To recycle (with minor changes) an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
***
I am very, very dubious about the proposition that the Court would have
sustained segregation if Vinson had lived.
"At their first conference on December 12, 1952, the justices were almost
evenly split. Hugo Black, Harold Burton, Sherman Minton, and William
Douglas were ready to strike down segregation; Stanley Reed was not. Felix
Frankfurter, Tom Clark, and Robert Jackson were not sure where they stood.
Chief Justice Vinson's inclination is the subject of debate. Relying on
Burton's and Jackson's notes of the conference, some historians believe
that Vinson was not ready to overturn segregation. However, in a taped
1962 interview with Yale University professor Walter Murphy, Douglas
counts Vinson in the camp against the constitutionality of segregation."
http://www.joanrigdon.com/clips/brown-v-board.html
Now, this means that even with Vinson on the Court, there were *at least*
four justices willing to strike down segregation, one (Reed) unwilling to
do so, and three uncertain. (IMO to call this "almost evenly split" is
misleading--it would be an even split only if there were four hard-core
advocates of sustaining segregation. To use an analogy: if some poll
showed that 45 percent of voters favored Candidate A and only 20 percent
favored Candidate B, with thirty-five percent undecided, while I wouldn't
say Candidate A's election was absolutely inevitable, neither would I say
it was a close race, let alone that Candidate B had the edge...) Even if
you assume Vinson was as opposed as Reed--and Douglas's testimony puts
that in some doubt--that still leaves the integrationists with a 4-2
advantage, with three undecided. Even if theoretically the possibility of
a 5-4 vote for segregation was there, you really have to wonder if *all*
the swing justices would vote to sustain segregation--particularly, when
you consider that (1) they knew that *at most* their concurrence would
produce a 5-4 decision, which would mean that the issue would just come up
again, and (2) it was the height of the Cold War, and segregation was very
bad for the US image around the world. In the end, I just can't imagine a
Frankfurter or Jackson voting to sustain segregation, and I have my doubts
even about Vinson. As the same article noted,
"Although many historians disagree, Greenberg believes that segregation
might have been struck down that year even if Vinson had lived. '[Vinson]
voted the straight civil rights line in a whole series of cases,'
Greenberg notes. Vinson voted against restrictive covenants, which had
prevented blacks from buying homes in white neighborhoods. He voted
against Texas's white primaries, which had excluded blacks on the grounds
that the primaries were private, not public, elections. He wrote the
opinions in Sweatt and McLaurin. 'When it finally came down to it and he
had to make a choice one way or another, he did the right thing,' says
Greenberg."
Apart from that, there was something unrealistic about saying that
*Plessy* was was still good law for education in 1954. It was really very
difficult to confine the reasoning of *Sweatt v. Painter*
http://laws.findlaw.com/us/339/629.html and *McClaren v. Oklahoma State
Regents*
http://laws.findlaw.com/us/339/637.html to higher education. In
particular, the Court's decision in *Sweatt* to emphasize not only things
like library facilities or spending (which states could theoretically
equalize) but also more "intangible" factors (including the opportunity to
associate with students of the numerically and socially dominant race [1])
would make it hard for a swing justice to write an opinion upholding
segregation in *Brown.*
[1] "The law school, the proving ground for legal learning and practice,
cannot be effective in isolation from the individuals and institutions
with which the law interacts. Few students and no one who has practiced
law would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed from the
interplay of ideas and the exchange of views with which the law is
concerned. The law school to which Texas is willing to admit petitioner
excludes from its student body members of the racial groups which number
85% of the population of the State and include most of the lawyers,
witnesses, jurors, judges and other officials with whom petitioner will
inevitably be dealing when he becomes a member of the Texas Bar. With such
a substantial and significant segment of society excluded, we cannot
conclude that the education offered petitioner is substantially equal to
that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law
School." I do not see how this reasonng could be confined solely to
higher education, unless one argues with a straight face that associations
made in elementary and high school are insignificant in determining one's
future.