On June 23, 1951, a little more than 60 years ago, a three-judge federal court panel sitting in Charleston, S.C., issued a majority opinion, upholding the state’s rigidly maintained practice of segregating school children on the basis of race. The decision in Briggs v. Elliott, which relied upon the U.S. Supreme Court 1896 precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, concluded that school segregation was a local matter outside the purview of the federal courts and the American Constitution. What was then little noticed was a passionate dissent by U.S. District Judge J. Waites Waring, an eighth-generation Charlestonian and son of a Confederate veteran. The Waring dissent represented the first instance in the 55 years since Plessy that a federal judge concluded that racial segregation was incompatible with the American Constitution, even if an effort had been made to equalize the segregated facilities. The Briggs lawsuit would eventually wind itself onto the Supreme Court’s docket and be consolidated with four other cases under the name Brown v. Board of Education. As they say, the rest is history.

Briggs v. Elliott was the first case filed, tried and appealed to the Supreme Court challenging segregation in public schools. At the time of the trial, in late May 1951, 18 states, including South Carolina, required the operation of racially segregated schools. These laws were a patchwork of state statutes and local ordinances from across the country that enforced a form of racial apartheid then popularly known as “Jim Crow” laws.

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