in North Carolina and sanctioned the use of busing.

This does not depend upon what social scientists might think about how people do in school. This is a much more fundamental principle of equality under the law that our law must treat black and white the same; that for the government to draw racial distinctions is fundamentally unequal and unconstitutional and wrong and unjust fundamentally. So, and not just as a matter of social science evidence.

I don't want to sound despairing, you know, but I think if anybody looks at our public schools today and many of our communities and our towns and cities and our counties, we have to acknowledge honestly that there's still a great deal of segregation. There are many schools that are identifiably white or identifiably black, and now, you know, Latinos, Hispanics— a large degree of segregation there also. Even voluntary desegregation efforts have been found by the Supreme Court a few years ago to be largely unconstitutional and illegal, and that's tragic.

But that doesn't mean that Brown wasn't significant. I was born in the year Brown vs. Board of Education. The America that I grew up in is a very different country than the one that preceded it. In spite of our flaws and our wars—no Brown versus Board of Education, no civil rights movement, I would say, and ultimately no desegregation of our society to the extent that we've accomplished it. And we have, to a great degree, no Barack Obama. So I think Brown stands, as I said, as a dividing point in America. But we can do better.

So, we've learned that under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the decision in Brown versus Board of Education struck a major blow to the system of segregation. After World War II, amidst the ideological struggle of the Cold War, the Supreme Court overturned the precedent set in Plessy versus Ferguson and ruled that segregated education constituted a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

To learn more about Brown versus Board, visit the National Constitution Center's interactive constitution and Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government and politics.