The Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation in 1954 was the fulfillment of a legal campaign the NAACP had started in the 1930's. Under Charles Houston, the Dean of Howard University Law School, the Association set about developing a cadre of black lawyers who could implement new strategies to press for voting rights, the end of housing discrimination and equal educational opportunities. The Association had first unveiled its legal strategy in the 1932 Margold Report which was presented to its 1932 Annual Conference.  The Report stated that the wide and readily apparent differences in the educational facilities available to white and black citizens provided a path to appeal to the Supreme Court. Over the next two decades the Association lawyers pursued cases showing that segregated graduate and professional schools were inherently unequal and that wages paid to white and black teachers in segregated schools were unfairly unequal. These cases were appealed through local and federal courts all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Usually the Supreme Court supported the arguments brought by Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues.

As historian Patricia Sullivan wrote,

[Robert] Carter took on the task of devising a strategy to establish the inherent inequality of separate at the primary and secondary level.  The challenge was different fro what the legal staff had confronted in the law and graduate school cases - where intellectual exchange and professional contacts were formative factors...He immersed himself in the social science literature, focusing on evidence of the psychic damage inflicted by segreegation...[Kenneth] Clark and his wife Mamie Clark, had developed [a test] using dolls to illustrate the effects of racism on children.  In this exercise, when African American children were presented with a white and brown doll 'they showed an mistakable preference for the white doll and a rejection of the brown doll.'

 

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