February 23, 2015 • 28 mins
It would be next to impossible to have ever had a class on American history or the American Civil Rights Movement and not heard about Brown v. Board. But the case is much more complicated than just one child in one segregated school system.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. The other
day we had an episode that was about Plessy versus. Ferguson.
So that was the U. S. Supreme Court case that
(00:22):
made racial segregation in the United States legal and in
some interpretations actually encouraged as long as separate facilities for
the different races were equal. So today's episode will definitely
be easier to follow if you've already listened to that
one first. And what we're going to talk about today
is the road to Brown versus Board of Education, which
(00:43):
is the Supreme Court ruling that overturned plus E versus Ferguson.
It would be next to impossible to have ever had
a class on American history or the American civil rights
movement and have not heard the name Brown versus Board.
But just like with Plessy Versus Ferguson, for a lot
of people, well like that name and what it did
(01:03):
in terms of segregation is sort of the beginning and
the end of the knowledge of of what it was
all about. And it's a lot more complicated than just
one child in one segregated school in a case that
uh that went all the way to the Supreme Court,
and it turns out it's a lot more complicated than
I expected when I got into it. So my intent
was to have one episode that was about Brown versus Board.
(01:24):
But what we're going to do is we're gonna have
today's episode, which goes through sort of the the impact
of Plessy versus Ferguson and the process of getting this
finally to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's decision
on the matter. We're going to need to have a
separate episode to talk about what happened after that, because
it was even even just confining it to this part
(01:46):
of the story. This episode, I feel like it's a
little longer than is typical for us. So we're having
a separate episode that's going to be about what happened
after the Brown versus Word decision was released. So our
Plusy Versus Ferguson episodes started with the context of the
American Civil War, this time the context is the aftermath
(02:07):
of Plusy Versus Ferguson as treaty just said, Marshall Harlem,
the loan dissenting Justice in that decision argued in his
opinion that these laws were inherently discriminatory and unjust, and
he wrote that the ruling was going to lead to
the proliferation of discriminatory laws and that race relations were
only going to get worse, and he was absolutely correct.
(02:28):
Especially in the South, the separation of black citizens from
white citizens became increasingly strict and codified, and there were
different schools, water fountains, and restrooms. Courtrooms had different seats
and different bibles to swear on. Hospitals refused to treat
black patients, and if there wasn't a hospital that would
(02:49):
treat black patients nearby, that was just too bad. Even
when separate facilities did exist for people of African descent,
they were almost universally poorly funded, badly maintained, and generally
inferior to the facilities that were for white people to use.
While the basic fact of being funneled two separate, inferior
(03:09):
facilities was humiliating and degrading. Even worse were the social
systems that went into enforcing this state of separation. Anyone
of African descent was expected to be completely subservient and
meek to white people. Black Americans who talked back or
stood up for themselves were routinely met with anything from
a public humiliation, which is horrible enough, but it went
(03:32):
all the way to outright violence. UH Lynching, both of
black people and any of their white supporters was a
fairly common occurrence, and it was rarely prosecuted. Majority sentiment
about race also shifted pretty dramatically in the years following
Plessy versus Ferguson. I mean, it wasn't good before that point,
(03:53):
but around the turn of the twentieth century, white historians
like William A. Dunning started to write about reconstruction as
a huge, huge mistake on the part of UH of
the government, and a lot of those opinions actually put
it into the classification of being evil. From this point
of view, the North had forced unwanted views onto an
(04:13):
unwilling South, and it should have just left well enough alone.
This situation grew more visibly hostile in the years following
World War One. African Americans who had served their country
in the war returned home to find that they were,
unlike white veterans, still treated with discrimination and harassment. A
series of violent and deadly race riots swept the United
(04:36):
States leading to many deaths and extensive property damage. Yeah,
there were also race riots before and after those interwar years,
for sure, but that was like the peak, with a
few exceptions. During this time, the Supreme Court upheld various
states segregation laws, which had come to be commonly known
as Jim Crow laws, and that precedent went on for
(04:59):
years after. Plessy is Ferguson. On the rare occasion that
the Supreme Court struck down a law, it usually wasn't
because the law itself was found to be discriminatory or
in violation of the Constitution regarding issues like equal protection
under the law. For example, in nineteen seventeen, the Supreme
Court struck down a Kentucky law that outlawed the sale
(05:20):
of homes to black people in majority white neighborhoods. But
this wasn't because that was a discriminatory thing to do.
It was because the law interfered with the rights of
contract and with the ability of white homeowners to dispose
of their property as they saw fit. The court cases
brought to try to overturn segregation were largely pursued by
(05:41):
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Most
people recognize it as the inn Double A CP, and
that was first founded in nineteen o nine. This interracial
group got its start challenging discriminatory laws. They were advocating
for equal access to employment, housing, and voting, and really
campaigning for Black Americans to have equal protections, access and
(06:03):
rights under the law. In one Nathan Marigold, who was
working with the Double A CP, outlined a plan to
fight school segregation. And rather than directly going up against
the idea that separate schools were discriminatory or that schools
for black children were inferior to schools for white children,
this legal strategy focused on budgets. So in the South, especially,
(06:26):
the budgets for schools for black children were vastly lower
than the budgets for schools for white children. And there
was extensive documentation of this that was like out there,
It's not something you're going to have to investigate. It
was obvious. And the hope was that by bringing this
point of easy to document unequal spending before the court,
school systems were going to end up with two choices.
