- [Kim] Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy,
and today, we're learning more
about Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Decided in 1954, Brown v. Board was a landmark case
that opened the door for desegregation
and the modern civil rights movement.
In Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools
for white and black children,
which had been prevalent throughout the American South
since the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
legalized segregation, were in fact, inherently unequal.
The named plaintiff in this case, Oliver Brown,
was the father of Linda,
a third grader who had to take a bus
to a segregated elementary school
that was much further from her home
than the nearby school for white children.
To learn more about the Brown case,
I sought out the help of two experts.
Theodore Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers
Distinguished Professor of Law
and Director of the Center for Civil Rights
at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Michael McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery
Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center
at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution.
So, Professor Shaw, can you just kind of
set the stage for us?
What was the overall social and political
context behind this case?
- [Theodore] Well, Brown was decided
in the Cold War Era, I think that's important
for reasons that I'll come back to,
but it also was decided, I guess it was 58 years
after the Supreme Court ruled
in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal"
railway cars were constitutional.
Of course that extended to all walks of life
in the South, and so what you had was
Jim Crow segregation sustained
and set in place by law.
And Brown was the case that cracked the edifice
of Jim Crow segregation,
so it was an enormously important case,
it came after a long campaign
by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to overturn Plessy.
- [Kim] One thing that I think is
really confusing about Plessy v. Ferguson
is how it interacts with the 14th Amendment.
So, immediately after the Civil War
Congress passed and the states ratified
the 14th Amendment, which gives
"equal protection under the law" to all citizens,
but then Plessy v. Ferguson, just a couple
decades later, legalizes segregation.
Can you talk a little bit more
about how the Equal Protection Clause
of the 14th Amendment has been interpreted
in Plessy and then later in Brown v. Board?
- [Michael] The Doctrine of "separate but equal"
was itself a departure from the prior
understanding of what the 14th Amendment meant.
In the immediate wake of the 14th Amendment
segregation was understood to be a violation
of equal rights, thus the Congress of the United States
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
which prohibited mandatory segregation
of, among other things, railroads.
Now, that was struck down in 1883,
I believe it was 1886, but for reasons
not related to "separate but equal", or segregation.
But it's only in the late 1880s and 1890s
that states begin passing Jim Crow legislation
like the law in Plessy v. Ferguson.
I think Plessy very likely would have been,
would have come out a different way
had it come up 25 years earlier.
It's really very difficult to understand
the logic of Plessy because Plessy takes
the point of view that segregation is okay
because it treats everyone the same way
and the sense of inferiority or insult
that comes from segregation, the Court just ignored.
You can read the opinion different ways,
and people do, and have read the opinion different ways.
A portion of the opinion makes it sound as though
this is a kind of social science conclusion,
that segregation breeds a feeling of inferiority
that has a deleterious effect
on the black students' performance in school.
- [Theodore] There's a famous footnote
in Brown v. Board of Education, footnote 11
in which some social scientists, and particularly
a Dr. Kenneth Clark, did a series of tests,
a doll test, in which they showed
black and white dolls who were otherwise identical
to little children, little black children,
and they asked "Who was the good doll?
"Who was the bad doll? Who was the pretty doll?
Who was the ugly doll?" and the black children
would invariably choose the white dolls
as the better dolls and the black dolls
as the inferior dolls, and then finally
the bombshell question, "Which one looks like you?"
and they would stop and choose
the black doll, and many times tears
would come to their eyes, and so this old notion
of the inferiority that segregation imbued
in black schoolchildren was important
and the Supreme Court had some
very eloquent language about that.
- [Michael] Everyone knew that the only reason
to have laws requiring black and white
to be separate was because of the feeling
on the part of the dominant white group
that the African race was inferior.
I think it was a failure of political will, really,
rather than a matter of constitutional
or legal logic that led to that.
And then it took, what, almost 60 years
before the Supreme Court would turn itself around.
- [Theodore] The late A. Leon Higgenbotham
who sat on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
in Philadelphia, he used to say that
"Plessy was wrong the day it was decided."
and I believe he was right about that.
If you go back and look at the rationale
stated in Plessy, it doesn't hold up,
it's not an intellectually honest decision.
And having said that, if you look at Brown,
it really did not overrule Plessy on its face
with respect to segregation and Jim Crow across the board.
What it did was say that in the field
of public education, separate but equal
is unconstitutional.
Separate schools can not be equal.
And what followed Brown was a series of cases
in all kinds of areas in which the Court,
sometimes without much of an opinion,
cited Brown but struck down segregation
in public libraries and public accommodations,
and transportation, et cetera.
The case that settled the long-running
boycott in Montgomery, Alabama
that catapulted Martin Luther King
into the national and world stage, you know,
it was decided, it was resolved finally.
The boycott was important, but it was resolved
by this case that the Supreme Court decided
and it cited Brown.
- [Kim] So Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund
had kind of been chipping away at the edges
of segregation, and then they turned
directly to school segregation in the Brown cases.
So what kind of arguments did they use
to challenge the system of school segregation?
- [Michael] Thurgood Marshall and his co-counsel
in the NAACP established a very careful strategy
of one case at a time, sort of pushing the envelope
of this idea that segregation is inconsistent
with the demands of equal protection.
