The lawyers who argued Brown v. Board of Education split into three camps. Thurgood Marshall led the plaintiffs’ side as head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, backed by a team that included Robert L. Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, James Nabrit Jr., and George E.C. Hayes across the five consolidated cases. John W. Davis, a former Solicitor General, anchored the defense for South Carolina, joined by state attorneys from Virginia, Kansas, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. The United States government filed an amicus brief urging the Court to strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine.1
Thurgood Marshall, Lead Counsel
Marshall ran the plaintiffs’ effort as head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a position he held from 1940 to 1961. He coordinated five separate legal teams, synthesized their local grievances into one constitutional argument, and drove the strategy of attacking the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision head-on rather than chipping away at it case by case.
At oral argument, Marshall told the justices that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to strip states of the power to impose racial classifications. He framed the defenders of segregation as making “the same argument that was made before the Civil War” and insisted that no honest reading of the amendment could support state-enforced separation. Segregation, in his framing, was not a policy question for legislatures but a constitutional violation the Court had a duty to end.
Marshall’s courtroom presence gave the five cases a unified voice. His work in Brown launched a career that eventually landed him on the Supreme Court itself, where he served as the first Black justice from 1967 to 1991.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund Team
Marshall did not build the case alone. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled a team of lawyers and researchers whose combined work made the arguments possible.
Robert L. Carter handled the Kansas case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which gave the consolidated litigation its name. Carter got involved around 1950, helped draft the original complaint, and argued the case before the Supreme Court. He later described the personal stakes: as a Black attorney working for the NAACP, “you were in fact working for yourself. It wasn’t like working for some client.”
Jack Greenberg argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Brown case and worked on the briefs in the Delaware litigation, Belton v. Gebhart. Constance Baker Motley, who had joined the Legal Defense Fund as a law clerk in 1945 and risen to assistant special counsel by 1949, authored the original complaint in Brown v. Board of Education.
Much of the intellectual groundwork happened at Howard University, where attorneys and academics gathered in what participants called a “brain trust” to stress-test their theories and refine how they would present sociological data to the justices.
The Attorneys in Each of the Five Cases
Brown was actually five lawsuits stitched together, and each had local counsel who knew the conditions on the ground.
Kansas — Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Robert L. Carter and Jack Greenberg argued for the plaintiffs, with Carter taking the lead on oral arguments.
South Carolina — Briggs v. Elliott
Harold Boulware served as chief counsel for the South Carolina NAACP and helped prepare the Supreme Court briefs. Boulware had been fighting for equal school resources in the state since the early 1940s, starting with a petition for school bus transportation for Black children that the local school board ignored for months.
Virginia — Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County
Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill argued that the severe disparities in school funding and facilities violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. Robinson was particularly forceful during reargument, telling the justices that the amendment was always meant to ban segregation and that states could not “use power to maintain a class or caste system based upon race or color.”
Delaware — Belton v. Gebhart
Louis Redding, Delaware’s only Black attorney at the time, represented the plaintiffs. The Delaware case was unique: it was the only one of the five where the plaintiffs had already won in the lower courts. A state chancellor ruled that “separate but equal” had been violated and ordered the Black students admitted to white schools immediately. The state appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which is how it joined the other four cases.
District of Columbia — Bolling v. Sharpe
James Nabrit Jr. and George E.C. Hayes argued this case on different constitutional grounds. Because the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to states and D.C. is a federal district, they argued that segregation there violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed in a separate companion opinion.
The Federal Government as Amicus
The United States entered the case as a friend of the court. In October 1952, the Attorney General filed an amicus brief arguing that “racial segregation imposed or supported by law is, per se, unconstitutional” and that “separate but equal” was a “contradiction in terms.”
The brief made a Cold War argument that carried weight with the justices. It warned that racial discrimination “has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries” and provided “effective ammunition” for Soviet propaganda, quoting the Secretary of State’s assessment that damage to foreign relations had “become progressively greater” over the preceding six years. Washington, D.C., itself came in for particular mention, described as “a window through which the world looks into our house,” where foreign diplomats were sometimes “mistaken for American Negroes and refused food, lodging and entertainment.”
Attorneys for the Defense
The states defending segregation brought serious legal firepower. John W. Davis, who represented South Carolina in Briggs v. Elliott, was widely considered the finest Supreme Court advocate of his generation. A former U.S. Solicitor General and the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, Davis anchored his defense in stare decisis, arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson had stood for nearly sixty years, that the Fourteenth Amendment had never been understood to prohibit segregation, and that decisions about how to run schools belonged to state legislatures rather than federal courts.
The other states fielded their own advocates. In Virginia, Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond Jr. and T. Justin Moore argued for the school board, joined on the briefs by Archibald G. Robertson and others from the Prince Edward County school authorities. Paul E. Wilson, a young Assistant Attorney General from Kansas, represented his state’s interests. Collectively, they argued that the Fourteenth Amendment did not explicitly ban segregation and that any changes should come through the political process rather than judicial decree. Their defense leaned on historical practice, state sovereignty, and the practical difficulties of dismantling an entrenched system.
The Two Arguments and a New Chief Justice
The case was first argued in December 1952, but the Court did not issue a decision. It ordered the parties to come back and address the original intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment and whether the Court had the power to order desegregation. Both sides spent months conducting historical research, though as the Court later acknowledged, the results were “inconclusive.”
Between the first argument and the reargument in December 1953, the bench itself changed. Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who had been skeptical of overturning Plessy, died of a heart attack in September 1953. President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as the new Chief Justice. Warren made a unanimous decision his top priority, understanding that a divided Court would undermine the ruling’s moral authority. He succeeded. When the decision came down on May 17, 1954, all nine justices joined an opinion declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and that the “separate but equal” doctrine “has no place in the field of public education.”