(06:48):
They would either have to raise the budget of the
black schools to match that of the white schools, or
they could save all that money and just operate one
school to educate all races. At that point, the widespread
majority the view was that white children should be educated
separately from black children, and that there was nothing unfair
about doing so. So Marigold thought that their best shot
(07:08):
at challenging the system was to hit the school system
in their wallets. Yeah, he really everyone was was pretty
helpful that if if they presented this to the court,
people were gonna be like, well, we can't possibly afford
to raise the budgets that much, and we're definitely not
going to lower the budgets of the schools for white children.
So they would just have to sort of throw their
(07:28):
hands up and go, well, I guess our hands are tied.
But money intervened in all of this in a completely
different way. Taking a case all the way to the
Supreme Court is extremely expensive, and this was the Great Depression.
Then in n three, Marigold was appointed solicitor to the
Department of the Interior Interior under Franklin beat Roosevelt's administration.
So his plan sort of, uh, it didn't really evaporate,
(07:52):
but he was going to be replaced with someone else
who would have a different plan, and that's what we'll
talk about after a brief word from a sponsor. So
two return to the story of of Nathan Merrigold's successor.
That was Charles Hamiltons Houston. He was valedictorian of his
class at Amherst College and he went on to study
law at Harvard and became the first African American editor
(08:14):
of the Harvard Law Review. Houston took another look at
marygold strategy and he found that, yeah, it was a
pretty good strategy, but it did come with some risks.
Black teachers who testified about their budgets and their salaries
would probably wind up losing their jobs as a result,
and giving the economic climate of the Great Depression, those
teachers probably were not going to be able to find
(08:35):
other work afterward. There was also the possibility that the
strategy would not actually in segregation, that uh, the courts
would just force the school systems to equalize their budgets
between schools for different races, and the schools would either
find money somewhere or you know, make things look as
though they were equal on paper. So Houston wanted to
(08:57):
take a different approach. Instead of focusing on public schools,
the a CP would focus on colleges and universities. Segregation
in these schools was just as prevalent as it was
in elementary through high schools, but states had far more
primary and secondary schools than they had colleges and universities.
The end a CP would be able to make a
(09:18):
difference while also fighting on fewer fronts. Focusing on colleges
and professional schools also got rid of a lot of
the wiggle room for schools to make excuses. So with
public schools, UH school boards might be able to explain
disparities and curricula for different schools by saying, well, this
school is focused on college prep and that one is
(09:38):
focused on vocational work. Or they might say, sure, the
school for the white children is new and the black
school is older, but the classrooms are the same size
and they have otherwise equivalent facilities. It was a lot
harder to explain away differences between one law program and
another law program, and people thought that focusing on the
(10:00):
college level would also be less emotional for parents. College
and professional school students were on the cusp of adulthood,
so there was less of a perception that white students
needed to be protected from some kind of racial threat. Also,
the more explicitly racist view of the time was that
white children who went to school with black children would
get used to them, breaking down a barrier that some
(10:23):
people felt needed to be there. Yeah, that that idea
was less tied to the college idea where people, you know, people,
a lot of people think of kids of that age
as being a little bit more set in their ideas,
which is not necessarily true, at least in like my
college experience. I changed my views on a lot of
things in college, but people were less threatened by that idea.
(10:45):
So the n Double A CP started in search for
plaintiffs in a case to take the Supreme Court at
the University of Maryland Law School. The University of Maryland
only admitted white students and there was no law school
for black students in mary Land at all, so when
the Double A CP started its search. At that point,
there had been nine African Americans who had applied for
(11:07):
admission to the University of Maryland Law School and they
had been rejected because of their race. One of them,
Donald Murray, was an exceptional student. Had he been white,
he definitely would have gotten into the program. And when
he was turned down because he was black, school officials
recommended that he go to Howard, which was a traditionally
black university in Washington, d c. And it wasn't just
(11:30):
a recommendation. The state of Maryland would give him a
scholarship from a fund that was set up for black
students who could not attend school in Maryland because of
their race. Then double a CP took up Murray's case,
and in five a court found that the scholarship was
not equal to admission out of state supported school. As
we've said before, the segregation had to be separate but equal.
(11:53):
For one thing, this scholarship was only a small amount
that could defray tuition costs and would not remotely have
covered tuition Howard or even reduced its cost to being
the same as that of a state supported school in
his state where he lived. For another thing, attending Howard
rather than a school in Maryland would have put Murray
at a disadvantage when it came to practicing law. Since
(12:15):
Howard isn't located in Maryland, mary wouldn't be studying with
Maryland lawyers, and he wouldn't be building a network in
the state where he plans to practice law. So the
court ordered that Murray be admitted to the University of
Maryland Law School, and in eight he became the first
black person to graduate from there. This case did not
overturn segregation anywhere else, but it was the A CPS
(12:38):
first major school segregation victory. It was also the first
case that Thurgood Marshall worked on for the Double A
c P. As a side note, Thurgood Marshall also went
to Howard University under exactly the kind of scholarship that
was at issue, and he graduated first in his class
at the law school. The Double A CP continued to
pursue more college and fashional school segregation cases throughout the courts.
(13:03):
Games versus Canada made it all the way to the
Supreme Court, and this one was pretty similar to Murray's case.
