#brownvboard

Photo:This image of an integrated classroom in the previously all white Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., shows how the District’s Board of Education attempted to act quickly to carry out the Supreme Court decision to integrate schools in the area. Thomas J. O'Halloran. School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955, Library of Congress. 

#Onthisday in 1954, the U.S Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was declared unconstitutional. For more than a decade, Charles H. Houston, Dean of Howard University Law School, headed a team of lawyers that brought school desegregation cases in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. After Houston’s death,Thurgood Marshall argued a joint appeal of these cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. 

Part of their defense relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists during throughout their legal strategy. In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African American children. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued a unanimous decision that racial segregation is unconstitutional, violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Learn more about the history of school segregation from the Library of Congress: bit.ly/2rqwcie