While giving weight to these public and
private considerations, the courts will
require that the defendants make a prompt
reasonable start toward full compliance
with our May 17, 1954, ruling. Once such
a start has been made, the courts may find
that additional time is necessary to carry
out the ruling in an effective manner. The
burden rests upon the defendants to establish
that such time is necessary in the public
interest and is consistent with good faith
compliance at the earliest practicable date.

Since the decisions rendered in the Brown cases affected the

parties directly involved and the classes of persons they represented in four States and the District of Columbia, the lower courts were to "take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion...as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.'

14

However, those States which were not directly affected by

the Brown decision, and where no legal action to desegregate schools had been initiated, had no obligation to act, even with

14. The phrase "all deliberate speed" apparently had great significance for Justice Felix Frankfurter, who wrote the opinion. It had been used by Sir Walter Scott, among others, and Oliver Wendell Holmes also employed it: "A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a state cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a businessman; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.'

deliberate speed. And they did not.

15

It is one of those ironies of history that when the formerly

all-white elementary schools of Topeka opened their doors to black children for the first time in September 1954, Linda Brown was

too old to enjoy the satisfaction of that four block walk to Sumner. Instead, she entered the seventh grade at a previously integrated junior high school. Yet 20 years later, as Linda Brown (now Linda Brown Smith) talks about the impact of the decision, she

comments:

Well, even though I didn't go to Sumner, at least
my younger sisters benefited. They entered deseg-
regated elementary schools that fall. In general,
the transition was so smooth that you really couldn't
believe it. There weren't any incidents.
It was
just as if black and white children had been going
to school together all the time.

As the principal plaintiff in what has been termed "the case of

the century," she summarizes the effect of Brown quite

succinctly: "I think the decision was the whole turning point for

black America.

From this single decision to open schools to

blacks, everything else has opened. So, after 100 years of bondage, this was the key to the beginning of freedom.'

་་

15. Even Topeka, Kansas, 20 years after Brown, apparently still remains a virtually segregated school system. In September 1973, in behalf of 10-year-old Evelyn Renee Johnson, Mrs. Marlene Miller, her maternal aunt, filed suit against the Topeka school board, basing her complaint on the precedent in Brown. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, also named in the action, has since ordered the school board to develop corrective remedies, and the case was pending in early 1974.

THE SHADOWS OF THE PAST

The decision in Brown v. Board of Edication was "one of
16

the great milestones in the history of the United States."

The effect of the decision was a "social upheaval the extent

and consequences of which cannot even now be measured with 17

certainty."

Yet, in

"We

If nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, the impact of Brown would be quite understandable. 1954, the "idea" in Brown was at least 178 years old, having been announced by the Declaration of Independence in 1776: hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Perhaps the interval between the Declaration of Independence and Brown and the response elicited by the Court's decision simply attest to the stubborn resistance of a society previously unable to resolve the root problem: race.

The Supreme Court itself had offered a contrary approach to this problem on several occasions during the interim. In 1857,

for example, the Court described black Americans, then slaves, as a class of persons who were "regarded as beings of an inferior

16. Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court's 1954 Decision (New York: Viking, 1964), P. 1.

17. Robert Carter, "The Supreme Court and Desegregation," The Warren Court: A Critical Analysis, eds. Richard Sayler, Barry B. Boyer, and Robert E. Gooding, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1969), P. 55.

18

order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior,

that they had no rights which the white man was bound to

18

respect...." In 1896, 31 years after the end of the Civil War, the Court still declared: "If one race be inferior to the other

socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them 19

upon the same plane."

Gunnar Myrdal later termed this conflict between the

professed ideals of the American people and the reality of our

behavior in race relations, often sanctioned by the judicial

20

system, an American dilemma." Brown initiated the most

vigorous legal assault on the dilemma in American history, thereby

insuring both social change and vigorous opposition.

It is not

yet clear whether the opposition has abated; the change has not. From many quarters the Brown decision was greeted as pronouncement second in importance only to President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation," and the extensive shock it caused in the South was attributed to "its simple recognition of the fact

18.

Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1857).

19. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 552 (1896).

20. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper,

21

that Negroes are citizens of the United States." School

segregation certainly represented a special symbol to white Southerners; and, 1 year before the Court's decision, Hodding Carter of Mississippi wrote that "a Supreme Court ruling against 22

segregation would be 'revolutionary' in character." Brown,

in fact, did evoke the anticipated reaction in the South, where the day of the Court's decision already had been labeled Black Monday.

The Southern Manifesto of 1956, signed by 101 Senators and Members of the House of Representatives, declared Brown "unwarranted," "a clear abuse of judicial power," and a

substitution of "personal political and social ideas for the law of the land." Governor Stanley of Virginia, but one spokesman among many, said that it would result in a "destruction of 23

our schools." James J. Kilpatrick, a leader in "massive resistance" and "interposition," whose views apparently have changed since then, described black Americans in terms similar to those used in Dred Scott and Plessy, concluding that white and black cannot come together, as equals, in any relationship

21. Muse, Ten Years of Prelude, pp. 1, 38.

22.

Cited in Anthony Lewis and The New York Times, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 5.

23. Ibid., p. 44.