Lloyd Gaines had not been admitted to a state supported
school in Missouri because of his color, and the state
had offered him a scholarship to a different school in
another state. A lower court found that this scholarship was
essentially equal to being allowed to attend the school, but
(13:25):
the U. S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling, noting that
offering a student a scholarship to a school in another
state was not the same as offering an actual equal
education within the state. Missouri would have to either admit
Gains to the law program at the school that admitted
only white students, or it would have to start a
law program at its college for black students, but still
(13:46):
didn't overturn any segregation laws. Though, since the ruling just
meant that states had to offer their own equal but
separate education within their state rather than basically farming it
out to other states, it didn't order Missouri to take
any specific action either, just in some way fix it situation,
so it really was offering equal programs for black and
white students. So, unfortunately, after this kind of partial victory
(14:12):
Gains case got stalled in the courts for years, there
was this whole series of like reversals and appeals and
and sending it back and bringing it back up, and
eventually Games himself disappeared, meaning that the double A CP
just couldn't pursue it anymore. I did not find out
what happened to him. I don't know if we know
what happened to him. The n double A CP continued
(14:32):
on with a long and frustrating series of other cases
in other states, including Missouri, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Oklahoma.
And while states often responded with delaying tactics and evasions
of court orders, there was some progress made. More states
started offering scholarships to private schools in the state if
the states supported schools did not admit black students, or
(14:55):
they started offering programs for black students to attend all
white programs. In some capacity, the number of African Americans
who had access to higher education started to increase in
southern and border states. As kind of a quick aside,
it should go without saying, and there's not really a
great place in this outline to say it, so we're
just gonna say it here before we take another brief break.
(15:17):
Everyone involved in bringing these cases to any court throughout
this episode did so at great personal risk. So people
were harassed and threatened, they lost their jobs, on and on.
So as all of this was happening, the struggle to
try to integrate schools was being done, you know, by
people who were doing so knowing that they could have
(15:37):
really poor ramifications on their own personal situation. Uh. And
at this point in the story, classrooms are still segregated.
So we're going to take another brief word from a
sponsor and then come back to talking about when we
finally got to the point of the Supreme Court desegregating schools.
To return to our story, the ACP slowly chipped away
(16:01):
at different aspects of college and professional school segregation by
bringing these cases into the courts, and it also started
to broaden its focus. So while many of the cases
from the late thirties and early forties had focused on
whether states were providing equal access to education for both races,
in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, the
(16:21):
they started focusing on the inherent discrimination that was part
of having segregated facilities at all. The U. S. Supreme
Court heard the case of McLaurin versus Oklahoma in n and.
In this case, George McLaurin had been allowed to attend
the University of Oklahoma because there was no graduate level
program at Langston University, which was the college for black students.
(16:45):
While mclauren was allowed to attend the otherwise white school,
he was separated from the white students in pretty much
every context. He sat in a row by himself in class,
he ate by himself since he was the only black
graduate student this com completely isolated him from all of
his peers. The Supreme Court also heard the case Sweat
versus Painter in nineteen fifty, which focused on the right
(17:08):
of a black student named Human Sweat to attend law
school at the University of Texas rather than the Texas
State University for Negroes. In both of these cases, the
arguments from the NU a cp. Lawyers focused on the indignity, unfairness,
and discrimination that we're inherent in segregation, as well as
violations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which we've
(17:31):
discussed in detail in the Plessy Versus Ferguson episode. In
both cases, the Supreme Court found in favor of the students,
not the States. But neither of these rulings was broad
enough to overturn Plessy Versus Ferguson. It only applied to
these specific students and the colleges that they were trying
to attend. Some colleges and professional schools did start to
(17:54):
voluntarily voluntarily desegregate at this point because they were anticipating
that other ruling this were going to come that would
force them to do it. And so with these president
cases finally out there, the Nuble a CP turned its
focus back to elementary and secondary school segregation, which is
where we finally come to Brown Versus Board of Education.
(18:16):
Although Brown v. Board sounds like one case with one plaintiff,
it was actually a collection of five cases argued before
the Supreme Court at the same time. Although these cases
were argued by different in double a CP lawyers, their
good Marshall was a prominent figure among them, and he
took the lead once the cases came before the Supreme
Court and Briggs Versus Elliott, which is a South Carolina case,
(18:39):
Marshall developed a strategy meant to challenge the innate unfairness
of segregation. He brought in psychologists, sociologists, and other experts
to testify to the fact that segregation was inherently damaging
to children, especially to black children. He also recommended that
rather than allowing black children to attend the white schools,
that white children and should be sent to the black schools.
(19:01):
Is a way to call out these supposedly equal schools.
We're not equal at all. Uh. This testimony is where
what like one of the most cited experiments about the
damaging parts of segregation came up frequently, and that's the
test where they would offer children different dolls and and
asked them to pick the good doll and the and
the bad doll, and really, regardless of their race, children
(19:23):
picked the white doll to be the good doll and
the black doll to be the bad doll. And just
a lot of other indicators that that that children were
picking up the idea that black was bad um by
being segregated. So the famous Brown versus Board of Education
gets his name from one of the other cases in
(19:45):
that set of five, and that was Brown versus the
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Although there were many
plaintiffs involved in this case, the lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown.
His name came first alphabetically on the plaintiff list, so
that's why he's listed. Brown was the father of a
little girl who had to attend the black school, even
though she had to walk directly past a much nicer,
(20:06):
better appointed, better funded white school on the way there
every single day. The other three cases that fell under
the Brown versus Board umbrella were two cases from Delaware.
Those were called Give Heart at All Versus Belton at
All and Give Heart Versus Beulah, and the other was
Davis versus County school Board of Prince Edward County, which
(20:28):
was a Virginia case. These cases all work their way
through the lower courts much the same as the cases
we've talked about earlier in this episode, and originally the
Supreme Court was set to hear Brown versus Board and
Briggs versus Elliott on the same day, but soon the
other three cases were ready for the Supreme Court as well,
and in the end, arguments for all five were set
(20:50):
to start on December nine of Ninetto their good Marshal
would lead the nub A CPS legal team because they
essentially had five cases to argue. The arguments went on
until the afternoon of December eleven. Double A CP lawyers
made many of the same arguments that they brought up
in lower lower courts, that segregation was psychologically damaging to
(21:10):
black children, that it was inherently discriminatory, and that it
was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. The states all separately
defended their practices of segregation, primarily arguing that the Fourteenth
Amendment allowed them to maintain separate facilities. A few months later,
the Core issued an order, but it was not a decision.
