AP Government

Brown v Board of Education

I. At the time in the United States (1950’s) segregation was legal. This was due to

the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, where they stated that “separate

but equal” was constitutional. One such aspect that was segregated was that of schools.

Although separate, black and white schools were often not equal. The facilities at black

schools, and the materials provided for students were lackluster compared to those

provided to the white schools. Additionally, sometimes black students lived extremely far

from the location of the assigned school. In Topeka, Kansas, this was the case for an

African American student called Linda Brown, who had to travel across a dangerous

railroad to arrive at her school. Her parents saw this as unequal and therefore a violation

of the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which requires each state to provide

equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. The district court ruled

that the schools were, in fact, equal, making this segregation legal. The Browns then went

on to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

II. The judicial question in this case was:

- Did the segregation public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the

14th Amendment?

III. The Supreme Court ruled that even though physical facilities and other “tangible”

factors of segregated schools were somewhat equal, the equal protection of the laws

guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment were still being violated. This was due to the

argument that by having separate schools, the black children felt inferior to the white
children. This feeling of inferiority reduced the desire to learn, and thus kept them from

receiving the same level of education as white children. On this basis, segregated schools

were inherently unequal. The Supreme Court then went on to say that the desegregation

of public education was to go on “with all deliberate speed” and that federal district

courts would oversee this process.

IV. The court’s decision was huge victory for Black civil rights, however, the

vagueness of how desegregation was to be implemented (“with all deliberate speed”),

made the process extremely slow. This allowed for segregationists to organize an even

further resistance to desegregation. Eventually however, after federal courts began to

provide monetary incentives for schools that integrated and began to change public

school district boundaries, segregation slowly diminished. This however, only meant “de

jure” segregation, meaning that it was in fact illegal to segregate in schools due to law,

however, “de facto” segregation still existed, which meant “in reality” many students still

segregated themselves within the school by choice. Overall, this was a huge stepping

stone for the NAACP towards their goal of eventually outlawing all segregation, and not

just in schools.