404 CHAPTER 13|CIVIL RIGHTS
was not good enough. There were intangible aspects of the
quality of law school, such as the school’s reputation, the
“position and infl uence of the alumni,” and “traditions and
prestige.” This ruling came very close to saying that “sepa-
rate but equal” was a contradiction in terms, but the Court
stopped just short of reaching that conclusion.^25
After these victories, the signals increasingly indi-
cated that the Supreme Court was ready to strike down
the separate but equal doctrine. As background, in addi-
tion to the law school cases, in 1948 the Court had ruled
that “restrictive covenants”—clauses in real estate con-
tracts that prevented a property owner from selling to an
African American—could not be enforced by state or local courts because of the
Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against a state denying blacks the “equal
protection of the laws.” This application of the Fourteenth Amendment was
expanded in the landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education.
The Brown case arrived on the Court’s docket in 1951, was postponed for
argument until after the 1952 elections, and was re-argued in December 1953. The
postponement was intentional because the Court knew that a fi restorm would
ensue. In its unanimous decision the Court ruled, “In the fi eld of public education,
the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal, depriving the plaintiff s of the equal protection of the laws.”^26
The case was signifi cant not only because it required all public schools to desegre-
gate but also because it used the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment in a way that had potentially far-reaching consequences. Also, even though
the decision did not rule segregation unconstitutional in all contexts, Brown pro-
vided an important boost to the civil rights movement.THE PUSH TO DESEGREGATE SCHOOLS
In 1955, Brown v. Board of Education II addressed the implementation of deseg-
regation and required the states to “desegregate with all deliberate speed.”^27 The
odd choice of words, “all deliberate speed” was read as a signal by southerners
that they could take their time with desegregation. The phrase does seem to be
contradictory: being deliberate does not usually involve being speedy. Southern
states engaged in “massive resistance” to the desegregation order. In some cases
they even closed public schools rather than integrate them—and then reopened the
schools as “private,” segregated schools for which the white students received gov-
ernment vouchers. However, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and the
District of Columbia desegregated their schools within two years.
Eight years after Brown I, little had changed in the Deep South: fewer than
1 percent of black children attended school with white children.^28 The Supreme
Court became frustrated with the lack of progress in desegregating the schools,
saying there was “too much deliberation and not enough speed.”^29 Through the
1960s the courts had to battle against the continued resistance. In 1971 the Court
shifted its focus from de jure segregation (segregation mandated by law) to de
facto segregation (segregation that existed because of segregated housing pat-
terns) and approved school busing as a tool to integrate schools.^30 This approach
was extremely controversial. The Court almost immediately limited the appli-
cation of busing by ruling in a Detroit case that busing could not go beyond the
boundaries of a city’s school district: students did not have to be bused from sub-
urbs to cities unless it could be shown that the school district’s lines were drawnde jure Relating to actions or
circumstances that occur “by law,”
such as the legally enforced segre-
gation of schools in the American
South before the 1960s.
de facto Relating to actions or
circumstances that occur outside
the law or “by fact,” such as the
segregation of schools that resulted
from housing patterns and other
factors rather than from laws.
BUSING STUDENTS FROM ONE
school district to another in the
interest of desegregation has
been controversial since the
1960s. In 2007, the Supreme
Court invalidated voluntary
desegregations plan in the
Louisville and Seattle school
districts.