(21:31):
It was an order that all five cases would be
held over to the next term and reargued, which is
something that really does not happen very often. Some other
notable examples where this has taken place, and these names
will kind of give you a hint as to how
the menhis It was where Roversus weighed on the issue
of abortion, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission on the
(21:53):
issue of whether corporations have First Amendment protections to free speech. Yeah,
it's it's the really the most controversial cases that seemed
to be reargued most often. The Court also asked for
new briefs, and this time they wanted them to answer
specific questions related to the Fourteenth Amendment, and they were
(22:15):
They were extensive, So very briefly, how did or didn't
the states that ratified the fourteenth Amendment understand that it
would abolish segregation? And if the states had not understood that,
did the framers of the amendment understand how it might
be used? Was it within the power of the Court
to use the Fourteenth Amendments to abolish segregation at all?
(22:37):
And if it was, what would it take to do this?
How would the segregation actually be done? Opinions among the
n double A CP lawyers were actually divided about whether
this request to reargue the case was a positive or
negative sign, but among the States lawyers, everyone generally felt
pretty confident that it was going their way and the
(22:58):
segregation would be upheld. Rearguments started on December seventh, nineteen
fifty three, so almost a year after the first arguments
that had started, and they went on for another three
days and the reargument third Good Marshals strenuously argued that
it was within the power of the Supreme Court to
end segregation, that it did not need to fall to
(23:18):
Congress to pass a new law or to amend the Constitution.
But the States argued that the N double a CPS
interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment was fundamentally flawed, and that,
as we've said so many times, allowed for different facilities
that were still equal. On May seventeenth of nineteen fifty four,
so at this point this has gone on for a
(23:40):
year and a half. Uh the Supreme Court announced its decision.
The Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose name
you may remember from our episodes on Mendez versus Westminster
in Loving versus Virginia, was unanimous. The decision began segregation
of white Amingro children in the public schools of a
state solely on the base is of race pursuant to
(24:01):
state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro
children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the
fourteenth Amendment, even though the physical facilities and other tangible
factors of white and Negro schools may be equal. It
also directly addressed plus E versus Ferguson by saying the
(24:22):
separate but equal doctrine adopted in plus Y Versus Ferguson
one sixty three U. S. Three fifty seven has no
place in the field of public education. But the story
doesn't end there. Uh. This decision didn't give much guidance
on how schools were supposed to integrate, so in the
case was re argued yet again from April eleventh to
(24:43):
April fourteenth, and this time the additional arguments were related
to how to implement the previous decision. This new decision
was given on May thirty one of that year, and
it ordered that the plaintiffs in the previous cases be
admitted to the schools in question. Quote on a ray
surely nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed. School authorities were
(25:05):
given the responsibility for figuring out how to solve problems
related to integration at the local level, with input from
the courts. When it was necessary, the original five cases
were remanded back to district courts to figure out how
to implement those UH specific rulings or to uphold the
earlier rulings, whichever was more applicable. So in a lot
(25:26):
of ways, this was disastrous, which is why we need
to have a whole other episode to talk about it.
School systems and states, especially but not exclusively, in the South,
strenuously resistant integration. It was huge, and that's why, as
I just said, subject of a whole separate episode, we
cannot basically leave it here by saying and then segregation
(25:48):
was overturned, yea, because a lot of what happened afterwards
was monumental and horrifying and UH in some ways still
echoing through school systems in the United States today. So
that is where we're gonna pause for a brief moment.
Do you have a spot of listener mail for us?
(26:09):
I do. It is a brief listener mail because this episode,
as I said, at the beginning is a little longer
than we typically do um and it is from Amanda,
and Amanda says, hello, ladies. I am surprised that I'm
actually able to write this email because I'm so excited
that it is hard to sit still. What she's excited about,
which you can glean from the subject of the the
email but not as much in the text, UH, is
(26:31):
that we talked about a site that she works on
in our Unearthed in episode I don't recall if it
was part one or part two, And she says, you
mentioned at thirteen minutes two seconds, Ah well in Tuscany.
I've been excavating at that well for the past two years,
and we'll be going back this year. I worked at
the fine tent up by the well and cleaned everything
(26:52):
that came in during those two seasons, and that was
a lot. In one strata, we had over twenty kilos
of broken bits of pottery. We were all very sad
when the well closed, as it signaled the end of
almost fifty years of on and off excavation, but the
director was incredibly happy to have finally reached the bottom
and to know all that the well contained. Thank you
(27:14):
so much. For mentioning my site and your show. It
was one of the coolest things ever. Thank you, Amanda.
I always love hearing from people who are directly working
with things that we've talked about in the episodes. Uh So,
we are going to stop this episode here for today
and we're going to pick the story back up in
I think our next episode is how That's Working out
(27:35):
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(27:57):
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bit more about what we've talked about today, you can
come to our website and put the word brown v
Board into ours so's far you will find the article
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brown versus Board of of Education because it was a huge,
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(28:19):
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(28:41):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. The other
day we had an episode that was about Plessy versus. Ferguson.
