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Black students could finally attend a quality high school that compared to the white high school. Some black parents were satisfied. But many were fueled by this win and had set their sights higher, on integration. Yet they couldn’t know the sacrifices it would require of their community for years to come.

IN 1952, THE PRINCE EDWARD case became part of something much bigger. The Supreme Court agreed to hear Davis with four similar cases being appealed to the court. The other cases from across the country—Delaware; Washington, DC; South Carolina; and Kansas—questioned the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools.

The five cases were combined under Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, to avoid the appearance of addressing a specifically Southern problem. The larger case was named for Oliver Brown, a railroad welder and assistant pastor whose seven-year-old daughter, Linda, attended a black school one mile from her house instead of the white school seven blocks away.

The Topeka chapter of the NAACP challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine governing public education, asking Topeka Public Schools to integrate. When that didn’t work, the NAACP in February 1951 filed suit in federal district court against the board of education of Topeka Public Schools on behalf of Brown and nineteen other plaintiffs. The district court ruled in favor of the school board and the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court.

The first of the cases, Briggs v. R. W. Elliott, was filed in 1950 by twenty black residents of Clarendon County, South Carolina, against school officials on behalf of their children. The parents were seeking school buildings, teacher salaries, and transportation equal to that provided white children, but the case was later amended to challenge segregation. For three years black parents had asked for buses for their children, some of whom walked five miles to school. One school lacked running water, and some schools had outhouses instead of toilets. The US District Court in June 1951 found that the black schools were inferior to white schools, and the lower court ordered the defendants to promptly give black students equal facilities. But the black children were denied admission to the white schools, the request for abolishing segregation in South Carolina’s schools shot down.

In Delaware, two cases, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, filed in 1951 and combined, involved two black schools with similar issues. The first was the overcrowded Howard High School in Wilmington, which black students traveled fifty minutes each way to attend. The state board of education would not permit them to enroll in the new white school in Claymont, where they lived. The second was a one-room elementary school in the rural community of Hockessin, where black students were not provided bus service. Sarah Bulah thought it was only fair that her daughter, Shirley Barbara, be able to ride a bus to school the way white children in her community could. The cases were filed in US District Court in Wilmington.

The state requested that the Delaware Court of Chancery hear the cases, where Judge Collins J. Seitz addressed the doctrine underlying racial segregation in the schools, something the other cases hadn’t done in such a direct way. Children were being denied equal protection of the law by being forced to attend inferior schools. “The cold, hard fact is the state in this situation discriminates against Negro children,” he wrote.

“I conclude from the testimony,” Judge Seitz wrote, “that in our Delaware society, a state-imposed segregation itself results in the Negro children, as a class, receiving educational opportunities which are substantially inferior to those available to white children otherwise similarly situated.”

He ruled that the “separate but equal” doctrine had been violated and that Shirley Barbara Bulah in Hockessin and Ethel Louise Belton and nine other plaintiffs in Claymont should be admitted to the white school in their communities—the first time a court had ordered a white public school to admit black children. The state supreme court upheld his ruling, which the Delaware Board of Education appealed.

The Bolling
et al.
v. C. Melvine Sharpe
et al.
(District of Columbia) case was filed on behalf of eleven black students, including Spottswood Thomas Bolling Jr., a twelve-year-old whose request to attend a modern white junior high school in southeast Washington was denied. Instead he had to attend a ragged black high school. His attorney, James Nabrit Jr., rejected the idea of seeking equal facilities and instead challenged the constitutionality of segregation per se. The case was filed in 1951 in US District Court, which in turn justified segregated schools in Washington, DC, by citing Plessy.

The Prince Edward County case, filed in 1951, was the only one spurred by a student strike. Hill argued that blacks want the ability to develop their talents, but that in the segregated school system, black children do not have that opportunity. The three-judge US District Court panel concurred in March 1952 that racial separation rested “neither upon prejudice nor caprice nor upon any other measureless foundation” but had become part of the values of the people. The court even suggested that segregation had given blacks great opportunities. The judges said that, in Prince Edward, “We have found no hurt or harm to either race.” The NAACP lawyers appealed the ruling.

Brown v. Board was the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Houston, Marshall, and the Richmond attorneys to end the exclusion of blacks from every level of education. Marsh, the first black mayor of Richmond and a long-serving state senator, always thought Brown should have been named for the Prince Edward case. “The revolution … took wings in Prince Edward County. The spirit of blacks in Prince Edward is the spirit that fired the civil rights movement to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson,” he told me. “It started right there.”

The case was first argued before the nation’s highest court over three days in December 1952, as three hundred people—about half of them black—packed into the hearing room and four hundred more lined the hallways. Robinson argued that Virginia’s segregation laws were “intended to limit the educational opportunities of the Negro,” citing evidence that for every dollar the government had spent on schools for white children, it had spent sixty-one cents for black children.

The deeply divided court had been expected to rule in June 1953. Instead, the court scheduled Brown to be reargued in the fall, inviting the attorney general of the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been sworn into office in January, to present a brief. The court put off a decision, in part, because the justices believed the “political upheaval” would cause an outbreak of violence.

