Events
1938Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada ruling
1946Morgan v. Virginia ruling
1950Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin
v. Oklahoma State Regents rulings
1954Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,
ruling
1955Montgomery bus boycott
1956Several states issue Southern Manifesto in response
to Brown decision
1957Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formsCivil Rights Act of 1957 passed
by CongressEisenhower intervenes in Little Rock crisis
Key People
Dwight D. Eisenhower -
34th
U.S. president; personally opposed civil rights movement but used
military to resolve Little Rock crisis in
1957
Orval Faubus - Arkansas
governor who defied federal court order to integrate public high
schools; ordered Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students
from entering Central High School in Little Rock
Martin Luther King Jr. - Preacher who gained prominence by leading Montgomery
bus boycott in
1955;
founded SCLC in
1957 to
rally southern churches behind civil rights movement
Thurgood Marshall - Chief counsel for NAACP; argued
Brown v.
Board of Education before Supreme Court in
1954
Earl Warren - Supreme
Court chief justice who proved unexpectedly liberal on civil rights;
worked hard to deliver unanimous verdict on
Brown v. Board
of Education
Rosa Parks - Seamstress
who launched era of peaceful protest by refusing to give up her
seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus; her arrest prompted the
Montgomery bus boycott later that year
The Legal Strategy
The NAACP’s primary goal upon its founding
in 1909 was
to tackle racial inequality by means of legal action, hoping to
overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v.
Ferguson. One of the organization’s earliest victories
came in 1938,
when the Supreme Court ruled in Missouri ex rel. Gaines
v. Canada that the University of Missouri had to
build an entirely new law school for blacks or simply integrate
them into the existing all-white school.
In 1946,
the Supreme Court further chipped away at the “separate but equal”
doctrine when it ruled in Morgan v. Virginia that segregated
interstate buses were illegal because they put an “undue burden”
on interstate trade and transportation. In 1950, the
court expanded on the Missouri decision when it
ruled in Sweatt v. Painter that “separate
but equal” professional schools were inherently unequal.
Thurgood Marshall
One of the main figures in the NAACP during this period
of legal action was its chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall.
A brilliant lawyer, Marshall won a major victory in 1950 with
the McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents ruling,
when he convinced the Supreme Court that segregated cafeterias,
libraries, and seats in classrooms placed a “badge of inferiority”
on black students. After winning several landmark victories, Marshall
himself would go on to become the first black justice on the Supreme
Court, in 1967.
Brown v. Board of Education
The early string of decisive legal victories for civil
rights activists laid the foundation for Marshall and the NAACP
to launch a head-on attack on the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
In 1951,
they accepted the case of Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas,
who wanted his daughter to be able to attend an all-white elementary
school near his house rather than a black school several miles away.
The case—Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas—eventually
worked its way up to the Supreme Court, where Marshall argued that
racial segregation relegated black Americans to second-class citizenship.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, though appointed by the
conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower, sympathized with
black Americans and pressured the wavering justices on the bench
to vote in Brown’s favor. Warren knew that only a unanimous decision
would be powerful enough to quiet racists and truly overturn Plessy
v. Ferguson.
After the final two justices had been persuaded to make
the groundbreaking, unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in
May 1954, Warren announced that
“in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but
equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.” A subsequent ruling a year later ordered local school
boards to desegregate schools but set no specific timetable for
doing so. Unfortunately, the second decision placed federal district
judges in charge of supervising the desegregation process, effectively
ensuring noncompliance and opposition in the South. Still, Brown
v. Board of Education was the landmark legal victory the
NAACP had been striving for since its formation nearly
a half century earlier. The decision revitalized the Fourteenth
Amendment and paved the way for future civil rights legislation.
Americans’ Reaction to Brown
Many Americans—in both the North and the South—disagreed with
the Brown decision and accused Warren of having
bent the Constitution in favor of his personal opinions. On the
other hand, and despite intense opposition, many Americans defended
Warren’s decision by arguing that he had rightly used his authority
to make up for Congress’s failure to protect black civil rights.
