Abstract

Brown at 50

The author discusses how the Supreme Court ruling Brown vs. Board of Education changed race relations and constitutional law in America. Prior to the landmark Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, the US government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown invalidated state laws requiring or permitting racial segregation in public primary and secondary schools. Such laws, the Court concluded, violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Simultaneously, in Bolling the Court held that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibited the federal government from racially segregating students in the District of Columbia. These decisions marked a major step forward in the struggle for racial justice--one that surely warrants commemorating on its fiftieth anniversary. The rulings reflected and encouraged developments that would soon spark that burst of humane, bold and heroic action we now know as the civil rights movement. The reformist Justices of the Supreme Court played an important role in that struggle. But it would be wrong to permit their handiwork to eclipse the achievements of activists such as Medgar Evers, Modjeska Simkins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Myles Horton, James Reeb, Robert Moses, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, James Farmer, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis--people who, assisted by Brown and subsequent rulings, attempted with considerable success to uproot segregation and its kindred abominations.