Thurgood Marshall

dog, with a fine piece of meat in his mouth, crossed a bridge and saw [his] shadow in the stream and plunged in for it and lost both substance and shadow. Here is equal education, not promised, not prophesied, but present. Shall it be thrown away on some fancied question of racial prestige?” Thurgood Marshall stepped up to the bar to make his final rebuttal. “I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart or something,” he said. “Everybody knows that is not true. These same kids in Virginia and South Carolina—and I have seen them do it—they play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, they separate to go to school, they come out of school and play ball together. They have to be separated in school.” Marshall declared that school segregation laws were deliberately designed to oppress black people. The only way the Supreme Court could uphold them, he asserted, would be “to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.” Ending his argument, he said, “The only thing [segregation] can be is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible. And now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.” A MOMENTOUS DECISION After the lawyers completed their arguments, the justices followed their standard procedure, conferring about the case in secret session. Five months later—on May 17, 1954—they reassembled at their great mahogany bench. As Chief Justice Earl Warren prepared to read the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education , spectators leaned forward in silence. Wire-service reporters started filing their dispatches from the press table. At 12:57 p . m . , the Associated Press wire carried a bulletin: “Chief Justice

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