Court Cases

Jim Crow Supreme Court Cases: Segregation

Close

The Slaughter House Cases--The Butcher’s Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Co., 83 U.S. 36 [Segregation]
1873, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Samuel F. Miller
Attorney for the Plaintiff: M. H. Carpenter, J. S. Black
Attorney for the Defendant: T. J. Durant
This case provided the Court with the first opportunity to interpret the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Butchers in New Orleans contested Louisiana’s 1869 law requiring them to conduct all their slaughtering on the premises of one specific company. The plaintiffs argued that this law violated section one of the Fourteenth Amendment. That section stated that no state law could abridge the privileges of citizens of the U.S.; deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process; nor deny to any person equal protection of the laws. They argued that the new amendment forbade state laws that abridged the rights of citizens of the U. S., among which was the right to labor freely in an honest business. The Supreme Court rejected the butchers’ claim in a five to four opinion, and did so in a way that narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection to be only to those cases involving the freedom of black Americans not the protection of the basic rights of whites. The Court distinguished between “state citizenship” and “federal citizenship,” and that state actions could not be struck down. Critics have argued that this decision severely undermined the ability of the government to protect the rights of the freedmen, although the case had nothing to do with black Louisianans as such.

Hall v. DeCuir, 95 U.S. 485 [Segregation]
1878, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Morrison R. Waite
Attorney for the Plaintiff: R.H. Marr
Attorney for the Defendant: E.K. Washington
This case was first appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the master and owner of a steamboat that transported freight and passengers between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. A Louisiana Supreme Court awarded damages to Josephine DeCuir, an African-American woman denied access to a cabin set aside for white passengers during her voyage from New Orleans to Hermitage, Louisiana. The Court held that the Louisiana law on which the damages were based did not apply because the steamboat was a business involved in interstate commerce, which could only be regulated by the U. S. Congress. States could not require carriers engaged in interstate commerce to provide integrated facilities even for trips that took place only within state borders. The Court’s opinion is said to have clearly indicated its interest in preserving existing racial customs and to have provided a rationale that was eventually used to support the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Strauder v. The State of West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 [Segregation]
1880, Wheeling, West Virginia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice William Strong
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Charles Devens, George O. Davenport
Attorney for the Defendant: Robert White, Attorney-General of West Virginia, James W. Green
In this first case of racial protection under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the Court held unconstitutional a state law prohibiting non-white males from sitting on a jury. The matter involved the decision of a Wheeling, West Virginia, jury’s guilty verdict of Taylor Strauder, a black carpenter accused of murdering his wife. Strauder petitioned to have his case moved to a federal court on the grounds that he could not receive a fair trail under West Virginia law, which limited jury service to whites. The Court held that West Virginia’s law excluding blacks was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment and that removing the case to federal courts was a proper way of enforcing rights under the provisions of that Amendment. This decision did not really prevent blacks from being excluded from jury service. To circumvent their service, states put into office officials who would not choose blacks for jury panels although state law allowed them to do this. See Virginia v. Rives (1980).

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 [Segregation]
1883, Washington, Kansas
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Joseph P. Bradley
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Solicitor General United States; William M. Randolph
Attorney for the Defendant: W.Y.C. Humes
The 1883 Supreme Court decision in the Civil Rights Cases held that neither the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nor the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from discrimination by other individuals. More specifically, the Court ruled unconstitutional those provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state curtailment of individual rights. Only the states, moreover, could act to prevent individuals from racial discrimination by other individuals. The lone dissenter on the Court, Justice John Marshal Harlan (Associate Justice 1877-1911), argued that the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed freedom of individuals from all the incidents and “badges of slavery.” The Court’s majority decision essentially required the federal government to withdraw from all civil rights enforcement--a withdrawal that lasted until the late 1940s. The five cases comprising the Civil Rights Cases involved instances where African Americans had been refused admission to hotels or theaters and access to the “Ladies” car on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad.

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 [Segregation]
1883, Washington, Tennessee
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Joseph P. Bradley
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Solicitor General United States; William M. Randolph
Attorney for the Defendant: W.Y.C. Humes
The 1883 Supreme Court decision in the Civil Rights Cases held that neither the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nor the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from discrimination by other individuals. More specifically, the Court ruled unconstitutional those provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state curtailment of individual rights. Only the states, moreover, could act to prevent individuals from racial discrimination by other individuals. The lone dissenter on the Court, Justice John Marshal Harlan (Associate Justice 1877-1911), argued that the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed freedom of individuals from all the incidents and “badges of slavery.” The Court’s majority decision essentially required the federal government to withdraw from all civil rights enforcement--a withdrawal that lasted until the late 1940s. The five cases comprising the Civil Rights Cases involved instances where African Americans had been refused admission to hotels or theaters and access to the “Ladies” car on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad.

