House Recognizes Supreme Court Decision Abolishing Racial Segregation in Public Schools

On May 13, the House approved, 406-1, a resolution (H. Con. Res. 414) recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the resolution on May 12. The Senate approved two resolutions commemorating the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on May 6 (see The Source, 5/7/04).

Sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the resolution contains a number of findings, including:

• n May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that, “in the field of education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place”;
• The Brown decision stands among all civil rights cases as a symbol of the federal government’s commitment to fulfill the promise of equality;
• The Brown decision helped lead to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin in the workplace and in public establishments; and
• The Brown decision helped lead to the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of homes on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said that the Supreme Court decision “is the most important court decision in American history,” adding, “The decision saved our country from catastrophic racial division that could have come to [a] race war rather than to a nonviolent revolution led by Dr. Martin Luther King that began with the peaceful overthrow of legal discrimination with Brown v. Board of Education.”

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) agreed. “In the 50 years since the Brown decision, much has changed in this country. Brown provided the spark for the Eisenhower administration to push through the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. These acts, in turn, provided the blueprint for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. All of these acts served to further dismantle the barriers to equality that African Americans and other members of minority groups had faced in the decades after [Plessy v. Ferguson].”