This simple narrative is wrong.
When the case of Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. was first presented to the Supreme Court in 1952, there were already many integrated schools around the United States.
Desegregated schools were nothing new; in fact, they were almost a century old. Some schools, like Berea College in Kentucky, were integrated even prior to the Civil War.
There is a great deal of documentation about desegregation before 1954.
Yearbooks from high schools reveal substantial integration among students in towns like Muncie, Indiana. In the mid-1940s, African-American students and white students were mixed together in academic classes, in sports, and in music groups like choirs.
Similar instances of desegregation appear in high schools in other cities.
Integrated schools since the time of the Civil War were more common in the North than in the South, more common in smaller towns than in large cities, and more common in parochial private schools than in preparatory boarding schools. The main targets of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision were public high schools in large cities in the South.
Some small towns integrated out of economic necessity rather than moral principle. Many parochial schools considered it part of their mission to integrate. Some schools in the North had never been segregated, and so had no need to desegregate.
Oversimplified narratives in history textbooks could lead students to assume that all schools were segregated prior to 1954, while in reality, by 1954, there were large numbers of integrated schools.
