How Brown v. Board Ended Legal School Segregation

A nine-page Supreme Court opinion changed the course of American education—and it wasn’t an accident. We walk through the legal strategy that chipped away at Plessy, the political maneuvering that elevated Earl Warren, and the consolidated cases that gave Brown its force. From the NAACP’s focus on the false promise of “equal” to South Carolina’s attempt to preserve segregation by upgrading Black schools, the road to 1954 was crowded with tactics, pressure, and surprising alliances.

Once Warren took the helm, the Court aimed for clarity over casebook citations. Brown I is short by design, rejecting the idea that state-enforced separation could ever be equal because it stamps children with a badge of inferiority. The harder part came next: Brown II’s mandate to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” That phrase left lower courts to navigate politics and logistics without a strict timetable. We explore how Southern federal judges became quiet heroes, why some states chose massive resistance, and how President Eisenhower’s intervention in Little Rock signaled federal resolve.

We also connect the dots with Bolling v. Sharpe, where the Court used the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to apply equal protection principles to federal schools in Washington, D.C., and we trace the aftermath through Cooper v. Aaron, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Along the way, we spotlight the advocates who shaped the moment—John Davis for the defenders of segregation and Thurgood Marshall for the NAACP—showing how courtroom craft and constitutional vision converged. Brown did not finish the work, but it reset the law’s moral compass and gave the country a common language for equality. If this journey through law, politics, and principle resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review telling us what part of Brown’s story you think matters most today.

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Chapters

• 2:19 Setting The Stage For Brown
• 3:26 NAACP Strategy And Southern Response
• 5:11 Earl Warren’s Rise And Politics
• 6:47 Merging Cases And Star Advocates
• 8:12 Brown I: The Short, Sweeping Ruling
• 9:22 Brown II And “All Deliberate Speed”
• 10:32 Bolling v. Sharpe And Federal Schools
• 11:21 Resistance, Enforcement, And Later Cases
• 12:49 Legacy, Scholarship, And Thurgood Marshall

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:33

Welcome back to Civic Senior. Today's Supreme Court case is Brown versus Board of Education. And there's actually, again, two decisions, and we're going to talk about that. But we have Dr. Beyenberg back with us. Dr. Beyenberg, tell us a little bit more about Brown versus Board of Education.

