1955 May 31

“All Deliberate Speed:” Implementing “Brown v. Board of Education”

 

The Supreme Court on this day, in what came to be called Brown II, ruled on the process for implementing school desegregation pursuant to Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954).

Rather than issue an implementation plan of its own, the Court remanded implementation to the federal District Courts, allowing them to take into account local conditions and administrative problems involved in desegregation.

The Court held that desegregation should proceed with “all deliberate speed.” In practice, it proved to be painfully slow. The first Mississippi public schools, for example, were not integrated until the fall of 1965.

Unfortunately, school integration in the south did not proceed with any speed, as local communities continued to resists efforts at integration. One tactic was the creation of a network of all-white private schools, which served to preserve the old form of racial segregation in a different form. In states outside the south, meanwhile, racial integration rose for several years, peaked in the late 1990s, and then declined. The movement of white families from cities into suburbs with separate school systems served to perpetuate racial segregation in city schools. Some experts calculated that by the late 1990s, the combined developments in the south and outside the south caused American public schools to be more racially segregated than ever before.

The Court: “The cases are remanded to the District Courts 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.” [Emphasis added]

Learn more: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001)

Watch historian John Hope Franklin discuss his research for Brown v. Board of Education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfro166MZvc

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

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