The BrownDecision 23Brownv.Board of Educa-
tion(1954): Crucial Sup-
reme Court decision that
invalidated ‘separate-
but-equal’ public schools.different location to sleep in every night. Defying death threats, Marshall
whittled away at Jim Crow through key cases in education, housing, trans-
portation, and voting, earning him the sobriquet, ‘Mr Civil Rights.’
Marshall’s crowning achievement came in the momentous case of Brown
v. Board of Education. First argued in December 1952, the case consisted
of five lawsuits brought by black parents from across the country. These
lawsuits exposed the vast inequities between white and black schools. In
Topeka, Kansas, 8-year-old Linda Brown lived near the all-white Sumner
Elementary School, but each morning she crossed a dangerous railroad yard
to a dilapidated bus that carried her a mile away to a black school. Her father,
a welder named Oliver Brown, sued to end the segregated school system,
giving his name to the famous case. In Clarendon county, South Carolina,
three-quarters of the students were black, but the all-white school board
spent 60 per cent of its budget on whites. Black children walked long dis-
tances to school while whites rode new buses. When parents complained, the
board chairman replied gruffly: ‘We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your
nigger children.’ Once at school, black students crowded together in shanties
without flush toilets, electricity, desks, or blackboards. Joseph DeLaine, a
local black pastor and schoolteacher, sued the school board, only to lose his
teaching job and have his home and church burned to the ground. In the
remote county of Prince Edward, Virginia, a fiery 16-year-old named Barbara
Johns took matters into her own hands. She led hundreds of riled-up stu-
dents on a two-week strike against broken-down toilets, classes in tar-paper
shacks, and the absence of lockers, microscopes, a gym, a cafeteria, and an
infirmary.
Marshall had to do more than show that black schools were substandard
because Clarendon county finally equalized black teacher salaries, provided
bus transportation for black children, and signed a contract for an expensive,
new black high school, all to sustain segregation legally. Marshall therefore
addressed the central issue – segregation itself. Calling on experts in social
science and education, he argued that black children possessed the same
ability as whites, but felt inferior in segregated schools, making learning
nearly impossible. The most controversial testimony came from psycholo-
gists Kenneth Clarkand Mamie Clark, whose pioneering but flawed studies
reported that most black children preferred white dolls over black ones, an
apparent sign of black self-hate. One black child smiled when asked whom
the black doll resembled: ‘That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.’ In his closing argu-
ment, Marshall challenged the Court to strike down school segregation laws
and, by implication, all Jim Crow laws. He contended that the only way that
segregation could be upheld would be ‘to find that for some reason Negroes
are inferior to all other human beings.’ Four of the nine justices Marshall
challenged came from states with Jim Crow schools. One justice had upheld
Clark, Kenneth(1914–
2005): Psychologist
whose research on black
child development help-
ed the NAACP to win the
Brown desegregation
case.