Professor Ogletree observes that people generally discuss the Brown case as though it were a singular event, when it
actually consisted of five cases. He asks attorney and professor Jack Greenberg what his sense was about the Supreme Court in 1953, when
Chief Justice Frederick Vinson was in place. Professor Greenberg begins by expressing that the "consensus is… that Vinson was for
reaffirming Plessy v. Ferguson, and the notes of the Supreme Court conferences seem to indicate that. On the other hand, Vinson
was not an idiot." Professor Greenberg believes that Vinson was only playing the Devil’s advocate, and that he would have certainly
voted against segregation.
When asked how confident he was that the court was going to overrule Plessy when Vinson was the Chief Justice in 1953,
Judge Carter replies, "Well, I wasn’t confident that it was going to overrule Plessy, but I was confident that we were not going to lose
ground…. There was no way we were going to go back beyond the status quo." These comments were followed by some exchanges about the
certainty with which lawyers knew that the Brown decision would come down on May 17th and speculation over the reasons why Charles
Hamilton Houston brought a separate but equal case to the court.
Professor Ogletree asks Judge Carter what he was trying to persuade the Supreme Court to think about besides the facts
of the different cases. Answers Judge Carter, "We were trying to find a hook to convince the court that grade school segregation was
unconstitutional, and we knew that the university issues were not going to sell." Fortuitously, he came across a study demonstrating
that as blacks moved out of the South and into integrated schools, their IQ and test scores improved. The argument that segregation
impaired the ability of blacks to learn became the hook, and "that was the thesis on which the Supreme Court decided Brown."
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