50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

This year, 2004, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. This landmark decision declared unconstitutional state statutes that required the segregation of public schools by race.

Standing at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, with the 16th Street Baptist Church Choir of Birmingham, Alabama, President George W. Bush on May 17 recalled the Brown decision, which declared unconstitutional the legal segregation of public schools. (White House photo by Eric Draper)

It thus extended federal power to education, an area traditionally controlled by states and localities. Brown also signaled a new determination to interpret more broadly the Constitution’s promise of equality before the law and began an era of active federal intervention to defend and guarantee the civil rights of all Americans.

The United States Constitution (annotated text; historical essay), adopted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, established a decentralized "federalist" system where all powers not specifically assigned to the new central government at Washington were reserved for the states and the people. Since the enumerated federal powers did not encompass education, the public schools became primarily a state and local responsibility, with those governments controlling public school funding and curricula. This tradition contributed to a close identification between schools and their surrounding neighborhoods.

The practice of slavery was another matter left to state law. Abolished in Northern states by the early 19th century, this "peculiar institution," as the Founding Fathers called it, continued in the South, where a plantation-based economy prevailed. After the Civil War of 1861–65, the Constitution was amended to forbid slavery (Thirteenth Amendment, ratified 1865) and to strengthen legal protection for the newly freed slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868) forbade states, among other restrictions, from "deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." When many Southern states subsequently moved to impose segregation—limiting each race to its own "separate but equal" public facilities and schools—the Fourteenth Amendment posed a potential obstacle. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1897), the Supreme Court ruled instead that "Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation [of the races]… do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other." Segregation, in other words, did not deprive African-Americans of equal protection.

The Brown decision reversed Plessy in 1954. It held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," invalidated as contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment state laws mandating school segregation, and began an era of federal efforts to ensure equal educational opportunity for all Americans. Complete text