Question

In three to five sentences, explain what happened and what the outcome was in the case of brown v. board of education.

Answer 1

Writing for the court, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that the question of whether racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal, and thus beyond the scope of the separate but equal doctrine, could be answered only by considering “the effect of segregation itself on public education.” Citing the Supreme Court’s rulings in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), which recognized “intangible” inequalities between African American and all-white schools at the graduate level, Warren held that such inequalities also existed between the schools in the case before him, despite their equality with respect to “tangible” factors such as buildings and curricula. Specifically, he agreed with a finding of the Kansas district court that the policy of forcing African American children to attend separate schools solely because of their race created in them a feeling of inferiority that undermined their motivation to learn and deprived them of educational opportunities they would enjoy in racially integrated schools. This finding, he noted, was “amply supported” by contemporary psychological research. He concluded that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” In Bolling v. Sharpe he stated that racial segregation of schools violated due process of law, and, in a reference to the Brown ruling, noted that “it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution [which prohibits racially segregated schools] would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government.”