Felix frankfurter brown vs board of education

  • What are the three types of courts

    • Biographies researched and written by NPS Volunteer Eleanor Jones.

    Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter

    Felix Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962. He was the sixth foreign-born justice, having spent the first twelve years of his life in Vienna, Austria before immigrating to New York in 1894. He was also a non-practicing Jew, albeit an active member of the Zionist movement. Although he spent much of his early career as a legal professor at his alma matter Harvard Law School, Frankfurter built up considerable influence and had an important hand in national politics. For example, he attended the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference as the representative of the American Zionists, he publicly defended those accused of being communists during Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s red scare, he supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and President Franklin D. Roosevelt went with a number of Frankfurter’s political nominee recommendations.

    President Roosevelt appointed Frankfurter to the Supreme Court in 1939, filling in the vacancy left by his friend Benjamin Cardozo. On the court, Justice Frankfurter was a bit of a loner and struggled to persuade his colleagues to his side at times. But, otherwise, he was a brilliant problem-solver. He was also known to support judicial restraint, and he strongly believed that rulings should be based on precedent and empirical evidence—not a judge’s personal feelings.


    Associate Justice Hugo Black

    Hugo Black served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1971. From an early age, he proved to be quite studious, choosing to spend much of his free time at the courthouse in his rural hometown in Clay County, Alabama. By the age of twenty-three, Black was a well-established private practice attorney in Birmingham. In 1914, he was elected the county solicitor—or public prosecutor—of Jefferson County. He bri
  • How did the naacp fight segregation

    • June 8, 1953

    By the end of the Court’s term, it becomes clear that the justices are divided over a decision. To break the deadlock, Justice Felix Frankfurter persuades the justices that they should ask both sides to prepare responses to a series of questions and to present their answers during the 1953 session. The questions focus on the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and the protection of citizenship rights as they relate to the abolition of segregated public schools.

    Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1956

    (Courtesy of Supreme Court of the United States)


    Original copies of the questions sent out by the Supreme Court

    (Lent by National Archives, Washington, D.C.)


    June 9, 1953

    NAACP director Walter White and Thurgood Marshall send out an emergency telegram to potential contributors that they are out of money to continue the fight. “United States Supreme Court today deferred judgment on five historic cases challenging racial segregation in elementary and high schools...Highest Court now requests preparation of answers within three months to many questions requiring legal argument on historic constitutional factors, sociological data and authoritative opinion...$15,000 needed immediately to forestall possibility these youngsters must wait decades before equal opportunity established.”

    June to October 1953

    The NAACP Legal Defense Fund organizes a massive nationwide research project of historians and legal scholars to answer the Court’s questions. Marshall chooses John A. Davis, a professor of political science at Lincoln University, to lead the task force. The NAACP enlists more than 200 scholars, including John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, William Robert Ming Jr., Alfred Kelly, and Horace Mann Bond.

    With Marshall’s direction and encouragement, the academics and the legal team draft an argument that the Fourteenth Amendment was unquestionably intended to prohibit all forms of state-imposed

  • Brown v board of education dissenting opinion

    • Brown v. Board of Education

    1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision

    1954 United States Supreme Court case

    Brown v. Board of Education

    Supreme Court of the United States

    Full case nameOliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al.
    Citations347 U.S.483 (more)

    74 S. Ct. 686; 98 L. Ed. 873; 1954 U.S. LEXIS 2094; 53 Ohio Op. 326; 38 A.L.R.2d 1180

    DecisionOpinion
    PriorJudgment for defendants, 98 F. Supp.797 (D. Kan. 1951); probable jurisdiction noted, 344 U.S.1 (1952).
    SubsequentJudgment on relief, 349 U.S.294 (1955) (Brown II); on remand, 139 F. Supp.468 (D. Kan. 1955); motion to intervene granted, 84 F.R.D. 383 (D. Kan. 1979); judgment for defendants, 671 F. Supp.1290 (D. Kan. 1987); reversed, 892 F.2d851 (10th Cir. 1989); vacated, 503 U.S.978 (1992) (Brown III); judgment reinstated, 978 F.2d585 (10th Cir. 1992); judgment for defendants, 56 F. Supp. 2d1212 (D. Kan. 1999)
    Segregation of students in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities are inherently unequal. District Court of Kansas reversed.
    Chief Justice
    Earl Warren
    Associate Justices
    Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed
    Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas
    Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton
    Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton
    MajorityWarren, joined by a unanimous court
    U.S. Const. amend. XIV

    This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings

    Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (in part)
    Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899)
    Berea College v. Kentucky (1908)

    Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially o

    On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Court ruled unanimously, declaring that they violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It thus overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which had been the law of the land since 1896, when Plessy v. Ferguson was decided. The Brown ruling—the culmination of a decades-long effort by the N.A.A.C.P.—has today acquired an aura of inevitability. But it didn’t seem inevitable at the time. And the fact that it was unanimous was little short of miraculous.

    When the school-segregation cases first came before the Court, in 1952, the justices, all Roosevelt and Truman appointees, were split over the constitutional questions. Only four of them (William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, Harold H. Burton, and Sherman Minton) were solidly in favor of overturning Plessy. Though there is no official record of the Court’s internal deliberations, scholars of the decision—notably Michael J. Klarman, a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia—have been able to reconstruct what went on through the justices’ conference notes and draft opinions. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a Truman appointee from Kentucky, argued that Plessy should be permitted to stand. “Congress has not declared there should be no segregation,” Vinson observed, and surely, he went on, the Court must be responsive to “the long-continued interpretation of Congress ever since the Amendments.” Justice Stanley F. Reed, also a Kentuckian, was even more skeptical of overturning segregation. “Negroes have not thoroughly assimilated,” he said; segregation was “for the benefit of both” blacks and whites, and “states should be left to work out the problem for themselves.” The notes for Justice Tom C. Clark, a Texan, indicate greater uncertainty, but he was clearly willing to entertain the position that “we had led the states