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 [Segregation]
1883, Washington, New York
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Joseph P. Bradley
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Solicitor General United States; William M. Randolph
Attorney for the Defendant: W.Y.C. Humes
The 1883 Supreme Court decision in the Civil Rights Cases held that neither the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nor the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from discrimination by other individuals. More specifically, the Court ruled unconstitutional those provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state curtailment of individual rights. Only the states, moreover, could act to prevent individuals from racial discrimination by other individuals. The lone dissenter on the Court, Justice John Marshal Harlan (Associate Justice 1877-1911), argued that the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed freedom of individuals from all the incidents and “badges of slavery.” The Court’s majority decision essentially required the federal government to withdraw from all civil rights enforcement--a withdrawal that lasted until the late 1940s. The five cases comprising the Civil Rights Cases involved instances where African Americans had been refused admission to hotels or theaters and access to the “Ladies” car on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad.

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 [Segregation]
1883, Washington, Missouri
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Joseph P. Bradley
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Solicitor General United States; William M. Randolph
Attorney for the Defendant: W.Y.C. Humes
The 1883 Supreme Court decision in the Civil Rights Cases held that neither the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nor the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from discrimination by other individuals. More specifically, the Court ruled unconstitutional those provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state curtailment of individual rights. Only the states, moreover, could act to prevent individuals from racial discrimination by other individuals. The lone dissenter on the Court, Justice John Marshal Harlan (Associate Justice 1877-1911), argued that the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed freedom of individuals from all the incidents and “badges of slavery.” The Court’s majority decision essentially required the federal government to withdraw from all civil rights enforcement--a withdrawal that lasted until the late 1940s. The five cases comprising the Civil Rights Cases involved instances where African Americans had been refused admission to hotels or theaters and access to the “Ladies” car on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 [Segregation]
1896, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Henry Billings Brown
Attorney for the Plaintiff: S. F. Phillips, A. W. Tourgee
Attorney for the Defendant: Alex. Porter Morse
In 1890 the state of Louisiana passed a law requiring railroads to provide “separate but equal” cars for African Americans. Homer Plessy, a light-skinned, Creole man identified as 1/8 black, tested the constitutionality of this law by buying a first class ticket on a Louisiana rail line and then sitting in the first class or “white” car. Plessy was arrested for violating the law. He immediately challenged the 1890 law in federal court, charging that it violated his Thirteenth Amendment rights and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. Hearing his appeal, the Supreme Court reasoned that while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, it could not protect African Americans from state laws that treated them unequally. The language of the Court determined that the Louisiana law was constitutional in its establishment of “separate but equal” cars for African Americans. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Justice John Marshall Harlan, a southern Unionist and one-time slave owner, issued the lone dissent, arguing that the law should be “color blind.” “In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case. . . . It seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race--a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race.”

Cumming v. Board of Education of Richmond County, 175 U.S. 528 [Segregation]
1899, Richmond County, Georgia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice John Marshall Harlan
Attorney for the Plaintiff: George F. Edmunds
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Ganahl, Frank H. Miller
This was the first case to apply the separate-but-equal doctrine to education. Richmond County, Georgia maintained only a white high school, claiming that it could not afford to operate both a black and white school. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the county had little choice but to provide only one school in view of its finances because the alternative would be no school at all for anyone. No black students would benefit by such an action. Speaking for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson, made it clear that separation would be the ruling order of the day and would be allowed over the imposition of the equality principal in such cases.

Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 [Segregation]
1908, Madison County, Kentucky
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice David J. Brewer
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Guy Ward Mallon, John G. Carlisle
Attorney for the Defendant: N. B. Hayes, James Breathitt, Thomas B. McGregor, Charles H. Morris
The Supreme Court upheld a Kentucky law passed in 1904 making it illegal to educate white and black students in the same institution. The small private Berea College, which had been integrated for over fifty years, was forced to segregate by the new state law, which was aimed solely at the college, since there were no other integrated schools in the state. The question before the Court was whether a state legislature could force a private college or school to segregate. In the hearing before the state Supreme Court, Kentucky presented a blatantly racist argument, contending that “if the progress, advancement and civilization of the twentieth century is to go forward, then it must be left not only to the unadulterated blood of the Anglo-Saxon-Caucasian race, but to the highest types and geniuses of that race.” The Court’s ruling permitted states to ban voluntary as well as obligatory contacts between the races. It signaled approval for state and local legislatures to separate the races without heeding the Court’s call for equal facilities as proclaimed in the Plessy case.

Guinn and Beal v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 [Segregation]
1915, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Edward Douglass White
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Joseph W. Bailey, C. B. Stuart, A. C. Cruce, W. A. Ledbetter, Norman Haskell
Attorney for the Defendant: John H. Burford and John Embry (U. S.); Moorfi Story (NAACP)
Among the NAACP’s first legal successes was this 1915 Supreme Court decision where the Court held that the grandfather clause amendment to the Oklahoma state constitution violated voting rights defined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Oklahoma, like several other states, had promulgated a law that predicated voter eligibility on inheritance. This provision exempted, or “grandfathered,” from its literacy test all people “who, on January 1, 1866 or who at that time resided in some foreign nation and the lineal descendants. The law specifically targeted black citizens whose ancestors, being slaves, could not vote prior to the Civil War. Thus only white people were exempted from having to pass the state’s literacy test to exercise the vote. . In Guinn, the Court in a unanimous decision dismissed the grandfather clause as unconstitutional but allowed the literacy test to stand as a legitimate exercise of state power. In practical effect, the decision did not matter much. All the other state grandfather statutes passed in the 1890s had lapsed by 1910, and most states were able to allow illiterate whites to vote by using the understanding provisions at the time of registration.

Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 [Segregation]
1917, Louisville, Kentucky
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice William R. Day
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Clayton B. Blakey, Moorfield Storey
Attorney for the Defendant: Pendleton Beckley, Stuart Chevalier
A white real estate agent, Charles H. Buchanan, and a black buyer, William Warley, joined together to challenge a Louisville municipal ordinance that required residential segregation by race. The law prohibited blacks and whites from living on blocks where members of another race occupied the majority of the houses. Buchanan sued Warley for breach of contract when he was unable to pay for the house because of the racial zoning law. In this rare instance, the Court unanimously struck down the municipal statute because it “destroyed the right of the individual to acquire, enjoy and dispose of his property,” a right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision established a significant precedent against residential segregation, although racially restrictive housing covenants soon replaced segregation statutes in most cities of the nation.

Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 [Segregation]
1926, Washington, District of Columbia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Edward T. Sanford
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Louis Marshall, Moorfield Storey, James A. Cobb, William H. Lewis, James P. Schick, Arthus B. Spingarn, and Herbert K Stockton
Attorney for the Defendant: James S. Easby-Smith, David A. Pine, Francis W. Hill
John J. Buckley sued his neighbor, Irene Hand Corrigan of Washington D.C., in order to prevent her from selling residential property to an African-American woman. Buckley asserted that a restrictive covenant entered into by Corrigan prevented her from selling her property to a member of the “Negro race.” The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia agreed that Buckley had the right to enforce the covenant, and the U. S. Supreme Court in a unanimous ruling decided that it had no jurisdiction in the case. The Court’s ruling noted that those sections of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments referring to equal protection under the laws, applied only to governmental actions not to private contracts. Although acknowledging that restrictive housing covenants were discriminatory, they did not violate the Constitution because no governmental actions occurred. This decision recognized the constitutional right of African Americans to acquire, own, and occupy property, but such right, in the Court’s opinion, does not carry with it the constitutional power to compel the sale and conveyance to anyone of any particular private property. The Court’s stand pushed open the door for racial segregation in housing. That door would stand open until the Court held in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) that housing covenants were not enforceable by the courts because such intervention would be government action prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Harmon v. Tyler, 273 U.S. 668 [Segregation]
1927, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice William Howard Taft
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Loys Charbonnet, Frank B. Smith
Attorney for the Defendant: Walter Winn Wright, John D. Nix, Jr., Francis P. Burns, J. Zach Spearing
Benjamin Harmon, an African American, sought a building permit for a white residential neighborhood. A New Orleans municipal code forbade the issue of a building permit for a residence to be lived in by blacks in white neighborhoods or to whites for residency in black neighborhoods. When Harmon was denied the permit, he sued the city in federal court. Harmon won a favorable judgment from the Court based upon the 1917 Supreme Court decision, Buchanan v. Warley, where a similar ordinance in Louisville, KY, had been struck down on the basis that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process” provisions. The Court held that such ordinances denied both blacks and whites the right to acquire property. The decision did little to prevent discrimination in housing because state courts upheld restrictive deeds and housing covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks.

Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 [Segregation]
1927, Jackson, Mississippi
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice William Howard Taft
Attorney for the Plaintiff: James N. Flowers
Attorney for the Defendant: Rush H. Knox, E. C. Sharp
In this Bolivar County, Mississippi case, a Chinese-American student, Martha Lum, challenged her expulsion from Rosedale Elementary School solely because of her ethnic heritage. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that state governments enjoyed the “right and power” to regulate methods of providing for education at public expense. By these provisions, the state could force Chinese-Americans to attend “colored” schools. Although Lum’s legal counsel argued that Martha Lum was not “colored,” nor of mixed race, the Court nevertheless allowed that her nonwhite status was sufficient under state law to require her attendance at the “colored” school: “The Legislature is not compelled to provide separate schools for each of the colored races, and unless and until it does provide such schools, and provide for segregation of the other races, such races are entitled to have the benefit of the colored public schools.” The Court also approvingly cited lower court cases that applied the separate-but-equal doctrine to public education.

Powell, et al v. State of Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 [Segregation]
1932, Scottsboro, Alabama
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice George Sutherland
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Walter H. Pollak
Attorney for the Defendant: Thomas E. Knight, Jr.
Ozzie Powell, Hayward Patterson and Charley Weems were convicted, along with six other African-American men, of raping two women while aboard a freight car traveling through Alabama. The three appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court, which overturned the ruling of the lower court on the grounds that the state had provided inadequate legal counsel. All of the black male plaintiffs in this case were retried and again found guilty. The Supreme Court, in Norris v. Alabama, then overturned the conviction because blacks had been systematically excluded from the grand jury that had indicted them. Although state courts retried the so-called “Scottsboro Boys,” freeing four of them, the supposed “ring leader” of the group, Haywood Patterson, was sentenced to 75 years in prison. He escaped from jail in 1948 and fled to Michigan, where he was convicted of the stabbing death of another black man in 1950.

Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 [Segregation]
1932, El Paso, Texas
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Benjamin Cardozo
Attorney for the Plaintiff: James Marshall, Nathan R. Margold Arthur Spingarn, Fred C. Knollengerg, E. F. Cameron. N. H. Kugelmass, Charles Houston
Attorney for the Defendant: Ben R. Howell, Thornton Hard J. Alston Atki Carter W. Wesl J. M. Nabrit, Jr.
This was one of four Supreme Court cases brought by African Americans in Texas, supported by the NAACP, in challenge of the Democratic white primary. It contested the state law passed in 1923 that asserted that in “no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic Party election.” Dr. L. A. Nixon, a black El Paso physician, argued that the 1923 statute was an infringement of his Fourteenth Amendment rights as established in Nixon v. Herndon (1927). TheNixon v. Herndon ruling ruled unconstitutional, any state law creating a white primary election. In response, the Texas legislature delegated voter participation qualifications in party primary elections to the party’s executive committee. The Court supported Nixon in a close five-to-four vote. The Court argued that the party executive committee was, in fact, operating as a state agent and thus violated black rights. The Democratic Party in the state responded by barring blacks from participation in the party nominating conventions, and thus effectively continuing the white primary.

Norris v. State of Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 [Segregation]
1935, Scottsboro, Alabama
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Samuel S. Leibowitz, Walter H. Pollak, Osmond K. Frankel, Carl S. Stern
Attorney for the Defendant: Thomas E. Knight, Jr.
In 1931, Clarence Norris and eight other black youths were convicted of raping two white women and sentenced to death by a jury in Scottsboro, Alabama. Norris and the others appealed their convictions. This case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court along with Powell et al v. State of Alabama as part of the 1932 landmark “Scottsboro Boys” cases. The Court reversed the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court on the basis that due process and equal protection had been denied the youths because blacks were prohibited from serving on Alabama juries.

Murray v. Maryland, 169 Md. 478 [Segregation]
1937, Baltimore, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Case not appealed to the Supreme Court
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Thurgood Marshall
Attorney for the Defendant:
Charles Hamilton Houston, general legal counsel to the NAACP, developed a plan to build a string of precedents against Plessy during the height of the Great Depression. The first victory in this plan was argued in 1935 before the Baltimore City Court. It involved the University of Maryland School of Law, the same institution that had refused to admit NAACP legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, several years before. The case revolved around the situation of Donald Murray, a 1934 graduate of Amherst College, sporting a stellar college record. Had he been white, Murray would have been admitted with no fanfare. The university president based his rejection of Murray’s application on a state policy requiring black students to accept one of three options: attend Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state institutions. Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Murray, showing that neither of the in-state institutions offered a law school. He further proved the segregated in-state schools flagrantly unequal to the facilities offered at the University of Maryland and other out-of-state black schools. The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned Murray’s rejected application with this statement: “Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education now must furnish equality of treatment now”. Because the state did not appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, the Murray case did not establish any precedent on racial segregation outside Maryland.

Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 [Segregation]
1938, Columbia, Missouri
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Charles H. Houston, S. R. Redmond
Attorney for the Defendant: William S. Hogsett, Fred L. Williams
Lloyd L. Gaines, an African American, was denied admission to the University of Missouri’s all white law school because of his race. The state routinely offered payment of out-of-state tuition to African Americans seeking education as a remedy to the lack of provision of equal educational facilities within the state. In a victory for the plaintiffs, the Court held that Missouri provided no equal access to higher education in state for its black citizens as compared to its white citizens. This distinction was deemed state-practiced racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Missouri addressed the problem by constructing and staffing a black law school within the University of Missouri. Regarding Gaines, he never did enroll in the law school, disappearing from the scene never to be heard from again after the Court rendered its opinion. Although less a desegregation case than a continued interpretation of the separate-but-equal doctrine, it does mark the first of a series of cases leading up to Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Mills v. Board of Education of Anne Arundel County, 30 F. Supp. 245 [Segregation]
1939, Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Case appeared before the federal district court and was not appealed by the County to the Supreme Court.
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Thurgood Marshall, Leon A. Ransom, William H. Hastie
Attorney for the Defendant: Noah A. Hillman, William C. Walsh.
Walter Mills, a black schoolteacher in the Anne Arundel County, Maryland, sued the county board of education and its superintendent over schoolteacher salaries. A Maryland State statute set lower minimum salaries for schoolteachers employed at a “colored school,” than for schoolteachers employed at a “whites only” school. The statutory minimum annual salary was $1250 for white teachers and $765 for black teachers. The Court ordered a cessation of salary discrimination based on race, but refused to order the board not to pay black teachers less than white teachers.

Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 [Segregation]
1940, Chicago, Illinois
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Harlan Fiske Stone
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Earl B. Dickerson, Truman K. Gibson, Jr., C. Francis Stradford, Loring B. Morre, Irvin C. Mollison
Attorney for the Defendant: McKenzie Shannon, Angus Roy Shannon, William C. Graves
First heard in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, this case involved African-American real estate agent, Carl A. Hansberry, and other African Americans who had purchased residential property in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, an exclusive neighborhood restricted to whites. Hansberry, the father of Loraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun, resisted vandalism and threats of physical violence. White landowners in the area had relied on a restrictive covenant, including Anna Lee, joined in an agreement not to sell property to “any person of the colored race.” The Illinois Supreme Court upheld Lee’s complaint breach of the contract had violated her due process rights. U.S. Supreme Court, reversed the decision because it determined that the required 85 percent of the residents in the neighborhood had not signed the agreement to exclude blacks. The decision opened 30 blocks of Southside Chicago to African-American families. The case did not, however, rule that restrictive covenants were unlawful.

Mitchell v. U.S., 313 U.S. 80 [Segregation]
1941, Chicago, Illinois
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Richard E. Westbrooks, Arthur W. Mitchell
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Stanley Payne, Wallace T. Hughes, Frank O. Lowden, Francis B. Biddle, Warner W. Gardner, Frank Coleman
Arthur W. Mitchell, an African-American resident of Chicago and member of the U. S. House of Representatives, was removed from his first-class car to the “colored” car. He had boarded the train in Chicago bound for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Upon reaching Arkansas, the conductor ordered him to move to the Jim Crow car. When the Interstate Commerce Commission set aside his complaint against the Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, Mitchell brought suit in the federal courts arguing that his removal from the first-class car, for which he had purchased a ticket, to the “colored” car violated his constitutional rights. The Court ruled, “that separate coach laws of the several states do not apply to interstate commerce.” The case had little immediate consequence, however, because most southern states simply ignored the ruling. Segregated transportation in interstate travel lasted into the 1960s.

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 666 [Segregation]
1944, Houston, Texas
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Stanley Reed
Attorney for the Plaintiff: William j. Durham, Thurgood Marshall, William H. Hastie
Attorney for the Defendant: George W. Barcus, Gerald Mann
Houston dentist, Lonnie E. Smith, was denied a ballot in the 1940 Harris County Democratic Party primary by election judge S. E. Allwright. In an earlier court decision, Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the Supreme Court had ruled that Democratic Party primaries were private affairs and not subject to state regulation. In 1941, the Court had switched course, however, ruling in United States v. Classic that party primaries constituted state action because the state allowed political parties the power to select candidates to hold elective office. Using this as a precedent the Court ruled that African Americans had as much right to participate in the primary elections of political parties as in general elections and that any rules eliminating their participation violated their constitutional rights. This landmark case argued successfully by the NAACP eliminated a major obstacle to black participation in southern elections.

Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 [Segregation]
1946, Richmond, Virginia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Stanley Reed
Attorney for the Plaintiff: William H. Hastie, Thurgood Marshall
Attorney for the Defendant: Abram Staples
Irene Morgan, an African American, boarded in Glouster County, Virginia, a Grayhound bus on route from Richmond to Baltimore, Maryland. When the bus driver ordered her to move to the back of the bus in order to allow white passengers to be seated, she refused and was arrested. The bus driver had acted according to a 1930 state law that required the segregation of seating rows on buses. On appeal, the U. S. Supreme Court by a seven-- one vote, held the state law unconstitutional as it applied to interstate (those traveling between states) passengers. States could require segregation within the state (intrastate) but not for interstate passengers. Unfortunately, segregation in both intrastate and interstate travel held firm, especially in the Deep South, for the next twenty years as few carriers modified their practices.

Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U.S. 24 [Segregation]
1948, Washington, District of Columbia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Charles H. Houston, Phineas Indritz
Attorney for the Defendant: Henry Gilligan, James A. Cooks, Philip B. Perlman
This was a companion case to Shelley v. Kraemer and McGhee v. Sipes (1948) involving the constitutionality of racially restrictive housing contracts or covenants. Such covenants were widely used in American cities to prevent the integration of white neighborhoods. Suits filed by white respondents in the District Court for Washington D.C. asked it to uphold the covenants and to require reversal of the home sales and eviction of the black residents. The District Court found for the white respondents, as did the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, with one justice dissenting. The U.S. Supreme Court did not address the due process question but instead noted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed the right of all citizens equally “to inherit, purchase, sell, hold and convey” real property. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief with the Court supporting Hurd and citing the recently released President’s Commission on the Status of Civil Rights report, “To Secure These Rights.”

Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 [Segregation]
1948, St. Louis, Missouri
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: George L. Vaughn, Herman Willer, Thurgood Marshall
Attorney for the Defendant: Gerald L. Seegers
This was the first of four cases in 1948 involving restrictive covenants (known collectively as the Restrictive Covenant Cases) in which the Court ruled racially restrictive property deeds or contracts to be unenforceable by state courts. (The other cases were McGee v. Sipes, Hurd v. Hodge, and Urciolo v. Hodge) These restrictions were used by real estate developers and neighborhood associations to segregate African Americans, as well as others by race, national origin, and religion from white neighborhoods. In St. Louis, where the Shelley case originated, such racial contracts set aside nearly five square miles of housing from black ownership. When the African-American Shelley family purchased a house in the restricted neighborhood, a white family, the Kraemers, sought an injunction to block occupancy. The Missouri Court allowed for the injunction, triggering an appeal coordinated by the NAACP, using arguments that drew heavily upon sociological data and theory. The Court’s unanimous opinion, which largely ignored the massive sociological data presented by the NAACP, found racially restrictive covenants permissible if voluntarily maintained but not enforceable by state action, which violated the Fourteenth Amendment protection of a citizen’s right “to acquire, enjoy, own, and dispose of property.” Although a major victory, Shelley failed to stop private housing discrimination principally because lower courts refused to intervene and neither the Federal Housing Administration nor the Public Housing Administration complied with much vigor or enthusiasm. Nor did the Restrictive Covenant Cases influence later court rulings to any great extent, principally because the enactment of state and federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s, established statutory answers to issues that might otherwise have related to Shelley v. Kraemer.