So that was the U. S. Supreme Court case that
(00:22):
made racial segregation in the United States legal and in
some interpretations actually encouraged as long as separate facilities for
the different races were equal. So today's episode will definitely
be easier to follow if you've already listened to that
one first. And what we're going to talk about today
is the road to Brown versus Board of Education, which
(00:43):
is the Supreme Court ruling that overturned plus E versus Ferguson.
It would be next to impossible to have ever had
a class on American history or the American civil rights
movement and have not heard the name Brown versus Board.
But just like with Plessy Versus Ferguson, for a lot
of people, well like that name and what it did
(01:03):
in terms of segregation is sort of the beginning and
the end of the knowledge of of what it was
all about. And it's a lot more complicated than just
one child in one segregated school in a case that
uh that went all the way to the Supreme Court,
and it turns out it's a lot more complicated than
I expected when I got into it. So my intent
was to have one episode that was about Brown versus Board.
(01:24):
But what we're going to do is we're gonna have
today's episode, which goes through sort of the the impact
of Plessy versus Ferguson and the process of getting this
finally to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's decision
on the matter. We're going to need to have a
separate episode to talk about what happened after that, because
it was even even just confining it to this part
(01:46):
of the story. This episode, I feel like it's a
little longer than is typical for us. So we're having
a separate episode that's going to be about what happened
after the Brown versus Word decision was released. So our
Plusy Versus Ferguson episodes started with the context of the
American Civil War, this time the context is the aftermath
(02:07):
of Plusy Versus Ferguson as treaty just said, Marshall Harlem,
the loan dissenting Justice in that decision argued in his
opinion that these laws were inherently discriminatory and unjust, and
he wrote that the ruling was going to lead to
the proliferation of discriminatory laws and that race relations were
only going to get worse, and he was absolutely correct.
(02:28):
Especially in the South, the separation of black citizens from
white citizens became increasingly strict and codified, and there were
different schools, water fountains, and restrooms. Courtrooms had different seats
and different bibles to swear on. Hospitals refused to treat
black patients, and if there wasn't a hospital that would
(02:49):
treat black patients nearby, that was just too bad. Even
when separate facilities did exist for people of African descent,
they were almost universally poorly funded, badly maintained, and generally
inferior to the facilities that were for white people to use.
While the basic fact of being funneled two separate, inferior
(03:09):
facilities was humiliating and degrading. Even worse were the social
systems that went into enforcing this state of separation. Anyone
of African descent was expected to be completely subservient and
meek to white people. Black Americans who talked back or
stood up for themselves were routinely met with anything from
a public humiliation, which is horrible enough, but it went
(03:32):
all the way to outright violence. UH Lynching, both of
black people and any of their white supporters was a
fairly common occurrence, and it was rarely prosecuted. Majority sentiment
about race also shifted pretty dramatically in the years following
Plessy versus Ferguson. I mean, it wasn't good before that point,
(03:53):
but around the turn of the twentieth century, white historians
like William A. Dunning started to write about reconstruction as
a huge, huge mistake on the part of UH of
the government, and a lot of those opinions actually put
it into the classification of being evil. From this point
of view, the North had forced unwanted views onto an
(04:13):
unwilling South, and it should have just left well enough alone.
This situation grew more visibly hostile in the years following
World War One. African Americans who had served their country
in the war returned home to find that they were,
unlike white veterans, still treated with discrimination and harassment. A
series of violent and deadly race riots swept the United
(04:36):
States leading to many deaths and extensive property damage. Yeah,
there were also race riots before and after those interwar years,
for sure, but that was like the peak, with a
few exceptions. During this time, the Supreme Court upheld various
states segregation laws, which had come to be commonly known
as Jim Crow laws, and that precedent went on for
(04:59):
years after. Plessy is Ferguson. On the rare occasion that
the Supreme Court struck down a law, it usually wasn't
because the law itself was found to be discriminatory or
in violation of the Constitution regarding issues like equal protection
under the law. For example, in nineteen seventeen, the Supreme
Court struck down a Kentucky law that outlawed the sale
(05:20):
of homes to black people in majority white neighborhoods. But
this wasn't because that was a discriminatory thing to do.
It was because the law interfered with the rights of
contract and with the ability of white homeowners to dispose
of their property as they saw fit. The court cases
brought to try to overturn segregation were largely pursued by
(05:41):
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Most
people recognize it as the inn Double A CP, and
that was first founded in nineteen o nine. This interracial
group got its start challenging discriminatory laws. They were advocating
for equal access to employment, housing, and voting, and really
campaigning for Black Americans to have equal protections, access and
(06:03):
rights under the law. In one Nathan Marigold, who was
working with the Double A CP, outlined a plan to
fight school segregation. And rather than directly going up against
the idea that separate schools were discriminatory or that schools
for black children were inferior to schools for white children,
this legal strategy focused on budgets. So in the South, especially,
(06:26):
the budgets for schools for black children were vastly lower
than the budgets for schools for white children. And there
was extensive documentation of this that was like out there,
It's not something you're going to have to investigate. It
was obvious. And the hope was that by bringing this
point of easy to document unequal spending before the court,
school systems were going to end up with two choices.
(06:48):
They would either have to raise the budget of the
black schools to match that of the white schools, or
they could save all that money and just operate one
school to educate all races. At that point, the widespread
majority the view was that white children should be educated
separately from black children, and that there was nothing unfair
about doing so. So Marigold thought that their best shot
(07:08):
at challenging the system was to hit the school system
in their wallets. Yeah, he really everyone was was pretty
helpful that if if they presented this to the court,
people were gonna be like, well, we can't possibly afford
to raise the budgets that much, and we're definitely not
going to lower the budgets of the schools for white children.
