Brown v. Board of Education : 60 Years Later

May 17 marked the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). By a 9-0 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school districts to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” Legal scholars, pundits and ordinary citizens have debated Brown‘s impact. Some have hailed the case as a watershed moment in the history of the American legal system—a decision that launched the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s. Subsequent critics have claimed that the practical impact of the case has been largely overstated.

Given the crisis state of our nation’s education system, it is worthwhile to reflect upon what Brown did and did not accomplish. First, it ended court-sanctioned racial segregation by overruling Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had infamously endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine. For a nation that had constitutionally promised racial equality for about 150 years, Brown reversed over half-a-century worth of court-endorsed Jim Crow laws. Second, by ordering school districts to begin taking steps to integrate schools, Brown initiated the process of school desegregation across the nation. Evidence suggests that African-American children who attended integrated schools received a better education than those children relegated to segregated facilities with inferior resources. Finally, Brown transformed the model for civil rights lawyering; it became an exemplar for using legal initiatives to secure important political outcomes. In fact, following the successes of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which litigated Brown, hundreds of nonprofit legal organizations arose to litigate on behalf of various special interests, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NOW Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, the Native American Rights Fund, the Children’s Defense Fund and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.