3.11 Government Responses to Social Movements

Facts: Linda Brown, a Black third-grader in Topeka, Kansas, had to travel much farther to a segregated school than to a nearby white school. Her case was combined with similar cases from other states. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the challenge.

Holding: A unanimous Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that state laws segregating public schools by race violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Reasoning: Separating children by race creates a feeling of inferiority that affects their hearts and minds and harms their education, so “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The Court drew on psychological research about the effects of segregation. It rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) for public education.

Significance: Brown was a landmark for civil rights, but enforcement was slow. A follow-up ruling in 1955 told schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” a vague standard many Southern officials used to delay. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a desegregation order. Brown also shows the limits of courts: they depend on the other branches to carry out their rulings.

Pushed by the civil rights movement and championed by President Lyndon Johnson, the act survived a filibuster in the Senate that lasted about two months before cloture was won. Key parts:

• Title II: bans discrimination by race, color, religion or national origin in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants and theaters.
• Titles III and IV: let the Justice Department sue to desegregate public facilities and public schools.
• Title VI: bars discrimination in programs that receive federal money.
• Title VII: bans job discrimination by race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce it.

Congress relied on its Commerce Clause power, because private businesses' discrimination affected interstate travel and trade. The Court upheld this in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), connecting this topic to federalism (1.8).

In March 1965, state troopers attacked peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, on a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. Televised images built support, and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act that summer. It suspended literacy tests in places with histories of discrimination, sent federal examiners to register voters, and required covered jurisdictions to get federal approval (preclearance) before changing voting rules. Black voter registration rose sharply; in Mississippi it went from roughly 7 percent of eligible Black adults in 1964 to about 60 percent by 1967.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula that decided which places needed preclearance, ruling it was based on outdated data. Without a new formula from Congress, preclearance stopped operating; other parts of the act remain.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bans sex discrimination in any education program that receives federal funds, which covers nearly all schools and colleges. Its best-known effect has been the huge growth of girls' and women's sports, but it also covers admissions, hiring and harassment. Like Title VI, it uses federal money as leverage, a form of fiscal federalism (1.7).