When the Supreme Court delivered its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling 70 years ago on May 17, the goal was to produce better academic outcomes for black children. It’s been clear for decades that racially mixed classrooms aren’t essential to meeting that objective, yet policymakers continue to insist that black pupils must be seated next to white pupils to learn.
The Brown decision effectively overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible and became the legal basis for racial segregation for more than 50 years. The Brown ruling, to its credit, aimed to end that era. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court that state-imposed racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional because sorting children by race denied black students “equal education opportunities” and thus deprived them of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
How a court reaches a decision can be as important as the decision itself, and the problem we’re still grappling with seven decades later is the reasoning the justices used in Brown. Instead of declaring that Plessy was an incorrect reading of the Constitution, Warren invoked “modern authority,” or social-science research not available when Plessy was decided, to argue that segregated schools were inherently unequal in academic outcomes. In other words, the prior decision was wrong owing to new developments.