Pre-Brown Timeline: A Selected History

1849

The first recorded educational lawsuit filed on behalf of blacks occurred when Robert Morris, an African-American abolitionist, worked with Charles Sumner, a white attorney, to petition the Massachusetts State Supreme Court to stop the exclusion of black students in the city's school system. The city pointed out that African-American children had one segregated school. The case, Roberts v. City of Boston,¹ was decided against the plaintiff. But later, as a U.S. Senator, Sumner authored the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

1881-1949

Black parents in Kansas initiated 11 court challenges to the Jim Crow² education, which included these cases: The Board of Education of Ottawa v. Tinnon (1881),³ Knox v. The Board of Education of Independence (1891),⁴ Reynolds v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1903),⁵ Cartwright v. The Board of Education of Coffeyville (1906),⁶ Rowles v. The Board of Education of Wichita (1907),⁷ Williams v. The Board of Education of Parsons (1908),⁸ Woolridge v. The Board of Education of Galena (1916),⁹ Thurman- Watts v. The Board of Education of Coffeyville (1924),¹⁰ Wright v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1929),¹¹ Graham v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1941),¹² and Webb v. School District No. 90, South Park Johnson County (1949).¹³

1896

Homer A. Plessy's refusal to move from a "white" East Louisiana railroad car seat led to one of the most important decisions in American legal history. In Plessy v. Ferguson,¹⁴ the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that railroad cars could be segregated by race if the facilities were equal. The decision, which stated that such an "equal" practice of segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, gave constitutional sanction for Jim Crow for half a century. But the facilities — particularly schools — were almost always unequal.

1935

Donald Murray attended the University of Maryland Law School after the state's Court of Appeals ruled that out-of-state tuition scholarships for blacks (provided only to avoid their admission into white universities) as not equal (Pearson v. Murray).¹⁵

1938

In Gaines v. Canada,¹⁶ the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Missouri had to provide blacks with the right to use a law school.

1950

Charles Hamilton Houston, the chief designer for the NAACP's legal strategy of attacking Jim Crow education, died at the age of 54. His work would bear fruit in the work of his protégé, Thurgood Marshall. The NAACP's legal staff, led by Houston, would become the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund by the end of the century.

1952

The NAACP petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court with five cases of separate-but-equal schooling: Briggs v. Elliot,¹⁷ Brown v. Board of Education,¹⁸ Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County,¹⁹ Bolling v. Sharpe,²⁰ and Gebhart v. Belton.²¹ The Court would merge these cases into its Brown decision two years later.