Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955)
The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases
that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. While the facts of
each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public
schools. Once again, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund handled these cases.
Although it acknowledged some of the plaintiffs’/plaintiffs claims, a three-judge panel at the U.S. District Court
that heard the cases ruled in favor of the school boards. The plaintiffs then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When the cases came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court consolidated all five cases under the name of
Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall personally argued the case before the Court. Although he raised a variety of
legal issues on appeal, the most common one was that separate school systems for blacks and whites were
inherently unequal, and thus violate the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. Furthermore, relying on sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientist Kenneth Clark,
and other data, he also argued that segregated school systems had a tendency to make black children feel inferior to
white children, and thus such a system should not be legally permissible.
Meeting to decide the case, the Justices of the Supreme Court realized that they were deeply divided over
the issues raised. While most wanted to reverse Plessy and declare segregation in public schools to be
unconstitutional, they had various reasons for doing so. Unable to come to a solution by June 1953 (the end of the
Court's 1952-1953 term), the Court decided to rehear the case in December 1953. During the intervening months,
however, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died and was replaced by Gov. Earl Warren of California. After the case was
reheard in 1953, Chief Justice Warren was able to do something that his predecessor had not—i.e. bring all of the
Justices to agree to support a unanimous decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On May
14, 1954, he delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that "We conclude that in the field of public education the
doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . ."
The Murder of Emmett Till
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, when he
reportedly flirted with a white cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till, beat him and
shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them. Till's murder and
open casket funeral galvanized the emerging Civil Rights Movement.
On August 19, 1955—the day before Till left with his uncle and cousin for Mississippi—Mamie Till gave her
son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the initials "L.T." The next day she drove her son to the 63rd Street
station in Chicago. They kissed goodbye, and Till boarded a southbound train headed for Mississippi.
Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi—on August 24, 1955—Emmett Till and a group of teenagers
entered Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy refreshments after a long day picking cotton in the hot afternoon
sun. What exactly transpired inside the grocery store that afternoon will never be known. Till purchased bubble gum,
and some of the kids with him would later report that he whistled at, flirted with, or touched the hand of the store's
white female clerk—and wife of the owner—Carolyn Bryant.
Four days later, at approximately 2:30 a.m. on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half
brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to
the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved
his mutilated body into the water. Moses Wright reported Till's disappearance to the local authorities, and three days
later, his corpse was pulled out of the river. Till's face was mutilated beyond recognition, and Wright only managed to
positively identify him by the ring on his finger, engraved with his father's initials—"L.T."
In the weeks that passed between Till's burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W.
Milam, two black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, published graphic images of Till's corpse. By
the time the trial commenced—on September 19, 1955—Emmett Till's murder had become a source of outrage and
indignation throughout the country. Because blacks and women were barred from serving jury duty, Bryant and
Milam were tried before an all-white, all-male jury.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the defendants' guilt and widespread pleas for justice from outside
Mississippi, on September 23, the panel of white male jurors acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. Their
deliberations lasted a mere 67 minutes.
Coming only one year after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education
mandated the end of racial segregation in public schools, Emmett Till's death provided an important catalyst for the
American Civil Rights Movement. One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on
an Alabama city bus, sparking the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nine years later, Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, outlawing many forms of racial discrimination and segregation. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act,
outlawing discriminatory voting practices, was passed.
Rosa Parks
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American woman who worked as a seamstress,
boarded this Montgomery City bus to go home from work. On this bus on that day, Rosa Parks initiated a new era in
the American quest for freedom and equality.
She sat near the middle of the bus, just behind the 10 seats reserved for whites. Soon all of the seats in the
bus were filled. When a white man entered the bus, the driver (following the standard practice of segregation)
insisted that all four blacks sitting just behind the white section give up their seats so that the man could sit there.
Mrs. Parks, who was an active member of the local NAACP, quietly refused to give up her seat.
Her action was spontaneous and not pre-meditated, although her previous civil rights involvement and strong
sense of justice were obvious influences. "When I made that decision," she said later, “I knew that I had the strength
of my ancestors with me.
She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation, known as “Jim Crow laws.” Mrs. Parks
appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation.
Under Jim Crow customs and laws, it was relatively easy to separate the races in every area of life except
transportation. Bus and train companies couldn’t afford separate cars and so blacks and whites had to occupy the
same space. Thus, transportation was one the most volatile arenas for race relations in the South. Mrs. Parks
remembers going to elementary school in Pine Level, Alabama, where buses took white kids to the new school but
black kids had to walk to their school. “I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said. “But to me, that was a way of life;
we had no choice but to accept what was the custom.”
In the South, city buses were lightning rods for civil rights activists. It took someone with the courage and
character of Rosa Parks to strike with lightning. And it required the commitment of the entire African American
community to fan the flames ignited by that lightning into the fires of the civil rights revolution.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery,
Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded
as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the
boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery
bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks’
court hearing and lasted 381 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus
system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68), emerged as a
prominent national leader of the American civil rights movement in the wake of the action.