Today, May 17, 2025, this Supreme Court decision turns 71 years old.
For some, that seems like ancient history. For others, it is their own story or the story of a parent or grandparent. In other words, not so long ago. To help us understand how recent this history is, remember that Linda Brown, the child whose name this case carries, only passed away in March 2018.
We’ve shared two videos below to help explain the case.
- The first is shorter and focused on the facts of the case.
- The second is longer and includes more of the history leading up to the Brown decision and some of what happened after it.
Before you dive into the videos, take a look at this map showing segregation laws across the country prior to Brown v. Board of Education1. And don’t forget to check out the extra notes after the videos.
Important Facts about this Case:
The decision wasn’t put into practice immediately. Desegregation wasn’t immediately required. In fact, Justice Warren ended his reading of the Brown decision “by announcing that the Court would hear new arguments during the October 1954 Term on how to implement the ruling. Not by accident, the Court did not even hear arguments in Brown II until April 1955 and would not hand down its decision until six weeks later, towards the very end of the term.”2
Southern leaders and media weren’t the only ones to criticize the decision. Northern legal academics and well-known newspaper columnists also criticized the decision.3 Experts will not be surprised to see some of these arguments used in our time by those who seek to privatize education and bring back segregation.
“Until Brown and then for many years after, particularly in Southern states, black children did not attend public school at the same rate as whites. The persistence of racially and economically exploitative sharecropping economies meant that black children were needed in the fields during the fall and spring, and that meant that school attendance, especially in rural communities in the most oppressive Southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, was limited to the winter months.”4
As with our last post, we are highlighting a case in which the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution‘s Equal Protection Clause played a major role. In fact, it was the cornerstone of this decision. The 14th Amendment is one that is front and center in many of the news stories we are seeing today. If you have access to Netflix and want to learn more about this amendment, check out Will Smith’s series Amend.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling laid the foundation for the 1975 federal law (now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) requiring access to a free appropriate public education for all children with disabilities. Before 1975, about one million American children with disabilities were receiving no education from the public school system.5
Unintended Consequences
As the second video above notes, many Black teachers and Black principals lost their jobs as Black students were integrated into white schools — white schools which did not want these professionals teaching white children. “Some 38,000 Black teachers were displaced in the South alone in the decade following the Brown decision, research has shown. In some cases, racist educators refused to hire Black teachers. In others, they were demoted for no good reason, or forced to sit for new licensing exams that, according to Leslie T. Fenwick, the author of “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” served a “racist agenda.”6
Footnotes
- Opinion | Project 2025 Provides a Blueprint for the Return of ‘Separate and Unequal’ Schools – Mississippi Free Press ↩︎
- Why Brown v. Board of Education Still Matters | ACS ↩︎
- Why Brown v. Board of Education Still Matters | ACS ↩︎
- Why Brown v. Board of Education Still Matters | ACS ↩︎
- Private: The Meaning of Brown for Children with Disabilities | ACS ↩︎
- Honoring the thousands of Black teachers lost their jobs after Brown – Chalkbeat ↩︎
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