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In Quest Of Brown's Promise: Social Research And Social Values In School Desegregation, Wallace D. Loh

Washington Law Review

There is perhaps no better setting in which to discuss the role of social research in the courts than that of school desegregation. From its early, rural, southern beginnings in Brown to its present, urban, northern manifestation in the Detroit case of Milliken v. Bradley, empirical evidence has been used in the litigation. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that "[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and ruled that the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson—which for half a century had legitimated Jim Crow legislation—had "no place" in the public schools. Eleanor Wolf, Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University, …