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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas |
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On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, that "separate but equal" educational facilities were "inherently unequal," and therefore segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warrenwrote the overriding decision, and Thurgood Marshallheaded the legal defense team of the NAACP.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
When handed down in May of 1954, the landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, called for the desegregation of all public school systems in the nation "with all deliberate speed." The court unanimously ruled that separate facilities were, by definition, unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional. Most important, however, was the breadth of the decision. In outlawing segregation in all public education throughout the entire nation, the court thereby implied that all forms of segregation were illegal. It could now be assumed that the court would uphold new civil rights legislation banning all forms of public discrimination, provided, of course, Congress could be persuaded to pass such legislation.
The Brown decision was a turning-point for the executive branch of the United States Government as well as the judicial branch. Minority Americans had won much more than the right to seek a court order to integrate any public school at any educational level anywhere in the United States. The court order would have to be enforced, and the obvious group to do the enforcing would be the Civil Rights Section of the United States Department of Justice. Civil Rights Section lawyers, when needed, could begin moving into the American South to oversee the orderly desegregation of public schools. Desegregation orders from U.S. courts would be enforced, if enforcement became difficult, by U.S. marshals. The judicial branch of the United States democracy had given the executive branch the legal justification - if it cared to use it - to go into the South and become directly involved in the enforcement of public school integration.
The Eisenhower Administrationresponded - and with a great deal of foresight - to the fact that U.S. marshals were the logical instruments to enforce public school integration. As more and more efforts to integrate public schools in the South resulted in strident white opposition, the Eisenhower Justice Department began training a sizable group of U.S. marshals to be used in the South. Herbert Brownell's successor as attorney general, William Rogers, trained an elite crew of 600 marshals whose significance reached well beyond the Eisenhower years. When President John Kennedyneeded marshals to enforce school integration at the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama in the early 1960s, he was able to draw on the elite crew of U.S. marshals trained under Eisenhower.
Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
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