96 PART onE • THE AmERiCAn sYsTEm
lynching was illegal, but southern authorities rarely prosecuted these cases, and white
juries would not convict.The End of the separate-but-Equal doctrine
As early as the 1930s, several court rulings began to chip away at the separate-
but-equal doctrine. The United States Supreme Court did not explicitly overturn
Plessy v. Ferguson until 1954, however, when it issued one of the most famous
judicial decisions in U.S. history.
In 1951, Oliver Brown decided that his eight-year-old daughter, Linda
Carol Brown, should not have to go to an all-nonwhite elementary school
twenty-one blocks from her home, when there was a white school only
seven blocks away. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), formed in 1909, decided to support Oliver Brown.
The outcome would have a monumental impact on American society.Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The 1954 unanimous decision
of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka^5 established that the segregation of races in the public schools
violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Chief Justice Earl Warren said that separation implied inferiority, whereas
the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson had said the opposite.“With All deliberate speed.” The following year, in Brown v. Board
of Education^6 (sometimes called the second Brown decision), the Court
declared that the lower courts needed to ensure that African Americans
would be admitted to schools on a nondiscriminatory basis “with all
deliberate speed.” The district courts were to consider devices in their
desegregation orders that might include “the school transportation sys-
tem, personnel, [and] revision of school districts and attendance areas
into compact units to achieve a system of determining admission to the
public schools on a nonracial basis.”Reactions to school integration. The white South did not let
the Supreme Court ruling go unchallenged. Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used
the state’s National Guard to block the integration of Central High School in Little Rock
in September 1957. A federal court demanded that the troops be withdrawn. Finally,
President Dwight Eisenhower had to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in
the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to quell the violence. Central High became integrated.
Universities in the South remained segregated. When James Meredith, an African
American student, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1962,
violence flared there, as it had in Little Rock. The white riot at Oxford was so intense that
President John Kennedy was forced to send in thirty thousand U.S. combat troops, a larger
force than the one then stationed in Korea. There were 375 military and civilian injuries,
many from gunfire, and two bystanders were killed. Ultimately, peace was restored, and
Meredith began attending classes.^75. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
6. 349 U.S. 294 (1955).
- William Doyle, An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi,
1962 (New York: Anchor, 2003).
When oliver Brown
wanted his daughter Linda (shown here)
to attend a white school close to their
home, he took his case all the way to the
United States Supreme Court. The outcome
of that case is considered a landmark
decision. Why? (AP Photo)Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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