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This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
It was on these grounds that Black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the twentieth century. They relied on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed “separate” accommodations for Black and white Americans so long as they were “equal.” They would point out how much poorer the conditions in Black schools were than those in white schools, proving those conditions violated the “separate but equal” requirement in the decision condoning racial segregation.
Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans, Black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois to call for a movement to advance equal treatment.
In 1905, thirty-two Black leaders met in Fort Erie, Ontario, and launched the Niagara Movement to call for equal justice before the law and economic opportunities, including the right to an education, equal to those enjoyed by white men. A year later, journalist William English Walling joined the group. Walling was a well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky who had become a social reformer. Another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, also joined. And so did their friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics.
A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908, sparked a wider organization. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety.
Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot.
Walling and his wife visited Springfield days later. He was horrified to find white citizens complaining that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.”
Walling reached back to the principles on which the nation was founded. He warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln—who, after all, was associated with Springfield—and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North,” he wrote, “every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….”
In January 1909, leaders from the Niagara Movement met in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City to create a new civil rights organization. Sixty prominent reformers, Black and white, signed their call, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning.
It was no accident that supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, as well as Du Bois, for a vibrant Black newspaper culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was central to spreading knowledge of the atrocities committed against Black Americans, especially in the South, and of how to sue over them. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.
While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Wells, Du Bois, and their colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening and demanded that officials treat all people equally before the law.
That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It took advantage of the skills of women like Rosa Parks, who after 1944 was the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter. Parks investigated sexual violence against Black women and compiled statistics about those assaults, making a record of the reality of Black Americans’ lives.
It was NAACP leader Walter Francis White who in 1946 brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officer and his deputy in South Carolina after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.
Truman had been a racist southern Democrat, but after hearing about Woodard, he convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a…Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out…his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
The committee’s final report, written in the wake of a world war against the hierarchical societies of fascism, recommended new federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting—including for Indigenous Americans—and promote equal rights, accounting for the internment of Japanese Americans as well as discrimination against Black Americans. It called for “[t]he elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life” and for a public campaign to explain to white Americans why ending segregation was important.
The NAACP had highlighted that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, an all-white jury acquitted the police officers who blinded Woodward. Presiding judge Julius Waties Waring, the son of a Confederate veteran, was disgusted at the jury’s decision and at the crowd that cheered when it heard the verdict. He began to stew on how to challenge racial discrimination legally when white juries at the state level could simply decide to nullify the law.
In 1940, Black NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in New York City. Six years later, civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley joined him. He would go on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She would become the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. They were a powerhouse team.
In 1952, with the support of Judge Waring, Marshall and Motley and their collaborators took a new tack to oppose segregation in public schools. Rather than resting on the idea that poorly funded Black schools were not equal to white schools as Plessy required, they argued outright that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same argument the Supreme Court had rejected in Plessy. This formula would enable the federal government to restrain white juries at the state level.
Truman had desegregated the military but had not been able to move civil rights through Congress because of the segregationist southern Democrats. After he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the cause. He appointed former California governor Earl Warren, a Republican known as a consensus builder, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Warren took his seat in October 1953, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a group of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, was before the court.
The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
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Notes:
Myisha S. Eatmon, “Wielding an Unlikely Weapon: Black Americans, White Violence, and Damage Suits during the Early Days of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History, 111 (September 2024): 267–289.
Dylan Penningroth, “How Civil Rights Were Made—and Remade—by Black Communities in the Jim Crow South,” Time, at: https://time.com/6317203/civil-rights-jim-crow-south-credit-essay/
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep163/usrep163537/usrep163537.pdf
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to-secure-these-rights
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