When was Brown v. Board of Education?
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision effectively overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision, which was partially influenced by Mendez v. Westminster, stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement,[2] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.[3] However, the decision's fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (349U.S.(1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
Oyama v. California
First, Chief Justice Vinson was fairly conservative in issues of race. As the famous story goes, Associate Justice Frankfurter remarked that Chief Justice Vinson’s death in 1953 (that is, in the middle of the "Brown v. Board of Education" case) was perhaps the only evidence of the existence of God he has ever witnessed. While there are of course no certainties in law, the general consensus remains that if Vinson had not been replaced by Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1953, the landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" case would have been decided differently. 