The Arguments Against Segregation

You likely know that the Chief Justice who famously announced the court's decision to overturn segregation was Earl Warren. But...in 1952... the court's chief justice was Fred Vinson.

The justices who heard the arguments in 1952 decided to ask to hear arguments again the following year. However, Vinson died of a sudden heart attack in September 1953. President Eisenhower, using his authority as Congress was in recess, appointed Earl Warren as chief justice just weeks before the Supreme Court's 1953 term began. Without Warren's appointment, the court may have ruled differently, or at least not unanimously. And, politically, Warren and others on the court believed a unanimous ruling was critical to weather the social earthquake to come.

But back in early December 1952...Chief Justice Fred Vinson was running the show. Each side had an hour to make its case before the court, and the side arguing for change went first.

Vinson called for the first argument against segregation. NAACP lawyer Robert Carter stepped up. This may be another surprising detail. You may know Thurgood Marshall as the mastermind behind the NAACP's legal strategy and, later, as the court's first Black justice. We'll hear from Thurgood Marshall soon. But, leading off on this day was Marshall's colleague Robert Carter. Carter quickly got to the heart of the matter:

That clause in the post-Civil War 14th amendment is simple - just one sentence: no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The problem Carter and the NAACP faced was how the justices would interpret the word "equal."

In the 1890s, an earlier Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy ruled that "equal" facilities — in that case, it involved a whites-only train car in Louisiana — didn't necessarily have to be integrated facilities. They could be separate as long as they were equal. The court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson became known as the "separate but equal doctrine," and it gave legal cover for generations of Jim Crow laws, including segregated schools.

It is rare for the Supreme Court to overrule itself. And the NAACP faced a choice: Ask the court to overrule its longstanding "separate but equal" precedent ... or argue that the precedent didn't apply to schools. As Carter stood to make his argument, he made it clear the NAACP had chosen the second approach.

The Sweatt case Carter mentioned was a much more recent precedent, just two years on the books at the time of the Brown argument. In it, the Court unanimously ruled in favor of a Black man denied access to the University of Texas Law School because of his race. Although the school tried to set up separate facilities for Black students, the Court said that would put those students at a professional disadvantage — in other words, separate was NOT equal when it came to grad school. Now, before the court, Carter argued that the crack in the door created by the Sweatt decision should be widened to include younger students.

Justice Felix Frankfurter pushed back on Carter's argument, asking whether Kansas might have had a legally acceptable reason for separating public school students.

The next case argued was Briggs v. Elliott, a case from South Carolina. Defending the state's practice of racial segregation was John W. Davis, one of the nation's most respected lawyers. You can hear his argument in the next module. Making the case against segregation? We now get to Thurgood Marshall.

Marshall represented nearly two dozen Black families from Clarendon County, South Carolina, who were challenging the state's segregated schools. Unlike in the Brown case from Kansas, where Black-only schools were relatively well-funded and had good teachers, Clarendon County's were inferior. That was the verdict of the trial court. But instead of ordering desegregation, the court simply told the state to improve the Black schools.

Justice Frankfurter returned to his line of questioning about the societal impact of integrating schools, which another justice referred to as "racial friction."

Specifically, he asked Marshall why South Carolina's Black population was larger than Kansas's.

So Marshall wanted to focus the Court's attention on the basic constitutional right of equality, yet he also stopped short of insisting that all schools be integrated immediately. This was the core of his strategy. While race alone should not be used to classify students, said Marshall, he also suggested local school officials could still find legal ways to keep softer forms of segregation alive.

Frankfurter zeroed in on the problem with Marshall's incrementalist approach. He was trying not to push the Court too far, too fast. But Marshall ran the risk of a muddled outcome that invited segregationists to simply keep the same racist school systems and hide them behind supposedly non-race-based policies. Marshall's approach would evolve as the case progressed.

Curiously, at this point, Justice Robert H. Jackson pivoted to the question of Native Americans, who had also suffered profound yet unique forms of discrimination and violence over the centuries. In his response, both Jackson and Marshall seemed almost to make light of the question.

As his argument drew to a close, Marshall focused on the basic unfairness of South Carolina's segregation law. After noting that an all-white legislature had passed it, he articulated the fundamental problem with using race as a dividing line.

In response to a question in rebuttal about whether states might have a legitimate interest in avoiding what the justice called "racial friction," Marshall cited the recently integrated U.S. military, which was at the time engaged in the Korean War.

He was referring to graduate schools.

Marshall's portrait of race relations in 1952 may have been overly rosy, but in his final statement, he reminded the nine white justices of their timeless duty: that their role was to protect minority groups from the tyranny of the majority.

One of the five school segregation cases in 1952 was slightly different from the others — it didn't come from a state, but from the very city where the arguments were taking place: The District of Columbia. D.C. had long had segregated schools, and in the 1950s, it was governed by Congress itself. NAACP lawyer James Nabrit picked up Marshall's argument that the Black man was currently fighting in an unsegregated war in Korea.

And Nabrit closed with a stirring reminder that the nation and the entire world were watching what happened in this case.