In June 1987, Philip Elman, a civil rights attorney who served as a staff member of the Attorney General`s Office during Harry Truman`s tenure, claimed that he and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter were primarily responsible for the Supreme Court`s decision, stating that the NAACP`s arguments did not contain solid evidence. [92] Elman has been criticized for offering a self-glorifying history of the case, omitting important facts and denigrating the work of civil rights lawyers who laid the groundwork for the decision for many decades. [93] However, Frankfurter was also known as one of the most vocal defenders of the philosophy of judicial deference, which based court decisions on applicable law rather than personal or political considerations. [94] [95] Officials in the United States today praise the verdict almost unanimously. In May 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of the decision, President George W. Bush spoke at the opening of Brown v. Board of Education, calling Brown “a decision that changed America for the better and forever.” [96] Most senators and representatives issued press releases welcoming the decision. Segregation is the practice of requiring separate housing, education, and other services for people of color. Segregation was repeatedly enacted in 18th and 19th century America, with some believing that blacks and whites could not coexist. As the . Read more Brown v.
Board of Education is considered a milestone in the history of American civil rights and is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. The case and efforts to undermine the court`s decision have raised public awareness of the racial inequalities faced by African Americans. The case has also rocked civil rights activists and intensified efforts to end institutionalized racism throughout American society. In anticipation of opposition to its decision, particularly in the southern states, the Supreme Court did not immediately attempt to issue instructions for the implementation of its decision. Instead, he called on attorneys general in all states with laws allowing segregation in their public schools to develop plans for further measures against desegregation. After further hearings before the Court of Justice on the issue of desegregation, the judges ruled on 31. In May 1955, he drew up a further plan of action; Desegregation should be done “as quickly as possible”. Although it would take many years for all segregated school systems to be abolished, Brown and Brown II (as the judicial plan for school desegregation was called) were responsible for setting the process in motion. Braun v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the court ruled that U.S.
state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even though segregated schools are otherwise of equal quality. The court`s decision partially overturned its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson said the term “separate but equal” is unconstitutional for U.S. public schools and educational institutions. [Note 1] It paved the way for integration and was a great victory for the civil rights movement[3] and a model for many future legal disputes. [4] The constitutionally sanctioned laws prohibited African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites – known as the “Jim Crow” laws – and established the doctrine of “separate but equal” that would apply for the next six decades. Topeka Brown`s records arrived in Kansas City on September 1, 1967, as part of Records Center accession 021-68A367. According to Tim Rives, an archival specialist at NARA-Central Plains, Brown (T-316) was “removed and taken to the archival repository, not as an actual custodial transfer, but rather for preservation to store it in archival quality.” The Brown files left NARA in the late 1970s and were returned nearly twenty years later as access to archives (i.e., permanently transferred from the courts to NARA) on September 27, 1994. On that day, court records became available to researchers; however, not all records were returned in full until the last documents were handed over to NARA on 29 August 2000. These documents contain a wealth of information about school segregation, desegregation and segregation in Topeka, which is a microcosm of what has happened nationally in the fifty years since the original Brown decision.