The road to desegregated education in the United States was a long and difficult one, and stands as a testament to the remarkable power, tenacity, and moral clarity of great African American trailblazers who refused to settle for the inherent injustice of “separate but equal.”
Following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans fought to realize their rights as guaranteed by the so-called Reconstruction Amendments. These three constitutional amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—abolished slavery (except as a punishment for crime); established the principles of “birthright citizenship” and “equal justice under the law”; and ensured a citizen’s right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” As many states sought to re-establish “white supremacy” in the 1870s, African Americans were disenfranchised and stripped of their newly won civil rights. They often sought justice in the court system, sometimes taking their cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Issued on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case created the “separate but equal” doctrine, declaring that racial segregation was constitutional and did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This landmark decision provided the constitutional basis for legalizing racial segregation. In what became known as the Jim Crow era, a collection of state and local statutes quickly followed, the impact of which was painfully felt in every aspect of African American life, including by Black children in the classroom.
Plessy v. Ferguson allowed Black children to be segregated into overcrowded and unsafe school buildings that were often inaccessible by public transportation, forcing students to walk long distances year-round. Classrooms were poorly resourced, without enough desks for every child, and the few books students had were tattered hand-me-downs from white schools. Black teachers were paid only a fraction of the salary of their white counterparts.
African Americans across the country understood the profound impact of segregated and inferior educational practices on Black students. Led by the NAACP’s Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP began mounting a legal challenge to “separate but equal” in the 1940s. Known as the “man who killed Jim Crow,” Houston trained several attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, to serve as counsel for African Americans fighting many areas where segregation was practiced, including education, transportation, and housing.
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In 1951, the NAACP identified a promising educational case and plaintiff in Oliver Brown, whose daughter was refused enrollment at the elementary school closest to their home in Topeka, Kansas, and instead was forced to ride a bus to a segregated Black school further away.
The Browns joined together with other Black families in Topeka and filed a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. When a federal court ruled against the families on the basis of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Browns—now represented by NAACP chief counsel Marshall—appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
In the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case of 1954, Marshall, Houston, and other prominent Black attorneys argued that segregation was inherently unequal and unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. They also built their case around the groundbreaking work of a husband-and-wife team of psychologists, Drs. Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark.
The Clarks, who each received their bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University, were the first African Americans to obtain doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University. In 1946, they opened the Northside Center for Child Development, the first full-time child guidance center offering psychological and casework services to families in Harlem. There they also continued Mamie’s studies on self-identification in Black children, the subject of her master’s thesis, and began conducting experiments to examine the psychological effects of segregation on Black children.
In the Clarks’ now famous experiments, children were presented with two Black dolls and two white dolls and asked to identify which dolls looked like them and which were “good” or “bad.” The studies revealed that Black children preferred the white dolls, identifying them as “nice” while identifying the Black dolls as “bad.”
The findings of the Clarks’ studies played a major role in the NAACP’s arguments in Brown v. Board. The Clarks were called as expert witnesses and testified that segregation damaged the psychological development of African American children and caused them to internalize racism.
Swayed by the Clarks’ research and the arguments advanced by Marshall and the Browns’ other attorneys, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and ordered that school segregation should be dismantled “with all deliberate speed.”
As for the courageous men and women at the center of this case, Charles Hamilton Houston passed away before the Brown v. Board case was decided. His words, however, spurred on the efforts of the legal team: “We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might.” Later, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice.
Kenneth and Mamie Clark continued to make significant contributions to the field of psychology and to the social justice movement of their time. Their research would later influence the scholarship of the late Dr. Audrey Smedley, a trailblazing social anthropologist—and one of the Museum’s earliest Charter Members. Dr. Smedley’s pioneering book, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview, traces popularized concepts of race for more than 300 years to show that race is not a product of science, as the Plessy court believed, but in fact a social construct.
The long reach of the social construct identified by Dr. Smedley remains visible in the systemic issues that plague education to this day. While the Brown case established the legal requirement for desegregating schools, that goal remains out of reach in many communities. In 1968, about 77 percent of Black students and 55 percent of Latino students attended public schools that were more than half minority. In 2010, more than 40 years later, 74 percent of Black students and 80 percent of Latino students continue to attend public schools dominated by minority populations. The legal mandate of Brown v. Board may be clear but factors such as income inequality and discriminatory housing patterns continue to perpetuate not only de facto educational segregation, but continuing disparities in the quality of education offered to children.
