“Separate is inherently unequal.”
On May 17, 1954, this phrase was etched into the annals of history with a U.S. Supreme Court decision, the most iconic education decision ever: Brown vs. the Board of Education.
Brown v Board was a monumental decision ruling that race-based segregation was unconstitutional — reversing the “separate but equal” precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Brown v. Board was more than a win in the courtroom. It was a symbolic victory that served as the first major domino in a cascade of civil rights efforts that would go on to define the next two decades. However, despite its success, Brown was not an exception to the unwritten social contract that our country has with the Black community.
Brown vs. the Board of Education was actually a consolidation of five lawsuits targeting school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and DC. These lawsuits were spearheaded by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF). The name “Brown” was derived from Linda and Oliver Brown. Linda, a third grader from Topeka, Kansas, was denied admission to the nearby all-white elementary school’s summer program. Once the Legal Defense Fund gathered these cases, they enlisted some of the era’s most adept legal minds to argue them. Their strategy was straightforward: to assert that segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees full citizenship and equal legal protection to all individuals born or naturalized in the United States. Central to their argument was the testimony of expert witnesses, underscoring the premise that racially segregated schools do irrevocable psychological damage and stamp Black children with “a badge of inferiority.”
The journey to the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education spanned years, involving multiple hearings. Despite compelling arguments presented by Marshall and other LDF attorneys, nearly six months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren was necessary for a unanimous decision to be reached. Following years of legal battles, the ruling in the Brown v. Board case stood as the most celebrated victory for the LDF in its extensive history of civil rights advocacy.
As we reflect collectively on the 70-year anniversary of Brown v. Board, one must ask: Have we reached the reality that Thurgood Marshall and the LDF envisioned?
Undoubtedly, there have been instances of progress that they would applaud. Nevertheless, the reality remains that an unwritten social law exists in the U.S.: Black progress does not exist without pushback. Unfortunately, the Brown decision was not an exception to this rule.
Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, there was immediate pushback from several states. To detail this, I have pulled from the various sources that the Equal Justice Initiative used in their Segregation in America Report.
South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi each responded by enacting constitutional amendments that empowered their legislatures to terminate public education if the Court mandated immediate desegregation.The opposition tothe original Brown ruling was substantial enough that just 12 months later, in May of 1955, a follow-up Supreme Court decision was made in a lesser-known but arguably more influential case known as Brown II. This decision ordered schools to integrate “with all deliberate speed”, and gave states a clear path to resistance.
To understand the depth of pushback following the Brown II decision all you need to do is look at how Virginia responded.
In 1956, the Virginia General Assembly passed laws that cut off state funding to schools that were integrated and mandated that they be closed. The governor swiftly complied by closing down nine public high schools. To ensure that white students still had access to education though, they created a “freedom of choice program” to repurpose tax dollars that would fund public education into tuition grants to provide access to private schools. In 1959 — when they were federally ordered to integrate schools — Prince Edwards County officials elected to shut down the entire public education system and use public dollars and tax credits to fund white students’ tuition into private schools. While over 90 percent of the county’s white students enrolled in the newly established all-white private school, more than 1,700 Black students in the county had no state-funded educational alternatives for five years.
Even the most well-known examples of school integration faced tremendous pushback.
Images of Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock 9 being escorted into school buildings by federal troops shape our collective memory when we reflect on the legacy of Brown’s implementation in the South. What many may not realize is that although 6-year-old Ruby was able to attend school, when she arrived, she was only one of two people in her classroom. All of Ruby’s white classmates had withdrawn from the school. For the entirety of the school year, it was only she and the teacher in the classroom.
When the Little Rock 9 initially sought to enroll in their all-white local high school in 1957, they were met with resistance from the Arkansas National Guard, acting under the orders of their governor. This prompted President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops to escort the students into the building to enforce integration. The community erupted, and in response, for the 1958 school year, the same governor made the decision to shut down all public high schools in Little Rock.
