The Origins of Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

The Origins of Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

by VNN Staff

12 January 2005

Do your White children attend school with violence-prone Blacks? The odds are that they do. If so, here is the reason why.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, meaning that soon afterward White and Black students would attend public schools side by side, with no administrative restrictions remaining on Black students.

How did the important Brown case come into being? Who launched it and steered it through the courts? Those are the questions that this essay addresses.

Specifics of the Brown case

- Title of the Brown court case: Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) et.al.

- Filed in federal district court in Kansas on Feb. 28, 1951, by Charles Bledsoe/NAACP of Topeka.

- The U.S. Supreme Court ruling was issued May 17, 1954.

- Number of plaintiffs effected by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling: 13 parents on behalf of 20 children. - Summary: A Black male, Oliver Brown, sued a Kansas school board on behalf of his daughter Linda, a third-grader, on the basis of racial discrimination in her schooling. Mr. Brown was aided chiefly by the Black organization NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF).[1] Other groups, including Jewish groups, aided Mr. Brown by filing amicus curiae -- "friend of the court" -- briefs.[2] Oliver Brown lost the first case. His lawyers then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, Brown's case was combined with other, similar civil-rights cases. Mr. Brown and the other plaintiffs won their appeal.

The critical Jewish involvement in the Brown case

So important were Jews to the Brown decision that it could be said that without Jews, Brown would not have happened. The Brown case was initiated in Kansas by Jewish activist Esther Swirk Brown (no relation to Oliver), who urged Oliver Brown to sue the Topeka school board. Swirk Brown also helped raise money for Mr. Brown's lawsuit.[3]

The legal pointman in Brown was also Jewish, NAACP/LDF lawyer Jack Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg wrote or edited at least two Brown briefs and organized Oliver Brown's legal battle through the courts.[4]

At the U.S. Supreme Court, Jewish justice Felix Frankfurter acted as the head Brown cheerleader. Frankfurter, working with two Jewish confidantes, Alexander Bickel and Philip Elman, eventually managed to tilt the Court's attitudes pro-Brown. So vigorous was Frankfurter's activism on behalf of Brown that he and his cohorts managed to get the Supreme Court to allow a re-argument of the case, a crucial factor in Brown becoming law.[5] Frankfurter is also the man who got the term "all deliberate speed" put into a later 1955 Brown compliance ruling by the court - the word "speed" apparently having a hastening aura to it that Frankfurter thought might be helpful to pro-Browners.

If the involvement of the Jews above were not enough to get the Brown case labeled by some as being "Jewish," there is more information available to validate such a label. Even though Jews made up only about two percent of the U.S. population in the early 1950s, they made up roughly half of the people who wrote/co-wrote/advised about/signed the briefs and amicus curiaes surrounding the Brown case. A list of those Jews (excluding Greenberg and Swirk Brown) includes: Jack B. Weinstein, Louis Pollack, John Ligtenberg, Isidor Chein, Phineas Indritz, Shad Polier, Will Maslow, Daniel Katz, Herman L. Weisman, David E. Feller, Arthur Goldberg, Otto Klineberg, Edwin J. Lukas, Sol Rabkin, Sarah M. Borchardt, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Arnold Forster, Joseph B. Robison, Leonard Haas and Theodore Leskes. However, it may be impossible to learn the total number of Jews involved with the Brown case, since other Jews may have been involved behind the scenes, a not-uncommon feature in 1950s America, where many Jews preferred to remain invisible in their social activism.

Jewish organizations involved with the Brown case included the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and the American Jewish Congress. Organizations that were involved with the Brown case and which likely contained a large number of Jews - due to their political bent - included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the American Federation of Teachers, the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and the American Veterans Service Committee.[6]

The historical significance of the Brown decision

The Brown decision was the first legal ruling to significantly alter everyday life in America vis-a-vis race. It forced Blacks and Whites together on a daily basis.

Today the Brown case has achieved almost holy status in magazines, newspapers and TV shows. Of some significance regarding the over-exaltation of the Brown decision is the U.S. federal historic site Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service in Topeka. That a still-largely-White government, using mostly White tax dollars, honors a court ruling that hugely damaged traditional White culture is noteworthy. Of further significance about Brown is famed U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson's observation that nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment would suggest that racial segregation is unconstitutional, and, Jackson's belief that the pro-Brown faction was basing its court arguments on hazy sociology and not on law. In simple language, justice Jackson said that Brown was a legally questionable ruling. The question has often been asked why racial segregation was perfectly legitimate in America for roughly 200 years, but suddenly no longer legitimate in 1954! The short, simple and correct answer is that the Brown decision was "good for Jews" politically -- because of the predictable negative effects on the dominant White culture that would result from mixing educable Aryan children with violent and borderline-retarded black kids.

Summary

Without the pointed involvement of Jews from beginning to end, the Brown ruling would likely have never occurred. Furthermore, the Brown decision was not based upon law but instead upon anti-White social science, a specialty dish now served up regularly in America. Brown was not good for Whites, who still make up the majority of the U.S. population. The Brown case only benefited a small minority of the population. Indeed, Whites might ask themselves: how many White kids have been beaten up or shot because they were forced into schools with gangsta Blacks? How many White kids have dropped out of school due to intimidation by those Blacks and have ended up performing menial jobs as a result? The answers are unknown because social scientists don't study those things. What is clear is that because of the Jews tens of millions of White children have received substandard educations from public schools.

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[1] The NAACP was founded by a mostly-Jewish band of activists in 1909.

[2] A brief is a legal statement explaining the general details and contentions of a case in court.

[3] Swirk Brown/Brown case: "50 Years After Integration Case, Jews Remember Their Crucial Role," by Matthew E. Berger, JTA News, May 10, 2004.

[4] See Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: BasicBooks, 1994) by Jack Greenberg.

[5] Frankfurter: essay/book chapter "The Brown Decision," by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, 1995. Also featured in the book The New Color Line by the same authors.

[6] Among other sources, the names and organizations involved with the Brown case came from: 347 U.S. 483 (1954); 74 S.Ct. 686; 98 L.Ed. 873, publicly provided by Yale law school, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., and opinion, BROWN ET AL. v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA ET AL., No. 1. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS.

VNN STAFF