Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954, decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and its companion cases.
In Brown, et al., the Supreme Court—Chief Justice Earl Warren and eight Associate Justices, including Robert H. Jackson—held unanimously that government racial segregation of school children was, henceforth, barred by the U.S. Constitution. The Court declared that state government school segregation was barred by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and that federal government school segregation was barred by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
Although Brown is seventy years old, this anniversary marks the first chance of most living people to hear the Brown cases as they were argued in 1952 and 1953 and decided in 1954.
Before Fall 1955, U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments and decisions were only preserved in text. The Court did not make audio recordings.
But now you can hear the voices of NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Thurgood Marshall, Chief Justice Warren, and other lawyers and justices, speaking the words that they in fact spoke in the Brown cases.
This newly-available audio is the product of the “Brown Revisited” project. It has used 1950s texts, actors, historic audio recordings of Brown case protagonists, and voice-cloning technology to recreate actual Brown voices speaking their historic Brown words. Here is the project website: https://brown.oyez.org/home/. Here is a video that explains the voice-cloning process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpBFyPm1OEY. I am honored to have been part of the team of advisers on this project.
So here, new, is the recreated voice of Chief Justice Warren reading his opinions for the Court in Brown and in Bolling v. Sharpe: https://brown.oyez.org/modules/opinions-may-1954/.
So please hear Brown. Hear nine justices, persuaded by extraordinary lawyers and by what the justices knew in their own lives, facing racism and racial subordination, including in government, and then standing up against those evils because, legally and morally, equality constitutes us.
And please continue, as you do [thank you!], to read. Here are the decisions in text form:
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (and companion cases from Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia—the State cases); and
Bolling v. Sharpe (from the District of Columbia—the Federal case).
And click this link for relevant essays in the Jackson List archive, including:
- from 2010, “May 17, 1954”;
- from 2011, “Brown Day,” about Brown-winning attorney Thurgood Marshall; and
- from 2018, “Nine Votes, Nine Present: The Unanimity of Brown v. Board of Education.”
