The Cases

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS: In the fall of 1950, a Black pastor named Oliver Brown tried to enroll his seven-year-old daughter Linda at the Sumner Elementary School near their home, but Black children were not allowed to attend. Linda had to walk and then take a bus miles across town to an all-Black school. In a 1985 interview for the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, Linda Brown said the quality of the school was not the problem.

The trial court ruled that the schools were equal and refused to order desegregation. Nonetheless, the Topeka Board of Education voted to desegregate its schools voluntarily. But the Kansas law giving local communities the authority to separate school children by race remained on the books. Because it was the first of the five cases to reach the Supreme Court docket, its title represented all of them.

Despite Brown's role as the namesake case, Briggs was actually the main event in part because it featured two American legal titans. Challenging segregation was Thurgood Marshall, then one of the country's leading Black lawyers and mastermind of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund's strategy in all five cases. Opposing Marshall and defending segregation was John W. Davis, a former Democratic candidate for president and a former U.S. solicitor general. He was perhaps the most famous lawyer in the nation.

Harry Briggs and other Black South Carolina parents brought suit against the segregated school system in Clarendon County. Conditions for Black students in Clarendon were harsh. Some schools had no heating or restrooms, classrooms were often stuffed with more than 60 pupils, and the school board refused to provide buses. It argued that Black residents didn't pay enough in taxes to warrant buses, and it would be an unfair burden on white taxpayers to subsidize them. Black students might walk as far as 16 miles roundtrip daily, and some even had to row a paddle boat across a flooded road to reach their school.

The trial court found Clarendon County's Black schools were indeed inferior and ordered the state to improve facilities, but it refused to order desegregation. A higher court upheld that decision, saying segregation was a legislative problem, not a judicial one.

In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the move towards desegregating schools began with a student boycott led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns. She was a student at the all-Black Moton High School. It was overcrowded and dilapidated, with tar-paper buildings so open to the elements that students and teachers inside classrooms had to wear coats in the winter and use umbrellas when it rained.

On April 23, 1951, Barbara Johns tricked the school's principal into leaving campus, forged a memo from him that allowed a student-only assembly, and then led a strike demanding better conditions. When school officials refused to make changes, the students worked with the NAACP to file a lawsuit.

A district court found that the Black schools were indeed being treated unequally regarding their buildings, curricula, and access to transportation. It ordered an equalization program. However, the district court upheld the 1896 ruling Plessy v Ferguson, which established "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" by stating that segregation was beneficial for both whites and Blacks.

GEBHART v. BELTON (Wilmington, Delaware): This case involved Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, which was both in terrible condition and the only college-prep high school for Black students in the entire state. The Delaware Chancery Court sided with the Black plaintiffs, ordering the immediate desegregation of the state's public schools and striking down enforcement of the state's segregation laws. The judge criticized the "separate but equal" doctrine and predicted it would be overturned. Yet he acknowledged that, as a state judge, he was powerless to achieve that outcome. Instead, he ordered Delaware schools to integrate until substantially equal facilities could be established. A higher court affirmed his decision.

BOLLING v. SHARPE (The District of Columbia): This case, originating in the nation's capital, differed from the other four and was ultimately decided in a separate opinion. The issue was that, although D.C.'s schools were also segregated, the District was not a state. It still isn't. The Fourteenth Amendment specifically says that states cannot deny equal protection of the laws, but that language doesn't cover the District. So, the NAACP argued that D.C.'s segregated schools violated the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The lower court threw out the case, but the Supreme Court granted immediate review, and it became part of Brown v. Board.