what if brown v. boe of topeka went different

Suppose the Supreme Court upholds segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Topeka. How would it affect the civil rights movement? Would segregation still exist today?
 
What you're suggesting is pretty close to unthinkable. The decision in Brown was unanimous. You'd need to replace 5 of the 9 justices on the Court in order to uphold segregation on constitutional principles, and this is after the Democrats controlled the presidency for twenty years, and had filled the federal judiciary with liberal aligned justices.
 
What you're suggesting is pretty close to unthinkable. The decision in Brown was unanimous. You'd need to replace 5 of the 9 justices on the Court in order to uphold segregation on constitutional principles, and this is after the Democrats controlled the presidency for twenty years, and had filled the federal judiciary with liberal aligned justices.

I was wondering what would happen if it went that way. If it wasn't this case it would have been another case. Segregation was unsustainable so it would be struck down somehow and someway.
 
What you're suggesting is pretty close to unthinkable. The decision in Brown was unanimous. You'd need to replace 5 of the 9 justices on the Court in order to uphold segregation on constitutional principles, and this is after the Democrats controlled the presidency for twenty years, and had filled the federal judiciary with liberal aligned justices.

I'm not so sure about this. The precedent of Plessy v Ferguson was a pretty massive hurdle, and politics notwithstanding, judges don't like just tossing out precedent. There was a lot of wrangling to get things the way they did and part of the reason they wanted unanimity was because it was such a leap. Especially because their stated reasoning is nonsense. Separate is not inherently unequal, if it were, we couldn't have sex specific bathrooms.
 
What you're suggesting is pretty close to unthinkable. The decision in Brown was unanimous. You'd need to replace 5 of the 9 justices on the Court in order to uphold segregation on constitutional principles, and this is after the Democrats controlled the presidency for twenty years, and had filled the federal judiciary with liberal aligned justices.

That's easy

Keep Vinson alive as Chief Justice to prevent Warren from getting on the Court as Chief Justice--Warren set out to build a unanimous consensus on Brown to make it as strong and forceful as possible

Vinson and Reed were pretty chill with segregation (they were both Kentuckians), Clark wanted states to sort it out themselves, and Frankfurter and Jackson didn't want to get involved because it would be judicial activism

It's very easy to make Brown a weaker, more fractured ruling
 
That's easy

<snip for brevity>

It's very easy to make Brown a weaker, more fractured ruling

I've always wondered (tried to start a thread on it a long time ago but no one bit): WI Plessy wasn't overturned, but the Court mandated that the "equal" part of "separate but equal" be taken seriously. In the case of schools, that would mean per student spending parity, equal quality and maintenance of facilities, equal amenities like school buses, etc., and equal textbooks and teaching.

Personally, I *don't* believe that separate can ever be truly equal, but I can see an AH where a serious attempt at it might come as an intermediate step to the Court just saying "f*** it" and ending the whole rotten system of segregation altogether.
 
I've always wondered (tried to start a thread on it a long time ago but no one bit): WI Plessy wasn't overturned, but the Court mandated that the "equal" part of "separate but equal" be taken seriously. In the case of schools, that would mean per student spending parity, equal quality and maintenance of facilities, equal amenities like school buses, etc., and equal textbooks and teaching.

Personally, I *don't* believe that separate can ever be truly equal, but I can see an AH where a serious attempt at it might come as an intermediate step to the Court just saying "f*** it" and ending the whole rotten system of segregation altogether.

I can't remember any names off the top of my head, but there were cases that did mandate that separate but equal had to be truly equal

But it was never enforced
 
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.
 
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