So they would just have to sort of throw their
(07:28):
hands up and go, well, I guess our hands are tied.
But money intervened in all of this in a completely
different way. Taking a case all the way to the
Supreme Court is extremely expensive, and this was the Great Depression.
Then in n three, Marigold was appointed solicitor to the
Department of the Interior Interior under Franklin beat Roosevelt's administration.
So his plan sort of, uh, it didn't really evaporate,
(07:52):
but he was going to be replaced with someone else
who would have a different plan, and that's what we'll
talk about after a brief word from a sponsor. So
two return to the story of of Nathan Merrigold's successor.
That was Charles Hamiltons Houston. He was valedictorian of his
class at Amherst College and he went on to study
law at Harvard and became the first African American editor
(08:14):
of the Harvard Law Review. Houston took another look at
marygold strategy and he found that, yeah, it was a
pretty good strategy, but it did come with some risks.
Black teachers who testified about their budgets and their salaries
would probably wind up losing their jobs as a result,
and giving the economic climate of the Great Depression, those
teachers probably were not going to be able to find
(08:35):
other work afterward. There was also the possibility that the
strategy would not actually in segregation, that uh, the courts
would just force the school systems to equalize their budgets
between schools for different races, and the schools would either
find money somewhere or you know, make things look as
though they were equal on paper. So Houston wanted to
(08:57):
take a different approach. Instead of focusing on public schools,
the a CP would focus on colleges and universities. Segregation
in these schools was just as prevalent as it was
in elementary through high schools, but states had far more
primary and secondary schools than they had colleges and universities.
The end a CP would be able to make a
(09:18):
difference while also fighting on fewer fronts. Focusing on colleges
and professional schools also got rid of a lot of
the wiggle room for schools to make excuses. So with
public schools, UH school boards might be able to explain
disparities and curricula for different schools by saying, well, this
school is focused on college prep and that one is
(09:38):
focused on vocational work. Or they might say, sure, the
school for the white children is new and the black
school is older, but the classrooms are the same size
and they have otherwise equivalent facilities. It was a lot
harder to explain away differences between one law program and
another law program, and people thought that focusing on the
(10:00):
college level would also be less emotional for parents. College
and professional school students were on the cusp of adulthood,
so there was less of a perception that white students
needed to be protected from some kind of racial threat. Also,
the more explicitly racist view of the time was that
white children who went to school with black children would
get used to them, breaking down a barrier that some
(10:23):
people felt needed to be there. Yeah, that that idea
was less tied to the college idea where people, you know, people,
a lot of people think of kids of that age
as being a little bit more set in their ideas,
which is not necessarily true, at least in like my
college experience. I changed my views on a lot of
things in college, but people were less threatened by that idea.
(10:45):
So the n Double A CP started in search for
plaintiffs in a case to take the Supreme Court at
the University of Maryland Law School. The University of Maryland
only admitted white students and there was no law school
for black students in mary Land at all, so when
the Double A CP started its search. At that point,
there had been nine African Americans who had applied for
(11:07):
admission to the University of Maryland Law School and they
had been rejected because of their race. One of them,
Donald Murray, was an exceptional student. Had he been white,
he definitely would have gotten into the program. And when
he was turned down because he was black, school officials
recommended that he go to Howard, which was a traditionally
black university in Washington, d c. And it wasn't just
(11:30):
a recommendation. The state of Maryland would give him a
scholarship from a fund that was set up for black
students who could not attend school in Maryland because of
their race. Then double a CP took up Murray's case,
and in five a court found that the scholarship was
not equal to admission out of state supported school. As
we've said before, the segregation had to be separate but equal.
(11:53):
For one thing, this scholarship was only a small amount
that could defray tuition costs and would not remotely have
covered tuition Howard or even reduced its cost to being
the same as that of a state supported school in
his state where he lived. For another thing, attending Howard
rather than a school in Maryland would have put Murray
at a disadvantage when it came to practicing law. Since
(12:15):
Howard isn't located in Maryland, mary wouldn't be studying with
Maryland lawyers, and he wouldn't be building a network in
the state where he plans to practice law. So the
court ordered that Murray be admitted to the University of
Maryland Law School, and in eight he became the first
black person to graduate from there. This case did not
overturn segregation anywhere else, but it was the A CPS
(12:38):
first major school segregation victory. It was also the first
case that Thurgood Marshall worked on for the Double A
c P. As a side note, Thurgood Marshall also went
to Howard University under exactly the kind of scholarship that
was at issue, and he graduated first in his class
at the law school. The Double A CP continued to
pursue more college and fashional school segregation cases throughout the courts.
(13:03):
Games versus Canada made it all the way to the
Supreme Court, and this one was pretty similar to Murray's case.
Lloyd Gaines had not been admitted to a state supported
school in Missouri because of his color, and the state
had offered him a scholarship to a different school in
another state. A lower court found that this scholarship was
essentially equal to being allowed to attend the school, but
(13:25):
the U. S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling, noting that
offering a student a scholarship to a school in another
state was not the same as offering an actual equal
education within the state. Missouri would have to either admit
Gains to the law program at the school that admitted
only white students, or it would have to start a
law program at its college for black students, but still
(13:46):
didn't overturn any segregation laws. Though, since the ruling just
meant that states had to offer their own equal but
separate education within their state rather than basically farming it
out to other states, it didn't order Missouri to take
any specific action either, just in some way fix it situation,
so it really was offering equal programs for black and
white students. So, unfortunately, after this kind of partial victory
(14:12):
Gains case got stalled in the courts for years, there
was this whole series of like reversals and appeals and
and sending it back and bringing it back up, and
eventually Games himself disappeared, meaning that the double A CP
just couldn't pursue it anymore. I did not find out
what happened to him. I don't know if we know
what happened to him. The n double A CP continued
(14:32):
on with a long and frustrating series of other cases
in other states, including Missouri, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Oklahoma.
