Brown V. Board of Education

Historian James T. Patterson traces the origins, legal battles, and contested legacies of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in American public schools. The book moves chronologically from the 1940s through the turn of the 21st century, arguing that while Brown's symbolic and legal achievements were enormous, the decision's practical effects on schools and race relations fell far short of the expectations it inspired.

Patterson opens by establishing the scope of what Brown attempted to change. In 1954, 17 southern and border states required racial segregation of public schools, consigning more than 10 million Black people in the South to inferior status under the Jim Crow system of state-sponsored discrimination. Public spending per pupil in southern Black schools stood at only 60 percent of that for southern white schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), argued that segregation itself was damaging, isolating Black students from the mainstream and depriving them of association with whites.

Patterson traces the forces that brought the case to the Supreme Court. Rising militancy among Black veterans returning from World War II, growing support from white liberals, and legal campaigns led by Marshall all converged during the late 1940s. Trained at Howard University Law School under dean Charles Houston, Marshall initially targeted segregation in graduate and professional education, winning key victories in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma in 1950. These rulings found that restrictions on Black graduate students violated equal protection but did not overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Recognizing that the case-by-case approach could take forever, Marshall made the fateful decision to challenge segregation itself.

Five school cases filed between late 1950 and mid-1951 became the basis for Brown. Patterson profiles the courageous plaintiffs: the Reverend Joseph DeLaine, who organized challengers in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the county spent $149 per white child versus $43 per Black child; 16-year-old Barbara Johns, who led a student strike in Farmville, Virginia; Gardner Bishop, a barber who fought for equal facilities in Washington, D.C.; Black parents in Delaware; and Oliver Brown and 12 other parents in Topeka, Kansas, where seven-year-old Linda Brown had to cross dangerous railroad yards to reach a distant Black school though a white school sat seven blocks away. Nearly all plaintiffs faced retaliation: Harry Briggs, the lead plaintiff in the Clarendon County suit, was fired from his job; DeLaine's home was burned; and others lost jobs and credit.

The Supreme Court that heard these cases in December 1952 was badly fractured under Chief Justice Fred Vinson. The Court stalled, ordering rehearings. When Vinson died in September 1953, President Eisenhower appointed California Governor Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren, gregarious and patient with no prior judicial experience, quickly built collegiality. At conference in December 1953, he stated that de jure segregation, meaning segregation explicitly sanctioned by law, rested on "a concept of the inherent inferiority of the colored race" and was unconstitutional. Over three months he forged unanimity, persuading the last holdout, Justice Stanley Reed. On May 17, 1954, Warren read the unanimous opinion concluding that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Patterson charts the tortuous path from ruling to reality. Brown II, issued in May 1955, instructed the South to desegregate with "all deliberate speed" but set no deadline. Compliance in border states proceeded quickly, with 70 percent of districts integrating by the 1955-56 school year, but across the Deep South, resistance was fierce: White Citizens' Councils organized economic intimidation; the 1956 Southern Manifesto, signed by 19 of 22 southern senators and 77 of 105 southern representatives, accused the Court of "clear abuse of judicial power"; states passed pupil placement laws designed to perpetuate segregation without mentioning race; Virginia pioneered Massive Resistance, authorizing school closings; and Prince Edward County shut its public schools from 1959 to 1964. Eisenhower refused to endorse the decision, telling friends it "set back progress in the South at least 15 years."

Patterson narrates the confrontations that exposed the depth of white resistance: the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the expulsion of Autherine Lucy from the University of Alabama in 1956, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walking past screaming crowds in New Orleans in 1960, and the Little Rock crisis of 1957, where Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block nine Black students from Central High School, forcing Eisenhower to send federal troops. By early 1964, only 1.2 percent of Black children in the 11 southern states attended schools with whites.

The civil rights movement of the early 1960s, driven by sit-ins, freedom rides, and mass demonstrations, finally forced federal action. President Lyndon Johnson drove the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress, and federal officials began pressing southern districts toward racial balance, meaning racial mixing roughly proportionate to district demographics, by threatening cutoffs of aid. In 1967, Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court as its first Black justice. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia (1968), the Court ruled unanimously that school officials had an "affirmative duty" to desegregate, giving teeth to the vague phrase "all deliberate speed."

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger surprised observers by initially extending Brown. In Alexander v. Holmes County (1969), the Court declared that "all deliberate speed" was no longer permissible. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971), it approved busing as a desegregation tool, and the percentage of Black students in majority-white southern schools surged from 23.4 percent in 1968-69 to 33.1 percent in 1970-71. But in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Court ruled five to four against metropolitan-wide desegregation merging city and suburban districts. Marshall, dissenting, warned that "unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together." The decision blocked efforts to address de facto segregation, the racial separation arising from housing patterns and public policies rather than explicit statutes, in northern cities.

Patterson documents the stalemates that followed. Court-ordered busing provoked violent opposition, most notably in Boston, and fueled white flight. The Coleman Report of 1966 had found that family and class background mattered far more than school resources for academic achievement. Some Black leaders echoed doubts voiced by W. E. B. Du Bois, an influential Black intellectual, about the presumed superiority of desegregated schools. By the 1990s, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist relaxed desegregation requirements, allowing districts to end court supervision once they had taken "practicable" steps to eliminate vestiges of Jim Crow. Resegregation accelerated.

Patterson closes by assessing Brown's overall legacy. The persistent Black-white test score gap, which narrowed between 1970 and the late 1980s but widened in the 1990s, defied simple explanation: It did not correlate neatly with school funding, racial mixing, or parental income. Marshall died on January 21, 1993, at age 84; some 20,000 mourners paid tribute at the Supreme Court. Patterson concludes that Brown did not quickly transform schools; compliance was glacial until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, court decisions like Green and Alexander, and firm federal enforcement attacked evasion. Yet Brown stimulated the Court's transformation into a liberal, activist body, and the rights-consciousness it helped inspire deeply influenced American law and life. Patterson quotes Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor at the LDF, who wrote in 1994 that school desegregation has been "a story of conspicuous achievements, flawed by marked failures, the causes of which lie beyond the capacity of lawyers to correct. Lawyers can do right, they can do good, but they have their limits. The rest of the job is up to society."