Before the case could be heard again, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died of a heart attack at sixty-three. Eisenhower nominated as his replacement the popular three-term California governor Earl Warren, who had helped Eisenhower win the Republican presidential nomination by securing the California delegation’s votes. He had also called for anti-lynching and anti–poll tax legislation. Taking the bench in October 1953, Warren, sixty-two, would have more impact on civil rights during his sixteen-year tenure than any other judicial appointment in history. Eisenhower, uncomfortable with the outcome of Brown and with other high court decisions he considered liberal, would come to regret the appointment, terming it “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”

His Department of Justice opted not to argue against desegregation in the Brown case. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in November 1953 that supported overturning Plessy v. Ferguson but couched his stance, suggesting that desegregation would take as long as a decade to implement.

When the case was reargued in December 1953, spectators lined up outside the court before the sun came up to ensure they could get a seat for the one o’clock arguments, which would last three days. To keep schools segregated, Marshall told the court, was “to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings” and to attempt to keep blacks in a form of slavery.

“Now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for,” Marshall argued.

When the court met to discuss the case, Warren quickly informed his colleagues that he thought de jure school segregation—segregation imposed by law—was unconstitutional. For him, the issues were moral. He wanted to work toward a unanimous decision to discourage resistance in the South.

The justices spent months discussing the case, and in order to reach unanimity, Warren compromised, agreeing to a “bare-bones” decision that did not stipulate how the ruling should be implemented, giving the South time to adapt. The cases could be reargued later, Warren believed, and the court could consider then how the decision should be implemented.

On May 17, 1954—three years after the Moton walkout—the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Warren, delivering his first major opinion, wrote that separating children “solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” The detrimental impact, the court found, was more profound when the law sanctioned segregation.

The court’s decision directly addressed segregation—not inequality in school facilities—and found that even if schools were equal, black children’s separation from whites was “inherently unequal.” The court ruled that the separation constituted a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices also found that receiving a quality education is critical for all children and that the state is responsible for ensuring educational equality.

“In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education,” Warren wrote. “Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right that must be made available on equal terms.”

The verdict was reached, in part, by the attorneys’ use of social science rather than legal precedent. Kenneth B. Clark, a New York social psychologist and assistant professor, and his wife, Mamie, a psychologist, had developed a study that showed the harmful effects of segregation on black children. They used dolls placed in front of black children that differed only in skin color—two were pink and two were brown. They found that the majority of children preferred the white doll and referred to the black doll as “bad.” Kenneth Clark, who wrote a brief explaining the psychological harm to black children from living in what was essentially a caste system, suggested that segregation creates a feeling of inferiority and humiliation that leads to self-hatred and the rejection of their own race. He argued that segregation harmed white children, too, feeding distrust and hostility and producing a distorted social reality. He suggested that there was no reason for segregation to continue, arguing that most differences between racial groups are environmental and rejecting segregationists’ claim that there was a scientific need for separation.

By overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court put an end to more than fifty years of legal racial segregation and paved the way for school integration. When the verdict was handed down, Marshall was “so happy” that he felt “numb.” He ran from the court and bound into the NAACP offices, wearing “a grin as wide as Fifth Avenue.” He walked over to Roy Wilkins, the NAACP’s executive secretary, and kissed him. A long night of celebration followed, but a cautious Marshall warned his friends that “we ain’t begun to work yet.” The next day, he was quoted in the New York Times predicting that school segregation would be wiped out in five years. Hill, too, believed whites would accept the ruling and integrate the schools. He rejoiced that the long battle was over.

But in Prince Edward County, it was just beginning.

My Family’s Part

I’m at my desk at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, frantically wrapping up work on an article before I dash out of the newsroom, drive across town, and retrieve my daughters from day care.

The days are a blur. I am reporting a story about how black activists are disappointed that a recently preserved African burial ground near downtown Richmond is being used for dog walking and Frisbee tossing instead of quiet reflection. At the same time, I am working on a piece about the white owners of a million-dollar riverfront property who are worried that a rezoning decision could block their pristine view. This is the yin and the yang of Richmond, the black and the white, the haves and the have-nots.

Working for the paper a year and a half, I have seen how the legacy of the slave trade and segregation have made their marks on Richmond. A huge swath of the black population lives in crushing poverty, isolated from whites—and from opportunities for a better life. Too many black children grow up in this city’s concentrated public housing and some never leave. Driving the neighborhoods, I begin to grasp how segregated Richmond still is, how much inequality still exists. This city, and the whole South, projects an image of friendliness and hospitality yet is built on a rarely acknowledged history of racial oppression.

The transition to life here has been challenging at times. New acquaintances warn us against walking two blocks to the “ghetto” grocery store—ghetto, I surmise, because some shoppers are black and poor. Others joke about hearing gunshots across Broad Street, but I don’t get the joke. At social gatherings, Jason and the girls are often the only people of color. When I mention my project to a friend from high school, she denies the reason for the academy’s founding. My aggressive reporting style and my interest in covering race and poverty seem misplaced in a setting where Southern manners are valued and uncomfortable topics best avoided. I spend a lot of time thinking about whether this is the right place to raise our children.

And then, one April morning, my focus changes in an instant, and those concerns fade into the background. In a peach-colored waiting room in a suburban medical building, a doctor surprises me with a diagnosis of early stage breast cancer. The best kind of cancer to have, I’m told, but still cancer. I escape out a side door of the building to call Jason, sobbing into the phone as he quietly comforts me.