Bob-Lo Excursion Co. v. People of the State of Michigan, 333 U.S. 28 [Segregation]
1948, Detroit, Michigan
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Wiley Rutledge
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Wilson W. Mills
Attorney for the Defendant: Edmund E. Shepherd
In this case, a Canadian company that owned most of the property on Bois Blanc (“Bob-Lo”) Island in Ontario prevented an African-American high-school student, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, from participating in a school outing to the island’s amusement park. She was not allowed to travel on the steamship ferry operated by the Bob-Lo Company because of her race. All “negroes and disorderly persons” were forbidden access to the island by company policy. The Recorder’s Court for Detroit along with the Michigan Supreme Court found Bob-Lo Excursion Company in violation of Michigan’s Civil Rights Act, fining the company $25. The company appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the Court to hold the state’s civil rights act unconstitutional because it infringed upon the power of Congress to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. The attorney’s for Bob-Lo used the precedent of Morgan v. Virginia (1946), wherein the Court had overthrown a Virginia segregation law on the grounds that the law ran counter to the right of the U. S. Congress to regulate interstate travel. The Court upheld the Michigan civil rights law, however, by looking at the issue as a matter of local commerce rather than foreign commerce, because the only access to the island was from Detroit, Michigan, where most of its customers lived. In affirming the ruling of the lower courts, the Supreme Court signaled its willingness to protect the civil rights of blacks, thus preparing the way for Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 [Segregation]
1950, Houston, Texas
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: W. J. Durham, Thurgood Marshall
Attorney for the Defendant: Price Daniel, Joe R. Greenhill
Hemon Marion Sweatt, an African-American mail carrier in Houston, applied to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 and was rejected because of his race. His suit against Theophilis Shickel Painter, and other members of the University’s Board of Regents, charged the University with violating the equal protection clause the Fourteenth Amendment and of failing to provide African Americans with access to equal educational facilities. Coordinated by the NAACP and its chief legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, the case proved to be a landmark struggle. The State of Texas attempted to address Sweatt’s plea by building a separate law school exclusively for “Negro” students, as required in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). The U.S. Supreme Court nevertheless held that the educational opportunities offered white and black law students by the state of Texas were not substantially equal, and that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required that Sweatt be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. Chief Justice Vinson ruled that the African-American law school was in no objective way equal to the law school for whites. The Court further noted, that even if it were, it would still lack those difficult to evaluate criteria that made for a law school of distinction, such as faculty reputation, alumni prestige, established traditions and history, and general respect in the legal community. This landmark decision made clear that statutory segregation would no longer be allowed under any circumstances.

McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 339 U.S. 637 [Segregation]
1950, Norman, Oklahoma
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Amos T. Hall, Robert L. Carter
Attorney for the Defendant: Fred Hansen
After successfully suing for admission to the University of Oklahoma, G.W. McLaurin, a seventy-year-old African American, was conditionally admitted to pursue a doctorate degree in education upon the order of a federal district court. Because Oklahoma law required that graduate instruction must be “upon a segregated basis,” McLaurin was subject to segregation policies that demanded he sit in a row of chairs specified for colored students, study at a designated table in the library, and be assigned to a special table in cafeteria. In an unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Vinson, the Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment precludes differences in treatment by the state based upon race. It also demanded that McLaurin receive “the same treatment at the hands of the state as students of other races” while attending a state supported school. The basic issue here involved the extent to which race may be used as an acceptable classification of persons under the law. But the case was decided on very narrow terms and did not result in a full-scale review of the separate-but-equal doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson. This was a companion case to Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which Heman Sweatt was seeking admission to the University of Texas’s all-white law school.

Henderson v. United States Interstate Commerce Commission and Southern Railway Co., 339 U. S. 816 [Segregation]
1950, Baltimore, Maryland
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson
Attorney for the Plaintiff: B. V. Lawson, Josiah F. Henry, Jr.
Attorney for the Defendant: Daniel w. Knowlton, Allen Chrenshaw, Bernard J. Flynn, Edward Dumbald, William McFarlane, Charles Clark, A. J. Dixon
Elmer W. Henderson, a black man, filed a complaint the against the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) after not being served in the dining car of the Southern Railway while he was traveling from Washington D. C., to Atlanta, Georgia. White passengers, moreover, were allowed to occupy seats in the black section of the dining car, which was separated from the white section by a curtain. The lower courts held that separate seating satisfied the separate-but-equal dictum of Plessy. Henderson brought suit after traveling “First Class” on the railway from Washington D.C. to Atlanta, Georgia. Although the Court refused to address the question of the Constitutionality of Plessy, it did hold that Henderson had been denied equal access in violation of the Interstate Commerce Act, and that use of curtains and partitions underlined “the artificiality of a difference in treatment.” After finding that the plaintiff had been discriminated against by railway's failure to furnish him with service equal to that furnished white passengers, the Court dismissed the complaint on the finding that the situation had been corrected by the amendment of an ICC regulation.

Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249 [Segregation]
1953, Los Angeles, California
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Sherman Minton
Attorney for the Plaintiff: J. Wallace McKnight
Attorney for the Defendant: Loren Miller
In this racially restrictive covenant case, the Supreme Court expanded upon Shelley by disallowing damage awards when racial covenants were violated. Barrows had been awarded damages when she sued Jackson for violation of a restrictive covenant that barred the sale of Jackson’s property in Los Angeles to a “non-Caucasian.” The Court upheld a decision by a California District Court of Appeals that determined the awarding of damages a state action that discriminated against African Americans.

Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia 103 F. Supp. 337 [Segregation]
1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood Robinson III, Charles Scott, Robert Scott
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Lindsey Almond, Jr., John W. Davis, Harold R. Fatzer, Robert McC. Figg, Jr., T. Justin Moore, Paul E. Wilson
This case originated before a federal appeals court and was added to a group of four other cases that went before the U. S. Supreme court as one of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education cases, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. Dorothy E. Davis and other black parents brought action against the county school board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, charging that teaching white and African-American children in separate schools was unconstitutional, asking that all inequalities between white and “colored” schools be corrected--with special reference to the Robert R. Moton high school. The district court held that constitutional and statutory provisions requiring the teaching of African-American and white children in separate schools were valid under the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson. It did rule, however, that all inequities in buildings, facilities, curricula, and buses would be corrected by court order. The plaintiff, represented by a team of NAACP lawyers, appealed the case to the U. S. Supreme Court, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.

Gebhart v. Belton, 91 A. 2d 137 [Segregation]
1954, New Castle County, Delaware
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood Robinson III, Charles Scott, Robert Scott
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Lindsey Almond, Jr., John W. Davis, Harold R. Fatzer, Robert McC. Figg, Jr., T. Justin Moore, Paul E. Wilson
This case originated before a federal appeals court and was added to a group of four other cases that went before the U. S. Supreme court as one of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education cases, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. Two cases were filed in Delaware’s Chancery Court by African-American citizens seeking the admittance of the plaintiffs to public schools maintained for white pupils only. The first case, brought by Ethel Louise Belton and other black parents was joined to the plea of Shirley Barbara Bulah to be admitted to an elementary school maintained for white pupils. The suits were consolidated and a lower chancery court decreed that plaintiffs be admitted immediately to schools for white students. The defendants appealed, however, and the state supreme court held that school facilities provided blacks were substantially unequal to those provided for white students, and that plaintiffs' personal and present rights to equal protection of the law entitled them to immediate relief from what the court held as unlawful discrimination. The case then was appealed by the state school board to the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled for the black defendants, thereby overturning Plessy v. Ferguson.

Briggs et al, v. Elliott, et al, 103 F. Supp. 776 [Segregation]
1954, Clarendon County, South Carolina
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood Robinson III, Charles Scott, Robert Scott
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Lindsey Almond, Jr., John W. Davis, Harold R. Fatzer, Robert McC. Figg, Jr., T. Justin Moore, Paul E. Wilson
This case originated before a federal appeals court in 1951 and was later added to a group of four other cases that went before the U. S. Supreme court as one of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education cases, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. Harry Briggs, a black parent, sued with other black parents R. W. Elliott, the school board chairman of Clarendon County, South Carolina, and others. The parents were represented by a team of NAACP lawyers, who claimed that the county schools discriminated against black children by providing educational facilities far inferior to those provided for whites. The lawyers argued that this was unconstitutional and detrimental to black children. The three judge District Court of the Eastern District of South Carolina held that that defendants had in good faith proceeded as rapidly as possible to comply with a decree directing defendants were trying in good faith to provide equal facilities in the form of a pending bond for educational funds. It denied the claim that segregation itself was unconstitutional as did the state’s attorney general, who stood on the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld separate-but-equal facilities.

Brown et al v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 [Segregation]
1954, Topeka, Kansas
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Charles Bledsoe, Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, Spottswood Robinson III, Charles Scott, Robert Scott
Attorney for the Defendant: J. Lindsey Almond, Jr., John W. Davis, Harold R. Fatzer, Robert Mc. Figg, Jr., T. Justin Moore, Paul E. Wilson, H. Albert Young
This landmark case reversed the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed for segregated facilities for blacks and whites as long as they were theoretically equal. According to Plessy, separation based on race in transportation, and later, in education and all other public facilities, was lawful. After Plessy, educational facilities provided for blacks in most southern states were always in separate schools and buildings but never equal. Salaries for black teachers, supplies for black schools, and transportation for black students were much inferior to those provided for whites. In many cases, such as high schools for blacks, no public facilities existed at all.