And the interesting thing about Brown itself,
the case challenging segregation
in Topeka, Kansas, you know, why Topeka, Kansas?
Why was this such an excellent place
to raise a challenge?
And the reason is that the schools in Topeka
were very substantially equal in quality.
In Topeka they actually had integrated
high schools and middle schools,
it was only the elementary schools
that were segregated, and the District Court found
and the Supreme Court did not disagree,
that in terms of their material advantages
the black school was essentially
just as good as the white school.
And that's why the NAACP wanted to
go after Topeka, because then it
went to the principle of the thing.
You know, it's one thing to attack segregation
when "separate but equal" is really
just a fiction, but when "separate but equal"
is a reality, at least pretty close to it,
as in Topeka, you have to go after
the actual principle that segregation
is wrong in principle and not just wrong because
it tends most of the time to lead to
material disadvantage.
- [Theodore] Brown was actually five cases.
The Brown case itself came from Topeka, Kansas.
In many ways the Supreme Court might have
chosen to lead with the Brown case
because it wasn't part of the South,
and so in some ways it might have been viewed as
taking pressure off of the South.
But there were five cases altogether.
There was a case out of South Carolina,
a case out of Virginia, a case out of Delaware,
a case out of Washington, D.C,
and then the Topeka case.
And the Brown family was actually not even
the only family named Brown in this Topeka case.
And the other Brown case did not have
their father available as the lead voice
and they wanted a man, and so
Oliver Brown was the one they chose.
They stipulated that the schools
were, in fact, equal, in all respects.
And of course they weren't, it was never possible
to make "separate but equal" equal.
But they stipulated that these schools
were equal, the black and the white schools,
because they wanted the court to be able to,
or to have to, confront the issue
of whether "separate but equal" per se
was unconstitutional.
- [Kim] Interesting, so it's this place where
they're hoping not to have a ruling that,
for example, oh the schools for black children
need to be brought up to code to be the same
as white children, but they're trying
to strike down the idea of segregation altogether.
And indeed, they rule unanimously that
separate but equal facilities are
inherently unequal.
- [Michael] The Supreme Court in Brown says
"Well, whatever may have been the status of
"education as a civil right back then,
"back in the 19th century, by now
"it surely is a civil right and therefore
"there can be no discrimination with regard to it."
And one other thing that changed,
that I think the Supreme Court doesn't refer to
but many historians think was surely
in the back of their minds has to do with
foreign policy, of all things,
that during this time the United States
in the wake of World War II was playing
a very major role in opposing colonialism,
opposing communism, and trying to spread
the gospel of liberty around the world,
and when we had segregation at home
this looked like rank hypocrisy.
- [Theodore] This was the Cold War period.
These soldiers came home from fighting
a form of racism in Europe, Nazi Germany,
you know, the Holocaust, and when they came back
they came back to segregated America.
And there are many stories that are painful
about what their experiences were.
But meanwhile the United States is having
this Cold War with the Soviet Union,
and the Soviet Union was exploiting
this inconsistency in what America
said it was and what it was.
And although the Supreme Court
never said a word about that in the Brown cases,
that was very much context for that decision.
- [Kim] So what did it take for desegregation
to really come about?
Do you think we have achieved desegregation?
- [Theodore] Yes and no.
There was a long battle to implement Brown,
and in fact for the most part Brown was not
implemented fully until, to the extent it ever was,
until the early 1970s, when the Supreme Court
decided a case called
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
in North Carolina, and sanctioned the use of busing.
- [Michael] This does not depend upon
what social scientists might think about
how people do in school.
This is a much more fundamental
principle of equality under the law,
that our law must treat black and white the same.
That for the government to draw racial distinctions
is fundamentally unequal and unconstitutional
and wrong and unjust.
Fundamentally so, and not just as a matter of
social science evidence.
- [Theodore] I don't want to sound despairing,
you know, but I think if anybody looks at
our public schools today in many of our communities,
in our towns and cities, and our counties,
we have to acknowledge, honestly,
that there's still a great deal of segregation,
and there are many schools that are
identifiably white or identifiably black
and now, you know Latinos, Hispanics, a large degree
of segregation there also.
And even voluntary desegregation efforts
have been found by the Supreme Court a few years ago
to be largely unconstitutional and illegal
and that's tragic.
But that doesn't mean that Brown wasn't significant.
I was born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education.
The America that I grew up in is a very different
country than the one that preceded it.
In spite of our flaws and our warts,
no Brown v. Board of Education,
no civil rights movement, I would say.
And ultimately no desegregation of
our society to the extent that we've accomplished it.
And we have, to a great degree, no Barack Obama.
So I think Brown stands, as I said, as a
dividing point in America, but we can do better.
- [Kim] So we've learned that under the leadership
of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund, the decision
in Brown v. Board of Education struck
a major blow to the system of segregation.
After World War II, amidst the ideological
struggle of the Cold War, the Supreme Court
overturned the precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson
and ruled that segregated education constituted
a violation of the Equal Protection Clause
of the 14th Amendment.
To learn more about Brown v. Board,
visit the National Constitution Center's
interactive Constitution and Khan Academy's
resources on U.S. government and politics.