Brown v. Board of Education
In 1950 in Topeka, Kansas, a seven-year-old girl named Linda Brown was denied admission to an all-white elementary school because she was black. As a result, she had to cross railway tracks to catch a bus that would take more than hour to transport her to the nearest school for black students. At that time, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), founded and led by Thurgood Marshall, was beginning a campaign to desegregate elementary and high schools through the courts.
The challenges facing black elementary students in Topeka were similar to those in other parts of the country. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, black students could attend only one high school, which was seriously overcrowded and sorely lacking in appropriate facilities. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, about 75 percent of the school children were black and attended separate schools. Yet they received only 40 percent of the school district's funds.
These cases, as well as one from Delaware and another from the District of Columbia, were argued together. They are commonly referred to as Brown v. Board of Education, although the District of Columbia case is sometimes referred to separately as Bolling v. Sharpe.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs who argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court were Thurgood Marshall, who subsequently became the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Jack Greenberg (CC '45, Law '48), Louis L. Redding, Robert L. Carter (Law '41 LL.M.), Spottswood W. Robinson III, James M. Nabrit, Jr., and George E. C. Hayes. Among Columbians who represented plaintiffs and who participated in writing the briefs were Charles L. Black, Jr. (professor at Columbia and Yale law schools), Constance Baker Motley (Law '46), Jack B. Weinstein (Law '48 and long time member of the faculty).
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the ruling that racial segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection, and the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process. The unanimous ruling, one of the most important decisions in American history, declared that "in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal' has no place."
