The Day Arrived ......

                           ("Brief for Appellants in Brown vs Board of Education")

Brown V. The Board of History was now underway. June of 1951 was the start of the case. Robert Carter was the lead attorney for the NAACP.


At the trial, the NAACP argued that a message was being sent to the colored children by keeping them in segregated schools.  The message was that they were not truly equal to the white children.   The witness for the NAACP Hugh W. Speer, testified that:


"...if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation."(Cozzins 1)


"The Board of Education's defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not necessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver had overcome more than just segregated schools to achieve what they achieved.”
(Cozzins 2)