Bolling v. Sharpe


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Although the black plaintiffs from D.C.'s Browne Junior High lost their class action suit against the schools in 1950, they had one small victory in the opinion of the dissenting judge, Henry Edgerton. He wrote that "School segregation is humiliating to Negroes...It 'brands the negro with the mark of inferiority and asserts that he is not fit to associate with white people.'" [2] Emboldened by this statement, an attorney named James Nabrit took up the case of Spottswood Bolling, Jr., a black student. Nabrit did not try to argue that the black schools were inferior to the white schools; instead, he gave the District government the task of showing a reasonable basis for school segregation. Bolling's case went before the Supreme Court and the Court ruled in his favor in Bolling v. Sharpe, decided at the same time as the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.


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