What was brown vs board of education case about

Virginia ; June Brown v. Belton et al. These cases all document inadequate funding for segregated schools—meaning that many black children lacked playgrounds, ball fields, cafeterias, libraries, auditoriums, and other amenities provided for white children in newer schools. In Summerton, South Carolina, and Hockessin, Delaware, school buses were only provided for whites, while black children had to walk.

In Claymont, Delaware, and Farmville, Virginia, there was no senior high school for black pupils. The Brown case of Topeka, Kansas, itself included twelve other plaintiffs besides Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was being bused twenty-one blocks from her home to a segregated school.

The nearest school in her neighborhood was only a few blocks away, but it was for whites only. All of these cases were appealed to the Supreme Court, and the first round of arguments were held December 9—11, The following June, the Supreme Court ordered that a second round of arguments be heard in October The Court rescheduled Brown v.

Board arguments for December. On May 17, , the Court declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively overturning the Plessy v.

Ferguson decision mandating "separate but equal. The Brown ruling directly affected legally segregated schools in twenty-one states. Kansas's state statutes restricted segregated elementary schools only to cities, such as Topeka, that had populations of more than fifteen thousand. Page 11 of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which states that the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place in public education. Though the ruling declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, it did not specify how this was to be remedied.

Originally the Court scheduled arguments on this subject for later in the year, but it did not hear what would become the third round of arguments in Brown until April In the intervening year, the District of Columbia and some school districts in other states had voluntarily begun to desegregate their schools. However, state-sanctioned opposition to desegregation was already well under way in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, where the Court's decision had been declared "null, void, and no effect.

Public funds were disbursed to parents to subsidize the education of their children in private schools. Some states even went so far as to impose sanctions on anyone who implemented desegregation. In Topeka, resistance to desegregation was more indirect, subtle, and covert. Historically, the color line in Kansas was more permeable than it was South Carolina or Virginia.

Its "border state" ideology was directed more toward racial collegiality and inclusion than animosity and exclusion. Kansas had relatively permissive segregation statutes compared to some southern states. For example, segregation was permitted in elementary schools where the population exceeded fifteen thousand cities of the first class. The one segregated high school—Sumner High School in Kansas City, Kansas—had been established in after a special act of the legislature allowed segregation of a secondary school in this one instance.

However, Kansas's permissive racial statutes served to disguise the underlying reality of an unwritten code of racial separation that rivaled locales where total de jure public segregation was practiced. Topeka's continued segregation of its public school system after Brown illustrates how the dismantling of a de jure system of segregation does not necessarily include the end of racist social practices.

Over the several decades following Brown, covert opposition to desegregation was carried out under cover of school redistricting and convoluted attendance boundaries. It was also aided by real estate developers riding the postwar housing boom, who urged white Topekans to buy new houses and move to the newer—and racially homogenous—western suburbs. The City of Topeka obliged this migration by annexing western territory several times between and There was a corresponding rise in demand for more schools from the Topeka Board of Education and its successor, Unified School District Between and , Topeka witnessed the creation of an "alternative predominantly white, school sub-system generally around the peripheral boundary but specifically concentrated in the southern and western portions of the Topeka school system.

Additionally, classroom additions and portable classrooms would be primarily placed at disproportionately white schools. Though the official end of segregation in met with far less hostility in Kansas than in Mississippi or South Carolina, African Americans still encountered obstacles. News correspondent Carl T. Rowan had found Topeka to be a "pretty segregated city" when he lived there as a navy trainee during World War II.

Returning to Kansas in , he described his earlier experiences by observing, "Topeka was a paradox. There was no Jim Crow in some areas where you had expected it; segregation had deep roots where it was not expected.

The state's permissive segregation laws meant that overt segregation was strictly limited, while covert segregationist practices arose unrestrained. Hotels, bowling alleys and other public recreation facilities were closed to Negroes. A decade later and just a few months before the first Brown decision, Rowan still found it difficult to find a restaurant willing to serve him and his companion, attorney Charles Scott, the original lawyer involved in the Brown case.

