Sold – “Brown vs Board of Education” – The Complete Opinion, Signed by Chief Justice Warren

From the Civil War until 1954, race relations in the U.S. had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were “equal,” segregation did not violate the Constitution. There developed a pervasive scheme of segregation laws in many states, all based on the fiction that separate facilities were equal. In 1951, as directed by the NAACP leadership, thirteen black parents attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school but were each refused enrollment and directed to the segregated schools. A class action suit was filed by the parents against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the U.S. District Court. The plaintiffs claimed that the policy of the school board was unconstitutional, despite Plessy v. Ferguson.

The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that Court determined to make a sweeping ruling on Constitutionality that would effect the nation rather than make a limited one that would be restricted to the particular facts of the case. With Chief Justice Earl Warren writing the opinion, on May 17, 1954, the Court rejected and overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, thus attacking the very root of the problem, and held that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and were thus unconstitutional. As Warren wrote for a unanimous Court, “We come then to the question presented: does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does…We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Typescript of the entire opinion, 9 pages, signed by Warren at the conclusion. The document comes from the collection assembled by Eugene Gerhart, a prominent attorney in upstate New York and the biographer of Justice Robert Jackson. It is just the second such signed Brown opinion we have seen in our decades in the field. Judging from the surviving invoice of a companion piece, this was likely obtained by Gerhart in 1970.

Not since the Dred Scott case pushed the country closer to Civil War a century previous has a Supreme Court decision had such impact. It not merely led to desegregation of schools, but paved the way for the civil rights movement, with the end of Jim Crow laws, widespread integration, and a different conception altogether of race relations.