Did Brown v. Board Ever Really Matter?

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Court ruled unanimously, declaring that they violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It thus overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which had been the law of the land since 1896, when Plessy v. Ferguson was decided. The Brown ruling—the culmination of a decades-long effort by the N.A.A.C.P.—has today acquired an aura of inevitability. But it didn't seem inevitable at the time. And the fact that it was unanimous was little short of miraculous.

When the school-segregation cases first came before the Court, in 1952, the justices, all Roosevelt and Truman appointees, were split over the constitutional questions. Only four of them (William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, Harold H. Burton, and Sherman Minton) were solidly in favor of overturning Plessy. Though there is no official record of the Court's internal deliberations, scholars of the decision—notably Michael J. Klarman, a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia—have been able to reconstruct what went on through the justices' conference notes and draft opinions. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a Truman appointee from Kentucky, argued that Plessy should be permitted to stand. “Congress has not declared there should be no segregation,” Vinson observed, and surely, he went on, the Court must be responsive to “the long-continued interpretation of Congress ever since the Amendments.” Justice Stanley F. Reed, also a Kentuckian, was even more skeptical of overturning segregation. “Negroes have not thoroughly assimilated,” he said; segregation was “for the benefit of both” blacks and whites, and “states should be left to work out the problem for themselves.” The notes for Justice Tom C. Clark, a Texan, indicate greater uncertainty, but he was clearly willing to entertain the position that “we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it out.”