Brown v. Board of Education by Susan Goldman Rubin

Author:Susan Goldman Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2016-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chief Justice Earl Warren. 1953

Marshall worried about the choice. Warren had been in charge of California’s program to put Japanese citizens in internment camps during World War II, an act he later regretted. Marshall hurried to California to check up on Warren. Everyone he spoke to said, “The man was simply great.” Warren was known for his honesty, dignity and common sense.

At this point the rearguments were postponed again and scheduled for early December. The postponement gave Marshall and his team more time to prepare the brief, which had to be submitted in November. Marshall gathered nearly a hundred scholars and lawyers for a three-day conference to discuss aspects of the Court’s questions. In October, he held another conference with only his inner circle to go over historical evidence. “I never worked for harder taskmasters,” recalled historian John Franklin.

“I never had so much fun in my life as during those sessions,” said Charles L. Black, Jr., a young professor at Columbia University. Black worked on the final brief and seemed to relish being part of the team. He didn’t complain when his words were rewritten or discarded. He said, “Everything was torn to pieces.”

Meanwhile, Marshall and other members of the staff gave speeches to raise money to pay for research, travel and printing the brief. The black press started a campaign to get contributions with the slogan, “Dollar or more will open the door.” Churches, black businesses and the black American Teachers Association made donations. Branches of the NAACP in Virginia and South Carolina sent thousands of dollars. Secretaries and volunteers in the Fund’s national office in New York City on West Fortieth Street worked in shifts of fifteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, without extra pay.

June Shagaloff, Marshall’s assistant, went to Delaware to study recently desegregated schools to help form a plan for integration in answer to one of the Court’s questions. “We knew we were right,” she said. “Everybody believed what we were doing.”

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