The resistance was seen not only through policy and school closures but through the original tool of white supremacy as well: violence. The Equal Justice Initiative shares that in nearly every year following the original Brown ruling, there was violent opposition to school desegregation somewhere:
Milford, Delaware, in 1954; Hoxie, Arkansas, in 1955; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Clinton, Tennessee; Mansfield, Texas, and Clay and Sturgis communities in Kentucky in 1956; Little Rock and Nashville in 1957; Clinton (again) in 1958; New Orleans in 1960; Athens, Georgia, in 1961; Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962; and Birmingham in 1963.
By 1964 — nearly a decade after Brown and Brown II — school integration was barely visible. Less than 3 percent of the South’s Black children attended schools alongside white students. In states like Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, it was less than 1 percent.
As we reflect on the legacy of Brown 70 years later, I grapple with my earlier question. Have we reached the reality that Thurgood Marshall and the LDF envisioned? While school segregation persists today, our schools are undeniably more integrated than before the original Brown ruling. But was integration the sole core issue they sought to address?
One of the central premises of the argument presented in Brown v. Board revolved around the psychological harm resulting from segregation. This was vividly demonstrated through Dr. Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s Brown Doll test. In this test, children aged 3 to 7 were presented with four dolls, identical except for color. Clark discovered that Black children were led to believe that Black dolls were inferior to white dolls, and consequently, they internalized a sense of inferiority compared to their white peers. In its Brown decision, the Supreme Court cited the Clarks’ 1950 paper saying: “To separate (African-American children) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
At the core, Brown was about humanizing Black people. School integration served as the vehicle to dismantle segregation, not merely for the sake of integration itself, but to undo the profound psychological damage inflicted on Black children by state-sanctioned segregation and the magnitude of the resistance to the implementation of the legislation underscores the importance of that work.
In 2024, the importance of this work remains as crucial as ever, and it’s far from complete.
Over the past seven decades since Brown v. Board, we’ve witnessed a continuous evolution of pushback against Black educational progress. While legalized segregation has become a thing of the past, its legacy has continued to be felt by our country’s failure to address racial covenants and redlining. The lasting effects are made evidently clear by recent data that shows nearly 70% of Black students attend schools that are highly segregated, and more than 70% of Black students attend schools that are high-poverty. The attack on Black education and psyche has become more subversive and morphed into recent curriculum changes that minimize Black subjugation; into censorship and suppression of some historically informed texts through book banning; the plague of negative perception of adults resulting in Black students being under-identified in talented and gifted programs and over-identified in special education programs, being subjected to more harsh and more frequent discipline than their white peers, and the policing of Black hairstyles.
The psychological damage that Black children face today in our public education system begins in pre-school and compounds over 13 years of education and does irreparable damage.
Brown v. Board illuminated a truth that remains pertinent today. You cannot legislate people to care about Black children. The true solution to the problem that they set out to solve in 1954 is a form of radical love that transcends racial boundaries and affords Black children the privilege to exist while their full humanity is recognized and unquestioned. Radical love recognizes the harm caused by systemic injustice and seeks healing.
As amorphous as this may sound, fortunately, there is precedent. The psychological development of Black children has been cared for in a “traditional” educational setting by Black teachers and leaders since the Reconstruction era. At a minimum, radical love in a classroom context frees Black students of the pervasive burden of low expectations, recognizes the assets they bring and the aspirations they hold, and guides students through critical examinations of the social order.
A necessary step toward honoring the legacy and realizing the vision of the legal team behind Brown is an intentional undoing of the unintended consequences that are associated with the original ruling. We lost over 38,000 Black teachers and thousands of Black school principals following the decision. The evidence is so compelling about the benefits of having a Black teacher for a Black student that arguing against it is like trying to debate gravity.
Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund chose education as the battlefield for this much larger issue with careful intention. Now it is our turn to build upon the foundation they created and protect the psychological development of our Black children.
Markus Flynn, a former classroom teacher anda 2024 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project, is the executive director ofBlack Men Teach, a Minnesota-based non-profit headquartered in St. Paul.
