Legal Education Commons^™

Brown And The Desegregation Of Virginia Law Schools, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

One-half century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional racially segregated public elementary and secondary schools in Brown v. Board of Education. The pathbreaking opinion culminated a three-decade effort that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP") and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ("LDF"), an independent litigating entity, had orchestrated. An important feature of the evolving NAACP and LDF tactical approach was to contest the segregation of government-sponsored professional and graduate education, particularly implicating law schools in jurisdictions bordering the South, namely Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These pioneering attorneys and the …