Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1951)
- US District Court for Kansas
- Bob Carter’s effort to blend a social and psychological attack on segregation with the more straightforward legal objections to desegregation.
- Redefining “curriculum”: Jack Greenberg leads Hugh Speer, an education
professor at the University of Kansas, through testimony defining ‘curriculum’:
it is not merely the school's course offerings but the total school experience of the
child: the development of his personality, his social adjustment, social skills and attitudes. “The more heterogeneous the group in which the children participate, the better they can function in our multi-cultural and multi-group society.”
- Asserting the psychological damage of segregation: Louisa Pinkham
Holt, University of Kansas psychologist, testifies that the legal enforcement of segregation by itself denotes the inferiority of the Negro group and interferes with ego-identity leading to
"the apathetic acceptance, fatalistic submission to the feeling others have expressed that one is inferior…”
- Judge Huxman’s opinion:
o The Supreme Court had confined its decision to weighing equal protection when subjected to segregation in graduate schools alone.
o In a "Finding of Fact", though, Huxman cited Holt’s testimony, acknowledging that segregation retarded the educational and mental development of Negro children.
(see Warren opinion in
Brown 1) |
|
|