Free The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History by David K. Fremon Page B

segregate their schools. If Linda Brown was kept from a nearby school, it was the local school board and not the state that was responsible.
    Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee Co., Kansas, et al. began hearings on June 25, 1951. A month later, the school board passed a resolution to end segregation “as soon as possible.” 5 The plaintiffs and their NAACP backers refused to accept this promise. They took the case to the United States Supreme Court.
    Four other cases also came before the court, two from Delaware and one each from Virginia and South Carolina. The Court decided to lump all these cases together with Brown as one lawsuit. Since it had agreed to take the Brown case first, the five cases became known as Brown v. Board of Education . A similar case dealt with segregation in Washington, D.C., schools. Because the District of Columbia was a federally run district and not a state, Bolling v. Sharpe would be decided separately from the other cases.
    Lawyers argued the cases before the Supreme Court in December 1952. There were ten one-hour presentations: five by the plaintiffs in the five state cases, and five by the defending school boards. Then all sides went home, hoping for quick decisions.
    Those decisions did not come quickly. Supreme Court members appeared to be divided on the verdict. If they acted immediately, they would have a split decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter suggested rehearing the cases in December 1953. His colleagues agreed.
    Fred Vinson, the chief justice, said that he did not wish to reverse the Plessy ruling. Southerners Tom Clark and Stanley Reed appeared ready to follow Vinson. So did Justices Harold Burton and Sherman Minton. Frankfurter and Robert Jackson were unpredictable. Only William Douglas and ex–Klan member Hugo Black appeared to favor desegregation.
    Chief Justice Vinson died suddenly in the summer of 1953. With his passing, the whole tone of the case changed.
The Warren Court and the Brown Decision
    After Vinson’s death, President Dwight Eisenhower had to nominate a new Supreme Court chief justice. He chose Earl Warren, who had been a popular California governor.
    Warren’s nomination worried several people. As a state official in California during World War II, Warren had favored the forced removal of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from the state. (During the war, many people were afraid that Japanese Americans were working for Japan, the United States’ enemy. In some places, Japanese Americans were forced to leave the country or were held in internment camps until the war was over.) People wondered whether Warren would ignore people’s rights similarly in Supreme Court cases. One of Warren’s early actions seemed to show that he no longer favored discrimination. When Warren arrived at the Supreme Court in 1953, the Court had separate washrooms for whites and blacks. Warren immediately desegregated the washrooms.
    Attorneys presented their cases again in Brown in late 1953. Warren realized that Brown v. Board of Education would be one of the most important decisions in American history. He wanted the vote to be unanimous.
    The 1950s, after the end of World War II, was a strange time in American politics. Now that the United States was facing off with its Cold War opponent, the Communist Soviet Union, appearances were important. For years, the Soviets and other governments around the world had used the racial tension and violence in the United States as part of their argument that the United States was inferior to other nations. It was especially important to many American politicians at the time of the Brown case for the United States to look as if it were making progress in improving racial relations.
    Gradually, Chief Justice Warren won over reluctant justices.
Little Rock
    On May 12, 1954, the Supreme Court gave its unanimous decision. It struck down the notion of separate but equal in the field of education. But making the decision was