BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION.

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION. Juan Williams in this article quotes from an interview in 1990 with Thurgood Marshall: “Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children? His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools.” BROWN demonstrates the importance of facts in adjudication. One of the amazing things about BROWN and the history of segregation is that segregation was defended on the basis of the strained logic of “separate but equal” when it was obvious to everybody (yes, everybody) that the nonwhite schools were inferior.