Profile of the main characters in the Brown v. Board of Education case:

Born Daisy Lee Gatson, Daisy Bates is best known for her involvement in the struggle to integrate the Arkansas public school system. Bates endured numerous hardships during the civil rights era and before, including death threats, jailings, and bombings of her house, but she continued to work for equality throughout her long career.

the Fight to Desegregate

In the years after the Brown decision (1954), she personally brought black children to the white public schools, accompanied by newspaper photographers to document each school's refusal to admit them. This intense pressure induced the school board to commence desegregation in September 1957. As an advisor to nine black students trying to attend Central High School, she was a pivotal figure in that seminal moment of the civil rights movement.

Documenting the Struggle

Bates worked as a publisher and journalist from 1942-1987. With her husband, L. C. Bates, she published, edited, and wrote for the Arkansas State Press newspaper from 1942-59. The newspaper advocated social and economic improvements for the Arkansas African American community, and fearlessly documented acts of police brutality against black soldiers from a nearby army camp. Her memoir of the desegregation conflict, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962), is a primary text in the history of American race relations.

An Enduring Advocate

Daisy Bates was also the president of the state conference of the NAACP from1952-59. In the 1960s she went on to work for the Democratic National Committee and government anti-poverty programs. Until the end of her life she worked for civil rights and equality, always refusing to be intimidated by those who opposed her insistence on racial and social equality.

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A prominent lawyer who had made 140 appearances before the US Supreme Court, Davis argued for continued school segregation in the Brown case. He presented oral arguments before the US Supreme court in opposition to Thurgood Marshall's case. Davis represented the Board of Education for the state of South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott), a case which was so similar to the Brown case that they were heard together by the Court.

Davis' Pro-Segregation Appeal

Davis ' argument was based on several points:

• The federal government should not interfere with details of public school education, which were more appropriately left in the hands of the states.
• If segregated schools were somehow “unequal” in their provision of education, facilities, teacher salaries, etc. then the states might be ordered to bring black schools up to par with white schools.
• There was no evidence that integrating schools would remove the damage to black students' self-esteem in a clearly race-conscious society such as the US.

Davis' Legal Career

John W. Davis was recruited specifically for this case by the Governor of South Carolina, who asked him to help preserve the “Southern way of life.” Davis was so committed to segregation that he represented the state of South Carolina pro bono. His record demonstrated resistance towards granting rights to African Americans:

• In 1934 Davis refused to join in a petition aimed at persuading the Supreme Court to hear an appeal from the Scottsboro Boys who had been convicted of raping two white women and sentenced to death.
• In 1935 Davis had refused to testify before Congress in favor of an anti-lynching bill.
• In 1945 Davis opposed a measure by the New York State Legislature that would ban racial and religious discrimination in businesses and unions in New York.
• In 1948 Davis bitterly opposed President Truman's civil rights' measures.

On the other hand, as solicitor general under Woodrow Wilson, Davis argued against Oklahoma 's “grandfather clause,” which excluded blacks from voting. His only child, author Julia Davis, wrote in her 1961 book Legacy of Love that her father was unfairly labeled a racist.

* Quotes are taken from the American Bar Association Division for Public Education’s transcription of Oral Arguments before the US Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, published as Argument: The Complete Oral Argument before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55, ed. Leon Freidman (New York, Chelsea House, 1969). Also found on: http://www.abanet.org/brown/reenact.pdf

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The longest serving Arkansas state governor, Orval Eugene Faubus served six consecutive terms from 1955-1967. He garnered national media attention in 1957 when he used the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending the previously all-white Central High school in Little Rock. Governor Faubus delivered the infamous words, "blood will run in the streets" if Negro pupils should attempt to enter the school.

Federal Intervention

Continued Resistance

Faubus later challenged the Brown ruling again in 1958 when he closed three public high schools in Arkansas rather than allow their integration. In 1959, a Federal court declared the state's school-closing law unconstitutional and announced that desegregated schools would reopen in Arkansas in the fall.

In the documentary Eyes on the Prize, Faubus refuses to state his personal views on desegregation and maintains that, “I was a hero. I saved lives.” He hints at his own ambivalence towards desegregation, however, when he mentions his own upbringing in a poor family with seven children. He notes that “There's a lot of them [black people] who never had it as hard as I did.” Faubus may not have been only motivated by racism, however: Commentators have suggested that he may have also sought to maintain the governor's office and/or defend states' rights against federal intrusion.

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Dr. Hugh Speer, an expert in education at the time president of the University of Kansas Department of Education, was a principal witness in the Brown case. Dr. Speer is particularly well-known for his clearly-stated argument against segregated schools: "...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." This persuasive argument gestured towards the Fourteenth Amendment (Equal Protection Clause), which ultimately proved to be pivotal in the Brown case. The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate” schools for whites and minorities were necessarily “inherently unequal,” and that minority children were not enjoying equal protection by their relegation to such schools.

Speer's Testimony

Accounts of the case cite Speer's testimony almost universally, as it directly opposed the stance taken by the Kansas Board of Education, which argued that segregation in the schools prepared black children for the segregated world they would encounter in adulthood. Speer is also cited with conducting educational research that aided the Brown case and recruiting other expert witnesses who testified for Brown. Speer documents the trial in his book: The Case of the Century: A Historical and Social Perspective on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , With Present and Future Implications (1968.)

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