And while states often responded with delaying tactics and evasions
of court orders, there was some progress made. More states
started offering scholarships to private schools in the state if
the states supported schools did not admit black students, or
(14:55):
they started offering programs for black students to attend all
white programs. In some capacity, the number of African Americans
who had access to higher education started to increase in
southern and border states. As kind of a quick aside,
it should go without saying, and there's not really a
great place in this outline to say it, so we're
just gonna say it here before we take another brief break.
(15:17):
Everyone involved in bringing these cases to any court throughout
this episode did so at great personal risk. So people
were harassed and threatened, they lost their jobs, on and on.
So as all of this was happening, the struggle to
try to integrate schools was being done, you know, by
people who were doing so knowing that they could have
(15:37):
really poor ramifications on their own personal situation. Uh. And
at this point in the story, classrooms are still segregated.
So we're going to take another brief word from a
sponsor and then come back to talking about when we
finally got to the point of the Supreme Court desegregating schools.
To return to our story, the ACP slowly chipped away
(16:01):
at different aspects of college and professional school segregation by
bringing these cases into the courts, and it also started
to broaden its focus. So while many of the cases
from the late thirties and early forties had focused on
whether states were providing equal access to education for both races,
in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, the
(16:21):
they started focusing on the inherent discrimination that was part
of having segregated facilities at all. The U. S. Supreme
Court heard the case of McLaurin versus Oklahoma in n and.
In this case, George McLaurin had been allowed to attend
the University of Oklahoma because there was no graduate level
program at Langston University, which was the college for black students.
(16:45):
While mclauren was allowed to attend the otherwise white school,
he was separated from the white students in pretty much
every context. He sat in a row by himself in class,
he ate by himself since he was the only black
graduate student this com completely isolated him from all of
his peers. The Supreme Court also heard the case Sweat
versus Painter in nineteen fifty, which focused on the right
(17:08):
of a black student named Human Sweat to attend law
school at the University of Texas rather than the Texas
State University for Negroes. In both of these cases, the
arguments from the NU a cp. Lawyers focused on the indignity, unfairness,
and discrimination that we're inherent in segregation, as well as
violations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which we've
(17:31):
discussed in detail in the Plessy Versus Ferguson episode. In
both cases, the Supreme Court found in favor of the students,
not the States. But neither of these rulings was broad
enough to overturn Plessy Versus Ferguson. It only applied to
these specific students and the colleges that they were trying
to attend. Some colleges and professional schools did start to
(17:54):
voluntarily voluntarily desegregate at this point because they were anticipating
that other ruling this were going to come that would
force them to do it. And so with these president
cases finally out there, the Nuble a CP turned its
focus back to elementary and secondary school segregation, which is
where we finally come to Brown Versus Board of Education.
(18:16):
Although Brown v. Board sounds like one case with one plaintiff,
it was actually a collection of five cases argued before
the Supreme Court at the same time. Although these cases
were argued by different in double a CP lawyers, their
good Marshall was a prominent figure among them, and he
took the lead once the cases came before the Supreme
Court and Briggs Versus Elliott, which is a South Carolina case,
(18:39):
Marshall developed a strategy meant to challenge the innate unfairness
of segregation. He brought in psychologists, sociologists, and other experts
to testify to the fact that segregation was inherently damaging
to children, especially to black children. He also recommended that
rather than allowing black children to attend the white schools,
that white children and should be sent to the black schools.
(19:01):
Is a way to call out these supposedly equal schools.
We're not equal at all. Uh. This testimony is where
what like one of the most cited experiments about the
damaging parts of segregation came up frequently, and that's the
test where they would offer children different dolls and and
asked them to pick the good doll and the and
the bad doll, and really, regardless of their race, children
(19:23):
picked the white doll to be the good doll and
the black doll to be the bad doll. And just
a lot of other indicators that that that children were
picking up the idea that black was bad um by
being segregated. So the famous Brown versus Board of Education
gets his name from one of the other cases in
(19:45):
that set of five, and that was Brown versus the
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Although there were many
plaintiffs involved in this case, the lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown.
His name came first alphabetically on the plaintiff list, so
that's why he's listed. Brown was the father of a
little girl who had to attend the black school, even
though she had to walk directly past a much nicer,
(20:06):
better appointed, better funded white school on the way there
every single day. The other three cases that fell under
the Brown versus Board umbrella were two cases from Delaware.
Those were called Give Heart at All Versus Belton at
All and Give Heart Versus Beulah, and the other was
Davis versus County school Board of Prince Edward County, which
(20:28):
was a Virginia case. These cases all work their way
through the lower courts much the same as the cases
we've talked about earlier in this episode, and originally the
Supreme Court was set to hear Brown versus Board and
Briggs versus Elliott on the same day, but soon the
other three cases were ready for the Supreme Court as well,
and in the end, arguments for all five were set
(20:50):
to start on December nine of Ninetto their good Marshal
would lead the nub A CPS legal team because they
essentially had five cases to argue. The arguments went on
until the afternoon of December eleven. Double A CP lawyers
made many of the same arguments that they brought up
in lower lower courts, that segregation was psychologically damaging to
(21:10):
black children, that it was inherently discriminatory, and that it
was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. The states all separately
defended their practices of segregation, primarily arguing that the Fourteenth
Amendment allowed them to maintain separate facilities. A few months later,
the Core issued an order, but it was not a decision.
