On This Day in History: May 17

Brown v. Board of Education

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“Separate but Equal.” Now there is a bullshit claim if ever there was one.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: May 17, 1954--

That’s what the Supreme Court called their 1896 ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld segregation as totally peachy. And it would last another 58 years, until May 17, 1954, when racial segregation in public schools was unanimously ruled unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The case was a culmination of a multi-year campaign conceived two decades prior by Charles Houston, a Black Harvard Law graduate and Dean of Howard University Law School. He was known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow” for his dismantling of Jim Crow laws, which had enforced racial segregation after the Civil War. His star pupil was Thurgood Marshall. It was he who enacted his mentor’s vision of desegregation.

The case began in 1951 in Topeka, Kansas when a public school refused to enroll Oliver Brown’s daughter, saying she could just take the bus to a Black elementary school farther away. The Browns, along with a dozen other local families, said screw that and banded together in a class-action lawsuit in federal court.

But they lost. The court pointed to the Plessy v. Ferguson case from more than half a century before and said, “These dead white dudes said segregation is okay.” That’s when Thurgood Marshall, who at the time was chief counsel for the NAACP, entered the picture. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

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When Plessy v. Ferguson took place, the 14^th Amendment had already been around for almost 30 years. Since most people only know about the first two amendments because of the endless shrieking about them on Facebook, I’ll elaborate. It was one of the Reconstruction Amendments after the Civil War and is actually a pretty damn important one. It is about the granting of citizenship, which included former enslaved. The amendment contains the Equal Protection Clause, saying no state could deny people equal protection under the law.

Marshall argued segregation violated that clause, and he won, not only opening the door for school integration, but serving as a model for future cases designed to affect societal change. One fun fact that helped sway opinion is that the Soviets were getting a lot of propaganda mileage from exposing American segregation laws, and yanks didn’t like being laughed at by commies. Alas, changing the law didn’t change the practice, and for several decades many states refused to integrate all of their schools.

Thurgood Marshall would go on to become the first Black man appointed Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving from 1967 to 1991.

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