unknown: 1:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52

So as you noted, there's two cases. And if you want to think about it, there's actually sort of a pair of even additional companion cases that are worth talking about. So the backs uh obviously there's you in a previous podcast, we talked about the Plessy V. Ferguson case and sort of the implication on that, sort of creating, giving the green light for the creation of Jim Crow. And that the sort of core of that ends up being school segregation. And over the course of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the NAACP and other critics effectively are trying to pick at that regime. And they use a very, very smart legal strategy, which is they originally try to go after the equal part. And they say, basically, even if separate but equal were true, the black schools suck. Like they're terrible. And so, quite interestingly, some of the more perceptive Southerners actually realize what's happening here. And so ironically, you have this movement by a wing of sort of progressive Southern Democratic governors to massively expand the funding into their schools in order to basically forestall this. And the leader of this movement is the governor of South Carolina named Jimmy Burns. Jimmy Burns is basically a name who's kind of forgotten from history today. But Burns had been one of Franklin Roosevelt's absolutely closest advisors. In fact, he's appointed to the Supreme Court at one point, but he finds it super boring. So he quits. And he ends up, this this is, yeah, you're laughing, but it's true. And he ends up effectively as the terms are sort of fuzzy, but effectively almost the domestic czar of the United States is economic policy during World War II, while Roosevelt is focusing on sort of the foreign policy side. So this is not some like marginal Yahoo! Like this is effectively Franklin Roosevelt's right-hand man who then goes to become governor of South Carolina. And so the Brown case is sort of spooling up a few times. They hear re-arguments. Some of the states are starting to pick at this. Arizona, for example, using its own Arizona state constitution, actually deems school segregation unconstitutional under the Arizona Constitution. And that's something we should do in a separate podcast, I think, on another thing. But so this sort of conflict is becoming clear that there's that school segregation is becoming increasingly, and segregation more broadly by government institutions, is more and more seen as intention with the 14th Amendment. Originally, they argued the case under Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who is, again, former Secretary of the Treasury for Harry Truman, so fairly major figure. Much more common to appoint political people to the court at the time. Vinson dies. And this is not relevant to Brown v. Board of Education, but it's a history story that I just can't resist. Vincent is not very popular with some of his fellow justices. And some of them are also afraid he's going to make Brown go out the wrong way. And so literally at his funeral, one of the justices turns to the other one. This is Felix Frankfurter. I can't remember which one he's talking to. And he says, basically, Vincent clocking out is the first evidence I've ever seen of God in my life. At the guy's funeral. So Vince. Yeah. Yeah. So Vincent gets replaced by Earl Warren. Earl Warren is very, very keen on seeing the destruction of segregation. There are some who've argued this is a sort of atonement for him because when he was governor of California, he was one of the, if not the chief architect of Japanese internment. So Warren basically gets appointed to the Supreme Court in a quasi-corrupt deal with Dwight Eisenhower, which is he'll back him for president at the Republican convention if Warren gets appointed. That whole backstory is to say there's a lot of actual politics happening here with Brown. It's not just a legal issue. So they they re-argue the case a couple times. And Jimmy Burns, the governor of South Carolina, it's easy to forget. There's a companion case that's tracking along with Brown, which is a consolidate. So Brown is from Kansas, Topeka, Kansas, right? There's a case called Briggs V. Elliott from South Carolina, and the court merges the two of them. But Burns is the one who basically takes care of the core of basically argue. He hires the best lawyer in the entire country to argue in the defense of the constitutionality of Brown, a guy named John Davis, who had been Woodrow Wilson's solicitor general, and then a member of Congress, and then Democratic 1924 presidential nominee. Like big, big, big player. So the Brown case, they re-argue it a couple of times because they're kind of buying time. And then the case comes down. And the striking thing about the Brown case is that when I assign my con law cases, I usually edit them down really ferociously because like the Dred Scott case is like 250 pages, and I'm not going to make them read that. Brown is not, I edit a little bit, but it's very short because Earl Warren very consciously has the idea, he says, I really don't care what the law professors and the historians are going to think about this case. I want this to be short and simple so it can be printed in the newspapers. And so, in some ways, this is a little harsh, but Brown won is closer to an op-ed than a legal opinion in many ways. Like, for example, the discussion of does the original understanding require this? He effectively has like a one-line footnote where he says, like, it's complicated. Who cares? Like normally you would then have a bunch of citations among evidence and a big thing, but he just basically says, like, eh, it's hard, because he knows that the law professors are going to care about that, but nobody else is really going to care about that. And so what he argues is effectively, whatever the understanding was at the time of the 1890s, whether separate but equal could be equal. He says, really, we have seen and understand that it dysfunctionally can't be equal. Even if all the even if Burns and Cruz sort of spend all the money and hire the same quality of teachers in the same kind of buildings, they're not, even if that's happening, the sort of aggressive stigma of designing a system to say you are unworthy of being in a school with us is itself unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. And so, but again, Earl Warren is trying to minimize conflict. And so he doesn't want this to be, he doesn't want this to get picked apart. And so then the next question is, okay, it's unconstitutional. Now what do we do about it? And Warren says, we'll come back and argue that later. And so that's what Brown two is. So they come back effectively in the next turn, and then they say, yep, indeed, school segregation is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. And then they kind of punt again and they put the lower courts in a really tough bind because they don't give a rule. They just say lower courts should work to eliminate segregation in schools with all deliberate speed. Does that mean six months from now? Does that mean two years from now? Right. So then the district courts effectively, so this is with Southern, basically Southern federal district judges are like really underappreciated heroes in American history because they're the ones getting really, I mean, there's you know signs coming up criticizing Earl Warren. They're the ones on the ground that are trying to implement this, both the district judges and then the circuit judges. And so again, the Brown case, Brown too, is also pretty short. There's a little concurrence by by Felix Frankfur, but it's effectively, again, pretty short. There's also sort of another case that's worth flagging, which is called Bowling v sharp, which is the sort of companion case in dealing with federal territories. Washington, D.C. is not bound by the Equal Protection Clause, which by its terms applies to the states, right? No state shall deprive anyone of the equal protection of the laws. And Earl Warren basically says, but the due process clause does, and if we think about sort of due process, being treated fairly under the law is part of that. When this case comes down, obviously Southerners in some places are furious. Some of them they take it a little better. Some places do massive resistance. Virginia, state of Virginia basically closes their school system and says, fine, we won't have a public school system. There's really aggressive pushback in some in some places. Yet some of the states they sort of grumble but sort of suck it up and start implementing it. North Carolina, I think, is generally regarded for sort of being more agreeable to it. And so there's a f there's a series of follow-ups in future years, Cooper v. Aaron and others, which is if or you know, Dwight Eisenhower effectively has to almost militarily implement this in Arkansas against horrible FOMAs. So Brown doesn't get aggressive in terms of like percentages of school desegregation. It takes eight, ten years. Historians have tried to argue, in fact, it's Congress that really ends up sort of putting the implementation on this in terms of actually making it stick. But Brown very clearly sets out the precedent that basically legal discrimination on racial grounds in education is unconstitutional. And law professors have gone through, it's sort of a cottage industry to basically say, and there literally was a book, actually about 15, 20 years ago, maybe, called What Brown v. Board Should Have Said. And it's various law professors going through and saying, based on this constitutional methodology, here's how Brown would have come out. Based on this one, here's how you know how it should have been argued. And probably most famously, the originalist scholar Michael McConnell has argued if you look at the sort of debates about the elections at the time and congressional bills afterward, that indeed this is faithful to and required by the original understanding of the Constitution, even if Earl Warren just sort of shrugged his hands, like, eh, boring con law. So for folks that really want to dive into sort of the legal argument on that, there's a very, very rich, very rich historical record that scholars have put together. But the Brown case itself really is very short and sweet and just basically school segregation is unconstitutional. Period. We'll come back next time and tell you what, tell you how to get rid of it. And then they come back next time and say, lower court judges, you guys figure it out. But Brown obviously is sort of the, you know, it's it's hard to say like what the first shot is. Is it desegregating the army? Is it, you know, you can work back? But Brown clearly does stand for the position that the United States government will finally implement sort of the anti-racial discrimination provisions of the 14th Amendment that have been sort of left for decades. And then Congress will sort of get on board later on with the Voting Rights Act as an enforcement of the 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, particularly the provision on public accommodations in dealing with the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.

SPEAKER_00: 12:47

It's such an interesting thing that the lead lawyer in this case was Thurgood Marshall, who then becomes a Supreme Court justice and just how intertwined, you know, a lot of these things are. So, Dr. Weinberg, thank you so much. And I look forward to our next case.