Despite the legal demise of segregation, informal segregation was still intact. Rowan and Scott were asked by one restaurant owner to eat in the kitchen not because of any law requiring racial separation, but simply because it was his "policy. In Kansas, the antecedents of the Brown case can be traced back through eleven previous lawsuits challenging segregation. Beginning in , these suits all challenged the legality of school segregation as it was practiced in Kansas.

The earliest case, dating from , involved the introduction of segregation in recently annexed areas the Reynolds case , and the other case the Graham case in involved the decision of whether or not junior high schools fell under the state's segregation statutes.

Similar patterns of racial upheaval and containment, begun with the annexation issues related to the Reynolds case and the limitation of segregation to elementary schools as illustrated by the Graham case, continued throughout the Brown litigation. The issues involved in both of these cases were the effect of segregation itself on public education, the system of social practices that had arisen around it, and whether segregation as it existed was a violation of the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, the same issues involved in the Brown decision.

Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.

In Kansas, both the Reynolds and Graham cases illustrate the development of the issues that came to fruition nationally in the Brown case. The Topeka State Journal reported the historic May 17, , decision that segregation in public schools must end. On February 1, , William Reynolds tried to enroll his eight-year-old son Raul in the new school that was reserved for whites.

When he was refused, Reynolds filed suit on behalf of his son. In the complaint, the court record stated that. The context behind the Reynolds suit was related to the geographical circumstances of Topeka. The westward growth of Topeka was caused in part by its being geographically constrained by the Kansas River to its north and southeast. Due to the contours of its flood plain, the least desirable land was north and east of the city, an area that came to be predominately African American.

The more desirable land—which rarely flooded—was toward the west and south, and was predominately white. This pattern of settlement would continue throughout the twentieth century.

In the s, the city of Topeka annexed part of a rural district, No. After annexation it continued to be integrated because "it did not become convenient or expedient to make provision for separate schools. The district then built a new school for the white children living in the area, which brought about the Reynolds suit. Reynolds ultimately lost his case, and his son had to attend a segregated school. The school board argued that the new school building was larger and more centrally located in order to accommodate the white children, who outnumbered the African American children living in the area.

We see that as early as , the parents of white children were able to enjoy the benefits of sending their children to newer, neighborhood schools while the parents of African American children had to send their children to segregated schools, many of which were not located close to where they lived.

Just as land annexation resulted in a challenge to segregation, so too did the shift toward junior high curriculum bring another challenge to Topeka's segregated schools with the Graham case.

When the segregation statutes were first written in and later modified in , junior high schools did not exist, and very few people of any race went on to high school. The subsequent redefinition of state segregation statutes after was in response to an innovation in the institutional structure of public education accompanied by rapidly increasing enrollments in secondary and post-secondary institutions.

May 17, , marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. Ferguson decision. Interested in helping more cases in our fight for racial justice? You can donate here! Brown itself was not a single case, but rather a coordinated group of five lawsuits against school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia starting in December Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.

These LDF lawyers were assisted by a brain trust of legal scholars, including future federal district court judges Louis Pollack and Jack Weinstein, along with William Coleman, the first black person to serve as a Supreme Court law clerk. In addition, LDF relied upon research by historians, such as John Hope Franklin, and an array of social science arguments.

After the five cases were heard together by the Court in December , the outcome remained uncertain. The Court ordered the parties to answer a series of questions about the specific intent of the Congressmen and Senators who framed the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. Then the Court scheduled another oral argument in December Ferguson , which held that segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other.

However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups set up legal and political, challenges to racial segregation. In the early s, NAACP lawyers brought class action lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court orders to compel school districts to let black students attend white public schools.

One of these class actions, Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka's white schools. Brown claimed that Topeka's racial segregation violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because the city's black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be. The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine.

Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together. Thurgood Marshall , who would in be appointed the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs. Thanks to the astute leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren , the Court spoke in a unanimous decision written by Warren himself. The decision held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall On the other hand, that Amendment did not prohibit integration.