(21:31):
It was an order that all five cases would be
held over to the next term and reargued, which is
something that really does not happen very often. Some other
notable examples where this has taken place, and these names
will kind of give you a hint as to how
the menhis It was where Roversus weighed on the issue
of abortion, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission on the
(21:53):
issue of whether corporations have First Amendment protections to free speech. Yeah,
it's it's the really the most controversial cases that seemed
to be reargued most often. The Court also asked for
new briefs, and this time they wanted them to answer
specific questions related to the Fourteenth Amendment, and they were
(22:15):
They were extensive, So very briefly, how did or didn't
the states that ratified the fourteenth Amendment understand that it
would abolish segregation? And if the states had not understood that,
did the framers of the amendment understand how it might
be used? Was it within the power of the Court
to use the Fourteenth Amendments to abolish segregation at all?
(22:37):
And if it was, what would it take to do this?
How would the segregation actually be done? Opinions among the
n double A CP lawyers were actually divided about whether
this request to reargue the case was a positive or
negative sign, but among the States lawyers, everyone generally felt
pretty confident that it was going their way and the
(22:58):
segregation would be upheld. Rearguments started on December seventh, nineteen
fifty three, so almost a year after the first arguments
that had started, and they went on for another three
days and the reargument third Good Marshals strenuously argued that
it was within the power of the Supreme Court to
end segregation, that it did not need to fall to
(23:18):
Congress to pass a new law or to amend the Constitution.
But the States argued that the N double a CPS
interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment was fundamentally flawed, and that,
as we've said so many times, allowed for different facilities
that were still equal. On May seventeenth of nineteen fifty four,
so at this point this has gone on for a
(23:40):
year and a half. Uh the Supreme Court announced its decision.
The Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose name
you may remember from our episodes on Mendez versus Westminster
in Loving versus Virginia, was unanimous. The decision began segregation
of white Amingro children in the public schools of a
state solely on the base is of race pursuant to
(24:01):
state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro
children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the
fourteenth Amendment, even though the physical facilities and other tangible
factors of white and Negro schools may be equal. It
also directly addressed plus E versus Ferguson by saying the
(24:22):
separate but equal doctrine adopted in plus Y Versus Ferguson
one sixty three U. S. Three fifty seven has no
place in the field of public education. But the story
doesn't end there. Uh. This decision didn't give much guidance
on how schools were supposed to integrate, so in the
case was re argued yet again from April eleventh to
(24:43):
April fourteenth, and this time the additional arguments were related
to how to implement the previous decision. This new decision
was given on May thirty one of that year, and
it ordered that the plaintiffs in the previous cases be
admitted to the schools in question. Quote on a ray
surely nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed. School authorities were
(25:05):
given the responsibility for figuring out how to solve problems
related to integration at the local level, with input from
the courts. When it was necessary, the original five cases
were remanded back to district courts to figure out how
to implement those UH specific rulings or to uphold the
earlier rulings, whichever was more applicable. So in a lot
(25:26):
of ways, this was disastrous, which is why we need
to have a whole other episode to talk about it.
School systems and states, especially but not exclusively, in the South,
strenuously resistant integration. It was huge, and that's why, as
I just said, subject of a whole separate episode, we
cannot basically leave it here by saying and then segregation
(25:48):
was overturned, yea, because a lot of what happened afterwards
was monumental and horrifying and UH in some ways still
echoing through school systems in the United States today. So
that is where we're gonna pause for a brief moment.
Do you have a spot of listener mail for us?
(26:09):
I do. It is a brief listener mail because this episode,
as I said, at the beginning is a little longer
than we typically do um and it is from Amanda,
and Amanda says, hello, ladies. I am surprised that I'm
actually able to write this email because I'm so excited
that it is hard to sit still. What she's excited about,
which you can glean from the subject of the the
email but not as much in the text, UH, is
(26:31):
that we talked about a site that she works on
in our Unearthed in episode I don't recall if it
was part one or part two, And she says, you
mentioned at thirteen minutes two seconds, Ah well in Tuscany.
I've been excavating at that well for the past two years,
and we'll be going back this year. I worked at
the fine tent up by the well and cleaned everything
(26:52):
that came in during those two seasons, and that was
a lot. In one strata, we had over twenty kilos
of broken bits of pottery. We were all very sad
when the well closed, as it signaled the end of
almost fifty years of on and off excavation, but the
director was incredibly happy to have finally reached the bottom
and to know all that the well contained. Thank you
(27:14):
so much. For mentioning my site and your show. It
was one of the coolest things ever. Thank you, Amanda.
I always love hearing from people who are directly working
with things that we've talked about in the episodes. Uh So,
we are going to stop this episode here for today
and we're going to pick the story back up in
I think our next episode is how That's Working out
(27:35):
on the calendar. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other subject, you can where
History podcast that How Stuff Works dot com. Our Facebook
is Facebook dot com, slash miss in history, and our
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History dot tumbler dot com, and we are also on
Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash ms in history. We
have a spreadshirt store at MS and history dot spreadshirt
(27:57):
dot com where you can buy t shirts and phoneys
and whatnot. If you would like to learn a little
bit more about what we've talked about today, you can
come to our website and put the word brown v
Board into ours so's far you will find the article
about how the Civil Rights Movement worked, which talks about
brown versus Board of of Education because it was a huge,
huge part of the civil rights movement. You can also
(28:19):
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
and you can find an archive of every single episode
we have ever done, as well as show notes for
the episodes. Holly and I have done lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
miss the mystory dot com for more on this and
(28:41):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
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