who was the attorney in brown v. board of education of topeka kansas lawsuit

by Shany Ondricka 6 min read

Thurgood Marshall

What was the consequences of Brown vs Board of Education?

As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the U.S. Supreme Court level. Bolling v. Sharpe. U.S. District Court, Washington, D.C.

What is the summary of Brown vs Board of Education?

Jun 08, 2021 · As Attorney General of Kansas, Harold Fatzer argued the case for the appellees (Kansas) in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Mr. Fatzer served as Kansas Supreme Court Justice from February 1949 to March 1956. Jack Greenberg Jack Greenberg, who was born in 1924, argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Brown v.

What was the long term effect of Brown v Board of Education?

Defending the Topeka School Board was Lester Goodell, former prosecuting attorney for the county of which Topeka was the seat. Goodell certainly was not an ardent segregationist, and local attorney for the plaintiffs, John Scott, later questioned whether …

What are facts about Brown vs Board?

In response to requests from two Justices during the oral arguments of the implementation phase of Brown v. Board, Kansas Attorney General Harold Fatzer provided the Court with this map of the Topeka public school districts along with 1956 enrollment estimates by race. Although almost all of the schools shown were either overwhelmingly white or completely black, Fatzer argued that …

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Who was the lawyer in Brown v Board?

Thurgood MarshallBoard of Education Re-enactment. As a lawyer and judge, Thurgood Marshall strived to protect the rights of all citizens.

Who was the lawyer that represented the Brown family?

The U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M.

Who were lawyers in Brown vs Board of Education?

Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall led a life in the pursuit of equality, and was on a path destined to lead him to the U.S. Supreme Court. ... Robert Carter. Carter was part of the legal team that developed the NAACP's strategy for ending segregation.Harold R. Boulware. ... Spottswood Robinson III. ... Arthur Shores.

Who was the representative plaintiff in the Brown v. Board of Education case?

plaintiff Oliver BrownBoard of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka's white schools.

Who was the chief justice in Brown v. Board of Education?

Chief Justice Earl WarrenThe Supreme Court's opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case.Jun 3, 2021

Who won the case Brown vs Board of Education?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl WarrenOn May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.Nov 22, 2021

Who was the attorney for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education?

Jack Greenberg. Jack Greenberg , who was born in 1924, argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, and worked on the briefs in Belton v. Gebhart. Jack Greenberg served as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1961 to 1984.

Why was Brown v. Board of Education important?

This grouping of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware was significant because it represented school segregation as a national issue, not just a southern one. Each case was brought on the behalf of elementary school children, involving all-Black schools that were inferior to white schools.

What was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education?

Board of Education that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. The Five Cases Consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Briggs v.

Who was Linda Brown?

Linda Brown. Linda Brown, who was born in 1943, became a part of civil rights history as a third grader in the public schools of Topeka, KS. When Linda was denied admission into a white elementary school, Linda's father, Oliver Brown, challenged Kansas's school segregation laws in the Supreme Court.

Who was Robert Carter?

Robert L. Carter. Born in 1917, Robert Carter, who served as an attorney for the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott, was of particular significance to the Brown v. Board of Education case because of his role in the Briggs case.

Who was the plaintiff in the Belton v. Gebhart case?

Ethel Louise Belton#N#Ethel Belton and six other adults filed suit on behalf of eight Black children against Francis B. Gebhart and 12 others (both individuals and state education agencies) in the case Belton v. Gebhart. The plaintiffs sued the state for denying to the children admission to certain public schools because of color or ancestry. The Belton case was joined with another very similar Delaware case, Bulah v. Gebhart, and both would ultimately join four other NAACP cases in the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Belton was born in 1937 and died in 1981.

Who was Thurgood Marshall?

Born in 1908, Thurgood Marshall served as lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott. From 1930 to 1933, Marshall attended Howard University Law School and came under the immediate influence of the school’s new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall, who also served as lead counsel in the Brown v.

What is Brown v. Board of Education?

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is widely known as the Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools to be "inherently unequal.". The story behind the case, including that of the 1951 trial in a Kansas courtroom, is much less known. It begins sixty miles to the east of Topeka in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam, Kansas, ...

What was the Brown decision?

The Brown decision, more than any of the other cases, boxed the Supreme Court in. It left the Court little option but to either uphold the separate but equal education in Topeka, relying on the Plessy precedent, or to overrule Plessy and hold that segregated education was inherently unequal. In the packed Supreme Court hearing room, Brown was ...

When did Kansas segregate schools?

In 1876, Kansas required that all of its public schools be open to all students, regardless of their race. Just three years later, however, the legislature backed away from its enlightened approach to racial issues, and authorized school boards in cities of over 15,000 persons to establish separate black and white schools for elementary and junior high students. Topeka exercised its option to segregate its elementary schools, and the Topeka School Board's policy of segregation was upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court in 1903, seven years after the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the principle of "separate but equal" in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It would be more than four decades before another challenge to segregation in Topeka's elementary schools would be mounted.

Who was Esther Brown?

Esther Brown, crusader for equal educational opportunities in Kansas. The NAACP Takes Action. Topeka was not the only place in Kansas where segregated education existed in the elementary schools in late 1940s.

Who is Elisha Scott?

Faced with continued Board intransigence, Brown enlisted a black Topeka attorney, Elisha Scott, to file suit against the South Park District.

Who was Robert Carter?

Robert Carter joined Thurgood Marshall's Legal Defense Fund office after finishing his service as a lieutenant in World War II , where he had developed a reputation among white officers as "an uppity Negro" for his insistence upon equal treatment. As a member of a team of lawyers working to end segregation in the nations' schools, Carter advocated bringing social psychologists into the cases. Carter believed, and eventually the U. S. Supreme Court would prove him right, that demonstrating how segregation adversely affected the ability of black students to learn in the classroom might be the key to winning in the courts. Before heading west to Topeka to assume command of the Brown case, Carter turned to his junior LDF colleague, Jack Greenberg, and assigned him the task of locating expert witnesses willing to testify at the Brown trial.

Who said Mary Had a Little Lamb?

As Philip Elman, author of the federal government's brief in Brown would later observe, "Thurgood Marshall could have stood up there and recited 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and the result would have been exactly the same.". On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in Brown v.

What was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka?

483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.

Who were the judges in Brown v. Board of Education?

U.S. circuit judges (from left to right) Robert A. Katzmann, Damon J. Keith, and Sonia Sotomayor at a 2004 exhibit on the Fourteenth Amendment, Thurgood Marshall, and Brown v. Board of Education

Where did the Brown case originate?

The case originated in 1951 when the public school district in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black elementary school farther away.

Who wrote the Brown case?

Chief Justice Earl Warren, the author of the Court's unanimous opinion in Brown. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Brown family and the other plaintiffs. The decision consists of a single opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren , which all the justices joined.

What did the Southerners view Brown as?

Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe —a Black Monday —a day something like Pearl Harbor ." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly:

When did the Brown ruling happen in North Carolina?

In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D. E. Hudgins Jr., a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.

Who was the plaintiff in the Brown case?

(son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith —who now had her own children in Topeka schools—to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown. They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open enrollment" had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would shift their children to "preferred" schools that would create both predominantly African American and predominantly European American schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs' request finding the schools "unitary." In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on 2–1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District's request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit's mandate.

When did Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka come to the Supreme Court?

When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka .

What was the impact of Brown v Board?

Board didn’t achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States. In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, ...

When did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat on the bus?

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus.

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Overview

Reaction and aftermath

Although Americans generally cheered the Court's decision in Brown, most white Southerners decried it. Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe—a Black Monday—a day something like Pearl Harbor." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly. The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:

Background

For much of the sixty years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment("no State shall ... …

District court case

In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children.
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate elementary schools due to a 1879 Kansas law, which permitted …

Supreme Court arguments

The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington, D.C.).
All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only case of the five ori…

Decision

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Brown family and the other plaintiffs. The decision consists of a single opinion written by chief justice Earl Warren, which all the justices joined.
The Court's opinion began by noting that it had tried to determine whether the Fourteenth Amendmentwas meant to abolish segregation in public education…

Legal criticism and praise

William Rehnquist wrote a memo titled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued: "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Ples…

Brown II

In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as "Brown II" the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed," a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven".