214 Politics and the judiciary
the state laws required separate but equal facilities, the Constitution offered
no barrier to the segregation of the races.
In the period following the Second World War, however, the National Assoc-
iation for the Advancement of Colored People developed a growing campaign
against segregation. The NAACP had been working towards a judicial confron-
tation on this issue for many years, and in a carefully planned scheme of attack
the NAACP gradually set the scene for reconsideration by the Supreme Court
of the basic constitutional principle upon which segregation was established.
In a series of cases the Court whittled away the supporting argument for
segregation by refusing to accept the ‘separate but equal’ formula in the field
of university and professional education. Then, in 1954, the Court squarely
faced the question of segregation in the elementary schools. The Court con-
sidered a number of cases from various states in which the black plaintiffs
argued that segregated public schools were not equal and could not be made
equal, and that therefore the equal protection of the laws, which the Four-
teenth Amendment was intended to guarantee, was far from being a reality.
In the Brown case the Court reviewed the history of the Amendment,
relied heavily upon psychological and sociological evidence of the effect of
segregation upon black children, and then proceeded explicitly to overrule
Plessy v. Ferguson. The unanimous Court, speaking through Chief Justice
Warren, found that segregated schools, even if physical facilities and other
tangible factors were equal, deprived the children of the black minority of
equal educational opportunities. ‘Separate educational facilities are inher-
ently unequal’ and therefore a denial of the equal protection of the laws.
Thus, without any legislation having been passed by Congress, and without
any presidential initiative, the judiciary instituted a new policy. The Court
did not order an immediate desegregation of all schools, and the process of
desegregation by judicial action went on slowly over the years after 1954, but
the implications of this case for American politics can hardly be exagger-
ated. It was the forerunner of Court decisions that outlawed segregation in
other walks of life. It brought down upon the Supreme Court the wrath of the
defenders of segregation, and it opened an era of more and more insistent
demands for the recognition of civil rights.
In the years following the Brown decision the long slow progress of deseg-
regating the schools was pursued as case after case came before the federal
courts. Detailed plans were prepared for each school district, involving the
daily transporting of white children to schools which had previously been
exclusively black and black children to schools which had previously been
exclusively white. This process of ‘busing’, in which children might spend
long periods each day on the school buses, was deeply unpopular with many
parents, particularly the parents of white children, who protested, sometimes
violently. It also led to ‘white flight’, the movement of the white population
out of cities to areas where their children would not be subject to busing,
and thus in practice to further residential segregation. In 1992 the Supreme