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Civil rights returned to dominate the nation's domestic agenda with Brown v. Board of Education. Although not directly involved in that case, the 1866 Act furnished part of the background for this dramatic expansion of constitutional prohibitions against racial discrimination. In particular, the act offers an alternative basis for the decision in the companion case to Brown, Bolling v. Sharpe. That opinion applied to the federal government under the Fifth Amendment the same principles against racial discrimination applicable to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. This result, although politically compelled, involved awkward reasoning that read the later amendment back into the earlier one, a step that can more easily be accommodated by the broad coverage of the 1866 Act. The scope of that coverage figured in another decision at the end of the Civil Rights Era, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., which interpreted the act to prohibit private discrimination. This result also had political support, in the form of modern civil rights legislation enacted under the Commerce Clause, but it served to solidify prohibitions against racial discrimination without regard to the intricacies of the state action doctrine. In doing so, it also revived the 1866 Act as a source of modern civil rights claims, chiefly in the field of employment discrimination law.

This chapter describes the post-World War II civil rights movement in Washington. The years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe were the most decisive period in the city’s history since the 1860s. Suddenly, it seemed, segregation in the nation’s capital collapsed, half a decade or more before similar changes happened elsewhere in the South. But segregation in the city had not died gradually of itself – it was killed by the concerted efforts of an interracial group of activists, parents, lawyers, writers, federal workers, and others committed to an egalitarian capital. These civil rights advocates seized upon Washington’s changing political, economic, and demographic context to push federal authorities to support racial change. By the end of the 1950s, the institutions of public life in Washington – schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, recreation facilities, government agencies, unions, professional associations – were no longer racially segregated.

This chapter tells the stories of the Black parents and children who challenged school segregation in the five cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first case, chosen by Thurgood Marshall to show the unequal facilities for Black and White students, came from the small town of Summerton, South Carolina, in which Black children walked to schools in former sharecroppers’ cabins while White children rode buses to schools with four times the funding of Black schools. The next case, in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, began with a strike by Black high school students to protest conditions at their overcrowded schools, where classes were held in unheated tar-paper shacks. The third case challenged segregation in the nation’s capital, led by a Black parent whose daughter was turned away from the all-White junior high nearest her home and sent to an overcrowded all-Black school. The fourth case, from New Castle County, Delaware, began when two Black mothers each protested the inferior schools their children were forced to attend. The final, and most famous, case began in Topeka, Kansas, whose four elementary schools were the only ones segregated in the state, when a father tried to enroll his nine-year-old daughter in the all-White school nearest her home rather than the Black school, a long walk and bus ride away. A federal appeals court cited the Plessy case as binding precedent but almost invited the Supreme Court to overrule it.