Beginning in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged segregation in the federal courts by trying to prove that existing state facilities set aside for blacks were not equal to those for whites. Lawyers for the organization, especially Charles H. Houston and Thurgood Marshall, argued that equal education was a constitutional right of black Americans and essential to their legal equality and economic welfare. In the aftermath of World War II, the NAACP won several significant Court victories that opened state-supported graduate and law schools to black citizens. With these victories in hand, NAACP lawyers pressed on to attack the Plessy doctrine in elementary-level public schools. They initiated court cases simultaneously in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D. C. When the cases reached the Supreme Court in December of 1952, they were grouped under the Kansas case and thereafter were referred to as Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The Court put the cases under Oliver Brown’s suit in Kansas, “so that the whole question would not smack of a purely southern one.” They also took the five cases from different parts of the nation in order to avoid the argument that this was “Yankee justice” aimed at the southern way of life.

In each of the five cases, local African-American parents worked with the local chapter of the NAACP to attempt to enroll their children in neighborhood schools. When they were told that they had to enroll their children in black schools often in other neighborhoods, the parents sued the local boards of education. When state courts ruled in favor of the school boards, the parents appealed to the Supreme Court. In the Kansas case, thirteen parents had joined together, and Oliver Brown, a local minister, was the first name listed of the thirteen.

In presenting their case before the Court, the NAACP lawyers made two interrelated points: First, they argued that the great physical and funding disparities between white and black schools provided overwhelming evidence that black children were denied equal educational opportunities. Secondly, the lawyers demonstrated the psychosocial damage done to black school children as a result of the Jim Crow system. In making this point, the lawyers drew upon the work of many influential social science scholars, especially the social psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. They used a doll test to show the personality dysfunction among black children as a result of Jim Crow. When asked to choose between a white doll and a black doll, the children almost always took the white one. They argued that this simple test, along with others, showed the damage done to the black psyche as the Jim Crow system of segregation and racial bias reinforced notions of black inferiority and seriously damaged self-esteem among black children. Although the use of such evidence set off a firestorm of controversy, the Court was clearly impressed by its value.

The victories won by the NAACP in earlier graduate and law school cases impacted relatively few people, but victory in the Brown case raised the fundamental question of segregation in a way that would affect almost every southern family. The case also fundamentally challenged the bedrock assumptions of white supremacy that had governed social relations between the races since the Civil War. Few cases in American history had such potential for altering the American way of life.

As fate would have it, Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, became Chief Justice of a severely divided Supreme Court in 1953. His commitment and personal powers of persuasion enabled him to unite the Court in a historical ruling that completely reversed Plessy. Warren, in speaking for a unanimous Court, held that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘Separate but equal’ has no place.” He further stated that the black children in the suits under review had been deprived, “by reason of the segregation claimed,” of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Separate facilities based on race were therefore “inherently unequal.”

The Court did not expect the states to immediately desegregate their public schools, instructing them, in a later ruling in 1955, to “proceed with all deliberate speed” in implementing its order. As a result, the nation experienced a decade of delay, massive resistance, and violent confrontations, especially in the South. This movement of popular protest and agitation in the 1950s and 1960s to achieve immediate desegregation of the nation’s schools and then all public facilities is known as the Civil Rights Movement. While it would be a mistake to think that the Civil Rights Movement began with Brown, it is correct to say that the Court’s decision put the stamp of law upon the long and ongoing struggle for equality by African Americans. It was this legal stamp of approval that enabled the advocates of civil rights to demand and eventually obtain the assistance of the federal government in their ongoing struggle for racial justice. Indeed, Brown set in motion the nation’s most significant social transformation since the Civil War.

Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 Bolling v. Sharpe 347 U.S. 497 [Segregation]
1954, Washington, District of Columbia
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: George E. C. Hayes, James M. Nabrit
Attorney for the Defendant: Milton D. Korman
This case was linked to a group of four other cases that went before the U. S. Supreme court as one of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education cases, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. This case differed from the other cases subsumed under Brown, which argued that school segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Blacks residing in Washington D. C., could not use the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying citizens equl protection of the laws but not the federal government. In Bolling, the Court ruled that discrimination can be “so unjustifiable as to be violative of due process” and that segregation in the District of Columbia was such a case. This ruling used the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process to extend the Court’s ruling regarding states to the federal government. It’s opinion clearly said as much: ”In view of our decision that the Constitution prohibits it’s the states from maintaining racially segregated public schools, it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government.” Although Bolling was linked by the Court to the other cases heard under the nomenclature Brown v. Board of Education, it was not argued by an NAACP attorney.

Muir v. Louisville, Park Theatrical Association, 347 U. S. 971 [Segregation]
1954, Louisville, Kentucky
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice Earl Warren
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Robert L. Carter, Benjamin F. Shobe
Attorney for the Defendant: Donald Q. Taylor
This case grew out of the attempt of James W. Muir, a black resident of Louisville, Kentucky, to purchase a ticket to a production in a city-owned amphitheater. The lower courts ruled that since the theater had been leased to a private theatrical association, the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply. In this unanimous decision, one of several following upon Brown, the Court extended to all public facilities the principle that segregation in public education violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as stated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling.