Jim Crow and the Fight in the Courts

Since the late 1800s, Jim Crow laws had enforced legal racial segregation in schools, transportation, and public life across the South, backed by extralegal violence including lynching. The Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) upheld state-mandated segregation under a "separate but equal" doctrine; in a lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued instead that "our Constitution is color-blind" -- a losing argument in 1896 that would eventually be vindicated. The NAACP, founded in 1909, built a patient, decades-long legal strategy under Thurgood Marshall's Legal Defense Fund, winning smaller victories in graduate and law school segregation cases years before directly challenging segregation in public K-12 education.

That strategy culminated in Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954), a unanimous decision under Chief Justice Earl Warren declaring segregated public schools inherently unequal and explicitly overturning Plessy's doctrine in education. A follow-up ruling, Brown II (1955), ordered desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed" -- a deliberately vague phrase that in practice let many school districts delay for years. Many Southern states mounted "massive resistance," and some districts closed public schools entirely rather than integrate them; at Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students from entering, prompting Eisenhower to federalize the Guard and send the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court's order -- a direct federal-state confrontation over enforcing constitutional rights. The 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury despite clear evidence, drew national attention to Southern racial violence at the very same moment these legal battles were unfolding, a hard truth this course states plainly rather than softening.