Brown v Board

Linda Brown outside Sumner School where she was not allowed to go in 1950 because of her race. The picture is probably from 1954.

Oliver Brown, et al. v Board of Education of Topeka, et al. (1954) was the Supreme Court case in the US that overturned Plessy v Ferguson (1896), the bedrock of Jim Crow (US apartheid). It paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement to bring an end to openly racist laws in the 1960s.

Linda Brown, daughter of Oliver Brown, was a seven-year-old Black girl in Topeka, Kansas who stood on a fault line of US history. To get to school by 9:00 am she had to leave by 7:40 to catch the bus, walking seven blocks, crossing the dangerous Rock Island railway switching yards. She often had to wait in the cold and the wind and the rain when the bus was late.

There was a school just four blocks from her house. Some of her friends went there, but the principal turned away her and her father.

Her mother told her it was because her face was black, and she just couldn’t go to school with the white races.

Her daddy told her he was going to try his best to do something about it.

In 1951 he did, becoming part of an NAACP class-action lawsuit with other Black parents in Topeka. The judge ruled against them saying that Plessy v Ferguson allowed Kansas to have “separate but equal” schools.

The NAACP, knowing that Jim Crow was built on Plessy, had been pounding away at it since 1935. They started with law schools and had worked their way down to grade schools. To overturn Plessy they had to prove that separate meant unequal. They did that with dolls:

The Clark Doll Experiment: In a nationwide study, Dr Kenneth Clark and and his wife Mamie found that Black children who went to segregated schools were more likely to think that White dolls were “nice” and Black dolls were “bad” – even when the only difference between the dolls was skin colour.

Segregation: By law 17 states and Washington, DC required Black and White children to go to separate schools. The NAACP had class-action lawsuits in five: Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina and DC. By the time they reached the Supreme Court, they became one case named after Oliver Brown: his name came first alphabetically.

Thurgood Marshall, one of the NAACP’s top lawyers, argued the case before the Supreme Court. The dolls were part of it, but so was the sociology of Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” (1944) and E. Franklin Frazier’s “The Negro in the United States” (1939).

The US government itself weighed in, saying that the South was:

“a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren, wanting a 9-0 vote on the ruling, promised that school desegregation would be slow. And slow it was:

In 1979, Linda Brown, now a mother, reopened the case because Topeka still had not desegregated its schools. She won the case in 1987. Topeka desegregated in 1994.

Resegregation: in the 1990s the Supreme Court gutted Brown v Board.

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: mainly NPR (2018); “We Shall Overcome” (2004) by Herb Boyd.

See also:

• Jim Crow
• NAACP
• Thurgood Marshall
• Clark Doll Experiment
• desegregation:
  • Elizabeth Eckford
  • Dorothy Counts
  • That Norman Rockwell painting
  • James Meredith
• The New Jim Crow
• resegregation

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