Brown v. Board of Education
"Separate but equal" has no place, unanimously
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The doctrine of separate but equal, laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896, made racial segregation lawful so long as the provision for both groups was equal — which it never was. The case was built over decades by the NAACP's legal arm under Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice himself, and the strategy was to attack "equal" before attacking "separate". The instruction that implementation proceed "with all deliberate speed" left room for delay that lasted years. The court relied partly on psychological studies of children's self-image, which was new and contested as a source of law.
For children
The Supreme Court held unanimously that separate schools for Black and white children were unconstitutional. The ruling overturned a rule that had stood for nearly sixty years. But many states refused to comply, and it took decades before schools were actually integrated.
Sources
- Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
- Kluger, Simple Justice (1976)
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