Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Supreme Court justice, was the attorney who worked with the NAACP to on the Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case in …
 · 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. Charles Scott Charles Scott worked to recruit plaintiffs willing to stand up to the school board while also researching and recruiting expert witnesses. John Scott
The U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M. Nabrit (right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing …
Charles Hamilton Houston played an invaluable role in dismantling segregation and mentoring the crop of civil rights lawyers who would ultimately litigate and win Brown v Board of Education. At Howard Law School, he served as Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and his eventual employer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
As a lawyer and judge, Thurgood Marshall strived to protect the rights of all citizens. His legacy earned him the nickname "Mr. Civil Rights." Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland.
The U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M.
Linda Brown The NAACP and Thurgood Marshall took up their case, along with similar ones in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, as Brown v. Board of Education. Linda Brown died in 2018.
Board of Education case before the Supreme Court. In 1956, Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP's group of lawyers, argues Brown v. Board of education before the Supreme Court. Black Muslim who urged blacks to separate from white society.
Thurgood MarshallIn Brown v. Board of Education, the attorney for the plaintiffs was Thurgood Marshall. He later became, in 1967, the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall was a member of the NAACP legal defense team in the Brown v. Board of Education case. He later became the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Led the NAACP Legal Defense team in Virginia in the Brown vs.
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 “separate but equal” and acknowledging that segregation greatly diminished students' self-esteem.
At trial, the Scott brothers and Bledsoe were joined by NAACP lawyers Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg. Counsel for the Topeka School Board were also Washburn Law graduates. Lester Goodell '25 served as chief trial counsel with George Brewster '29. Both men were partners in the firm Wheeler, Brewster, Hunt and Goodell.
Why was the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka so important? Because Thurgood Marshall won the case, it meant that school segregation was no longer legal in America. In what year did Thurgood Marshall become a member of the Supreme Court?
In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and outlawed segregation. The Court agreed with Thurgood Marshall and his fellow NAACP lawyers that segregated schooling violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of law.
Chapter 29: The Civil Rights MovementABJames MeredithHe was the first African-American student to attend the University of Mississippi.freedom ridersThey tested the Supreme Court decisions banning segregation on interstate bus routes and facilities in bus terminals.29 more rows
Carter was part of the legal team that developed the NAACP’s strategy for ending 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.
Oliver Hill was assigned to the Davis case, and agreed to help them if they would try to integrate, not equalize the schools.
After working with Charles H. Houston, Shores went on to argue the Lucy v. Adams case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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.
George E.C. Hayes was responsible for starting the oral argument of Bolling v. Sharpe, the case which originated in the District of Columbia
Charles Bledsoe worked to recruit plaintiffs willing to stand up to the school board while also researching and recruiting expert witnesses.
To litigate these cases, Marshall recruited the nation’s best attorneys, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg , Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles, and John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit, and George E.C. Hayes.
It was not until LDF’s subsequent victories in Green v. County School Board (1968) and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) that the Supreme Court issued mandates that segregation be dismantled “root and branch,” outlined specific factors to be considered to eliminate effects of segregation, and ensured that federal district courts had the authority to do so.
But striking down segregation in the nation’s public schools provided a major catalyst for the civil rights movement, making possible advances in desegregating housing, public accommodations , and institutions of higher education.
As then-Senator Obama observed in a 2008 speech in Philadelphia, “segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education – and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.”
After the five cases were heard together by the Court in December 1952 , 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.S. Constitution and about the Court’s power to dismantle segregation. Then the Court scheduled another oral argument in December 1953.
This research included psychologist Kenneth Clark ’s now-famous doll experiments, which demonstrated the impact of segregation on black children – Clark found black children were led to believe that black dolls were inferior to white dolls and, by extension, that they were inferior to their white peers.
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.
Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M. Nabrit (right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court congratulating each other after the Court’s decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.
Attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954
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
(son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith —who now had her own children in Topeka schools—to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown. They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open enrollment" had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would shift their children to "preferred" schools that would create both predominantly African American and predominantly European American schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs' request finding the schools "unitary." In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on 2–1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District's request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit's mandate.
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 ."
In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D. E. Hudgins Jr., a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.
Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe —a Black Monday —a day something like Pearl Harbor ." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly:
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars.
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.
May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history. Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v.
The legal victory in Brown did not transform the country overnight, and much work remains. But striking down segregation in the nation’s public schools provided a major catalyst for the civil rights movement, making possible advances in desegregating housing, public accommodations, and institutions of higher education. The decision gave hope to millions of Americans by permanently discrediting the legal rationale underpinning the racial caste system that had been endorsed or accepted by governments at all levels since the end of the nineteenth century. And its impact has been felt by every American.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) that the Supreme Court issued mandates that segregation be dismantled “root and branch,” outlined specific factors to be considered to eliminate effects of segregation, and ensured that federal district courts had the authority to do so.
Wrapping up his presentation to the Court in that second hearing, Marshall emphasized that segregation was rooted in the desire to keep “the people who were formerly in slavery as near to that stage as is possible.” Even with such powerful arguments from Marshall and other LDF attorneys, it took another five months for the newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren’s behind-the-scenes lobbying to yield a unanimous decision.
After the five cases were heard together by the Court in December 1952 , 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.S. Constitution and about the Court’s power to dismantle segregation. Then the Court scheduled another oral argument in December 1953.
This research included psychologist Kenneth Clark’s now famous doll experiments, which demonstrated the impact of segregation on black children – Clark found black children were led to believe that black dolls were inferior to white dolls and , by extension, that they were inferior to their white peers.
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.
Celebrating the 65th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 2019 , the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education turns 65. On this date in 1954, the Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional and handed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Board of Education, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and other civil rights organizations will be hosting a rally at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, May 16th. Find out more here.
Sent the week before the 65 th anniversary of Brown, LDF’s opposition letter cites Park’s failure to support the momentous ruling during his confirmation hearing as a disqualifying factor.
As part of its Overlooked series, the New York Times recently published an obituary for Barbara Johns, an courageous student organizer and one of the plaintiffs in Brown.
Educational documents from the case at the National Archives.
Jack Greenberg, LDF’s second Director-Counsel and a member of the Brown legal team, discusses LDF’s strategy in Brown, the experience of arguing before the Court, the long road to desegregation, and his friendship with Thurgood Marshall.
Gebhart, in one of the five cases that eventually became Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark Supreme Court case litigated by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. (LDF) that ended segregation by law in American public schools. [1]
In her recent book, A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin explores why so many Black women and girls were the voices behind the school desegregation movement. Students and their parent who initiated the landmark Civil Rights lawsuit 'Brown V Board of Education,' Topeka, Kansas, 1953, Pictured are, front row, from left, students, ...
May 17, 2020. Ethel Brown was born with a heart condition. But, because she was Black, she had no choice but to travel 20 miles each day to attend Howard High School, the only public high school in the state of Delaware that admitted Black students in 1950. Her mother, concerned about Ethel’s ability to make the trip, ...
Unfortunately, racial bias in schools did not end with Brown v. Board. COVID-19 has exposed fundamental educational inequities in public education that still have not been fully addressed over 66 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board. Black students today are six times more likely than white students to attend a high-poverty school, [2] and nearly 75% of Black K-12 students attend racially segregated schools. Like high-poverty schools, racially-segregated schools are likely to have high levels of teacher turnover, inadequate facilities, and fewer classroom resources. [3] Educators are already predicting that the existing academic achievement gap will become more entrenched as distance learning continues, due to the digital divide and other existing economic and educational disparities.