Abstract

The Long Road to Equality

The author presents a first-hand account of how the work of African American lawyers and political activists led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. In the early 1930s the NAACP took on as its primary mission the elimination of segregation in public education, from primary school to the highest reaches of the state university system, including the graduate and professional schools. Charles Houston was hired as NAACP counsel to undertake this assignment. Houston viewed the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as the black Magna Carta. In 1929 Houston became dean of Howard University Law School and transformed his idea into school policy. For at least the next decade the law school trained its students in the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to fight racial discrimination and urged its graduates to return home and put various local discriminatory policies and practices to the constitutional test. Thus civil rights law was conceived; it would become a course of study in every mainstream law school in the country. Shortly after the Gaines victory, Houston left the NAACP and turned the job over to his assistant and former student, Thurgood Marshall. I became Marshall's assistant in 1945. In all these cases, our basic thesis was that even if school facilities for black children were made substantially equal to those for whites, segregation nonetheless impaired the ability of the black child to learn and therefore violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court adopted this argument in its May 17, 1954, holding on the merits.