As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the U.S. Supreme Court level.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)
Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, finally overturning âseparate but equalâ and acknowledging that segregation greatly diminished students' self-esteem.
Having won these cases, and thus, establishing precedents for chipping away Jim Crow laws in higher education, Marshall succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
The U.S. District Court's three-judge panel ruled against the plaintiffs, with one judge dissenting, stating that "separate but equal" schools were not in violation of the 14th amendment.
Chief Justice Earl WarrenChief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the unanimous Court. The Supreme Court held that âseparate but equalâ facilities are inherently unequal and violate the protections of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Brown v. Board of EducationcaseMarshall's most famous case was the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Educationcase in which Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren noted, "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.
Thurgood Marshall, who became the first African-American Supreme Court Justice (1967-1991), knocked down legal segregation in America as a civil rights attorney.
Known for his earlier work in helping end legal segregation through the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, he once described his judicial approach by simply saying, "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up."
As an attorney fighting to secure equality and justice through the courts, Thurgood Marshall helped build the legal foundation for Martin Luther King's challenges to segregation.
On August 30, 1967, the Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. Marshall was no stranger to the Senate or the Supreme Court at the time. Marshall was confirmed in a 69-11 floor vote to join the Court.
Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers argued the case and won on May 17, 1954. Brown marked a landmark victory in the fight for full citizenship, offering hope that the system of segregation was not unassailable.
Thurgood Marshall led a life in the pursuit of equality, and was on a path destined to lead him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Read More...
The first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, Louis Redding was part of the NAACP legal team that challenged school segregation.
As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the U.S. Supreme Court level.
Thurgood Marshall led a life in the pursuit of equality, and was on a path destined to lead him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Read More...
George E.C. Hayes was responsible for starting the oral argument of Bolling v. Sharpe, the case which originated in the District of Columbia
Houston developed a "Top-Down" integration strategy, and became known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow" for his desegregation work.
Nabrit took over Charles Hamilton Houston's work on the Bolling v. Sharpe case which went to the U.S. Supreme Court alongside four others.
After Brown, Marshall argued many more court cases in support of civil rights. His zeal for ensuring the rights of all citizens regardless of race caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy, who appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Yet, the discrepancy in the caliber of education for whites and blacks was made all too apparent to him when, one day while traveling with Houston, Marshall witnessed a black child biting into an orange. He had received such a poor education that he neither knew what it was nor how to properly eat it.
Together with Houston, Marshall participated in the cases Murray v. Maryland (1936) and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938). When Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall took over the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and argued Sweat v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950). Having won these cases, and thus, establishing precedents for chipping away Jim Crow laws in higher education, Marshall succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Marshall attended the all-black Lincoln University (the oldest African-American institution of higher education in the country) and, after being rejected from the University of Maryland School of Law because of his race, went on to attend law school at Howard University and graduated first in his class. It was at Howard University that Marshall met Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice-dean of the law school. In 1935, Houston directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Marshall was his right-hand man.
Article III establishes the judicial branch of government and the Bill of Rights lists the rights that all American citizens are supposed to enjoy. Growing up in an era when Jim Crow laws still permeated much of the country, Marshall knew that many African-Americans were not enjoying all of their constitutional rights.
U.S. circuit judges (from left to right) Robert A. Katzmann, Damon J. Keith, and Sonia Sotomayor at a 2004 exhibit on the Fourteenth Amendment, Thurgood Marshall, and Brown v. Board of Education
483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe âa Black Monday âa day something like Pearl Harbor ." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly:
However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II ( 349 U.S. 294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" was named after Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster. The lawyers, and the National Chapter of the NAACP, also felt that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court Justices.
In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as " Brown II " the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed," a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson 's poem, " The Hound of Heaven ."
The Board of Education of Topeka began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts.
Board of Education, the Federal district court even cited the injurious effects of segregation on Black children, but held that "separate but equal" was still not a violation of the Constitution.
Reargument of the Brown v. Board of Education cases at the Federal level took place December 7-9 , 1953. Throngs of spectators lined up outside the Supreme Court by sunrise on the morning of December 7, although arguments did not actually commence until one o'clock that afternoon. Spottswood Robinson began the argument for the appellants, and Thurgood Marshall followed him. Virginia's Assistant Attorney General, T. Justin Moore, followed Marshall, and then the court recessed for the evening.
The last case listed in the order of arguments, Belton v. Gebhart , was actually two nearly identical cases (the other being Bulah v . Gebhart ), both originating in the state of Delaware in 1952. Ethel Belton was one of the parents listed as plaintiffs in the case brought in Claymont, while Sarah Bulah brought suit in the town of Hockessin, Delaware. While both of these plaintiffs brought suit because their African-American children had to attend inferior schools, Sarah Bulah's situation was unique in that she was a white woman with an adopted Black child, who was still subject to the segregation laws of the state. Local attorney Louis Redding, Delaware's only African-American attorney at the time, originally argued both cases in Delaware's Court of Chancery. NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg assisted Redding. Belton/Bulah v. Gebhart was argued at the Federal level by Delaware's attorney general, H. Albert Young.
Marshall also argued the Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, case at the Federal level. Originally filed in May of 1951 by plaintiff's attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, the Davis case, like the others, argued that Virginia's segregated schools were unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. And like the Briggs case, Virginia's three-judge panel ruled against the 117 students who were identified as plaintiffs in the case. (For more on this case, see Photographs from the Dorothy Davis Case .)
Ferguson. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the lower courts' decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a Black man from Louisiana, challenged the constitutionality of segregated railroad coaches, first in the state courts and then in the U. S. Supreme Court.
Five separate cases were filed in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware: Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et al.
Board of Education case of 1954 legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.
Board of Education of Topeka . Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs.
When Brownâs case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka .
While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it. In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957.
But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.
Separate But Equal Doctrine. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.
This grouping of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware was significant because it represented school segregation as a national issue, not just a southern one. Each case was brought on the behalf of elementary school children, involving all-Black schools that were inferior to white schools.
John Scott. John Scott was a Topeka, KS, based lawyer who initially began the Brown case on behalf of Oliver Brown and the other litigants. Earl Warren. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was born in 1891, secured a unanimous decision in Brown v.
Ferguson ruling of the United States Supreme Court as precedent. The plaintiffs claimed that the "separate but equal" ruling violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v.
Ethel Louise Belton#N#Ethel Belton and six other adults filed suit on behalf of eight Black children against Francis B. Gebhart and 12 others (both individuals and state education agencies) in the case Belton v. Gebhart. The plaintiffs sued the state for denying to the children admission to certain public schools because of color or ancestry. The Belton case was joined with another very similar Delaware case, Bulah v. Gebhart, and both would ultimately join four other NAACP cases in the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Belton was born in 1937 and died in 1981.
Fatzer served as Kansas Supreme Court Justice from February 1949 to March 1956. Jack Greenberg. Jack Greenberg, who was born in 1924, argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, and worked on the briefs in Belton v. Gebhart.
C. Melvin Sharpe , acting as President of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia from 1948 to 1957, was named as the lead defendant in the case Bolling v. Sharpe. Earl Warren. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was born in 1891, secured a unanimous decision in Brown v.
Board of Education case because of his role in the Briggs case. Carter secured the pivotal involvement of social scientists, particularly Kenneth B. Clark, who provided evidence in the Briggs case on segregation's devastating effects on the psyches of Black children. Harold R. Fatzer.
Earl Warren was serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Not only did Warren believe that segregation was legally insensible, but he sought to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, a previous case which had upheld the practice of segregating schools, with an unanimous verdict.
Board of Education declaring that the âseparate but equalâ regime of segregation within public education was unconstitutional under ...
Ferguson stands among cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford and Korematsu v. Unit ed States as Supreme Court decisions that are nearly universally condemned by lawyers, scholars, and citizens across the nation.
Ferguson decision that cemented public school segregation in law in 1896: âthe underlying fallacy of the plaintiffâs argument [is that] the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from August 30, 1967 until his retirement on October 1, 1991 â becoming the first Black American to hold this position. Prior to his career on the Supreme Court however, Marshall served as the Director of the NAACPâs Legal Defense Fund and represented the Brown family during ...
Last week marked the 65th anniversary of Oliver Brown et. al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, which was a landmark case that shook the foundation of legalized segregation in the South. It is a challenging time to celebrate such an anniversary, as deep, structural inequities and social marginalizations persist along lines of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, not to mention the democratic decay that slides us farther and farther from the ideal world we wish to see. Indeed, some of this backsliding is personified in the countless judicial nominees emanating from the Trump administration who refuse to admit that Brown v. Board was even rightly decided.
For good reason, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is proud of the legal strategy that paved the way for Brown v. Board. The case was the culmination of a half-century of focused legal work performed by some of the top Black legal minds in the country. Almost immediately after the turn of the century and Plessy v. Ferguson, lawyers were assembling to consider avenues to fight back against legally sanctioned discrimination in the courts. By the 1930s, studies demonstrating that contrary to Plessyâs holding, facilities for African Americans were separate but never equal. This led to a focused series of lawsuits aimed at remedying core imbalances. Into the breach stepped groundbreaking Black legal minds who were and remain among the greatest figures in the history of our nationâs judicial system: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and Nathan Margold.
Supreme Court holding that âin the field of public education the doctrine of âseparate, but equalâ has no placeâ because âseparate educational facilities are inherently unequalâ â was in many ways only the beginning, and it has yet to come to an end. The Jim Crow South had its fair share of judges who exploited nuances of the law to maintain the segregation status quo and attempted to shut out those who would seek equality outside of the courthouse. It was the continued, relentless efforts of civil rights activists and public interest litigants that helped spur changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to expand class actions and kept the courtroom doors open for all. When legislatures passed racially divisive laws post-Brown that didnât mention race, âSouthern courts prevented [African-Americans] from bringing class actions, saying that, because the laws did not mention race, collective action was impermissible.â Later efforts expanded the definition of what could be brought as a class action lawsuit.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The Court's decision partially overruled its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring that the "separate but equal" notion was unconstitutional for American public schools and educational faâŚ
In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children.
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate elementary schools due to a 1879 Kansas law, which permitted âŚ
Although Americans generally cheered the Court's decision in Brown, most white Southerners decried it. Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastropheâa Black Mondayâa day something like Pearl Harbor." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly. The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:
In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as "Brown II" the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed," a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven".