Racial segregation was being challenged on many fronts when, in 1952, the Supreme Court heard five cases collectively known as Brown v. Board of Education. Just a few years earlier, in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers made headlines and shattered the color barrier by bringing on Jackie Robinson, who was previously in the Negro Leagues. A year later, President Harry Truman signed an executive order abolishing segregation in the military.
These pivotal events were taking place against the backdrop of the Cold War, when the U.S. was vying with the Soviet Union to extend its influence in developing nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia. “American racial segregation was a tremendous embarrassment to the United States,” says Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University. “It enabled the Soviets to say that [Americans] talk about freedom and we talk about democracy, while millions of our citizens are being treated in a discriminatory way, so what kind of democracy is this?”
It was in this context that the NAACP and its advocate, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, argued that the legal justification for segregation established by the high court in 1896 – “separate but equal” – violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Not only were facilities for black students not equal to those of white students, but the idea of separating one group of citizens from another was inherently discriminatory, Marshall argued.
When the justices couldn’t come to a decision, they agreed to rehear the case in 1953. In the meantime, a new chief justice, former California Gov. Earl Warren, took the bench. Warren is credited with marshaling his colleagues and achieving a rare unanimous decision, which he delivered on May 17, 1954: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The ruling, and what happened next, would ignite America’s civil rights movement.