It’s the 70th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board Decision
Did it Accomplish What it Was Supposed To?
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that shook America to its core. State-sanction segregation of public schools was found to be a violation of the 14th Amendment. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned almost 60 years of precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson which declared “separate but equal” was good enough for schools in the United States. But the devil is in the details. Exactly nothing happened in 1954 when the ruling was made. The Warren Court, as pictured above, gave itself until the next term of the following year to decide how integration would be implemented. In 1955, Brown II coined the phrase “with all deliberate speed,” giving states as long as they wanted to start integrating schools.
When the case went to the Supreme Court, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued that “school segregation was a violation of individual rights under the 14th Amendment.” He added, “The only justification for continuing to have separate schools was to keep people who were slaves as near that stage as possible.”
Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are…
