Briggs v. Elliott
| Briggs v. Elliott | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Decided January 28, 1952 | |
| Full case name | Harry Briggs, Jr. et al. v. R.W. Elliott, chairman, et al. |
| Citations | 342 U.S. 350 (more) |
| Prior history | |
| Subsequent history |
|
| Holding | |
| In order that the Supreme Court may have the benefit of the views of the district court upon the additional facts brought out in the appellees report on implementation of district court's mandate to equalize segregated South Carolina schools, and that the district court may have the opportunity to take whatever action it may deem appropriate in light of that report, the judgment is vacated and the case is remanded for further proceedings. | |
| Case opinions | |
| Per curiam. | |
| Dissent | Black, joined by Douglas |
| Laws applied | |
| 28 U.S.C. (Supp. IV) § 1253, S.C. Const., Art. XI, § 7; S.C. Code § 5377 (1942) | |
Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952), on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, challenged school segregation in Summerton, South Carolina. It was the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Following the Brown decision, the district court issued a decree striking down the school segregation law in South Carolina as unconstitutional, and requiring that state's schools to integrate.
At the time Brown reached the U.S. Supreme Court, South Carolina was one of 17 states that required school segregation. South Carolina law required incomplete segregation. Article 11, Section 7 of the 1895 Constitution of South Carolina read as follows: "Separate schools shall be provided for children of the white and colored races, and no child of either race shall ever be permitted to attend a school provided for children of the other race." Section 5377 of the Code of Laws of South Carolina of 1942 read: "It shall be unlawful for pupils of one race to attend the schools provided by boards of trustees for persons of another race."
No one questioned that the Clarendon County schools were unequal. At the beginning of the hearings in U.S. District Court, the defendants admitted upon the record that "the educational facilities, equipment, curricula and opportunities afforded in School District No. 22 for colored pupils are not substantially equal to those afforded for white pupils."
The case began in 1947 as a request to provide bus transportation. In addition to having separate and very inferior facilities, black children had to walk to school, sometimes many miles. In the neighboring Jordan community, some children walked as many as 18 miles round-trip to school each day, and children had to frequently gather wood for heaters within schools. Knowing this, Summerton residents Harry and Eliza Briggs joined with 21 other families to find a school bus suitable for their children, but frequent maintenance led them to ask the local school superintendent, R.M. Elliott, for their own bus. Surmising that the white children rode buses—the white schools in Clarendon County used 33 buses at the time for white students—the Briggs family and many others contended black students could have at least one. Elliott refused, saying black citizens did not pay enough taxes to warrant a bus and that asking white taxpayers to fund that burden would be unfair.
...
Wikipedia