Bolling v. Sharpe

Bolling v. Sharpe

Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that unanimously held racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia to be unconstitutional. Decided on the same day as the more famous Brown v. Board of Education, this case was its crucial counterpart for the federal government, applying the same principle of desegregation through the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The ruling was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement, explicitly dismantling the legal framework of Jim Crow in the nation's capital and establishing that the federal government was constitutionally barred from practicing racial discrimination.

Background and Legal Context

The case originated in Washington, D.C., where public school segregation was mandated by Congressional statutes, not state law. In 1947, a coalition of parents and activists, led by barber and civic organizer Gardner Bishop, sought to challenge the inferior conditions at the all-Black John Philip Sousa Junior High School. After being denied admission for their children to the newer, better-equipped all-white Eliot Junior High School, they enlisted the legal counsel of Charles Hamilton Houston, the visionary dean of Howard University Law School and architect of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's litigation strategy. Following Houston's death, the case was taken up by his protege, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The legal context was defined by the ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' (1896) doctrine of "separate but equal," which the NAACP had been systematically attacking. A key hurdle was that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, used to challenge state segregation, did not apply to the federal district. Thus, attorneys had to build a novel argument based on the Fifth Amendment.

The Case and Arguments

The named plaintiff was Spottswood Thomas Bolling, one of eleven African American students refused admission to the newly opened Sousa Junior High. The defendants were the Board of Education of the District of Columbia and its president, C. Melvin Sharpe. The plaintiffs' legal team, led by James Nabrit Jr., professor at Howard University School of Law, deliberately chose a different tactic than the ''Brown'' cases. Instead of arguing that segregated schools were inherently unequal—a fact-based approach—Nabrit argued directly that segregation itself was unconstitutional, a violation of due process. He contended that the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of "liberty" included the right of Black children to be free from arbitrary and invidious racial discrimination by the federal government. The government's defense relied on precedent and the claim that Congress had the plenary power to govern the District. The case was first argued before the Supreme Court in December 1952, alongside Brown, and was reargued a year later after the Court ordered further briefing on the historical intent of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Supreme Court Decision

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous opinion of the Court. The Court held that racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia was a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Warren famously wrote, "Liberty... cannot be restricted except for a proper governmental objective. Segregation in public education is not reasonably related to any proper governmental objective." The Court explicitly rejected the notion that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment was less robust than the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth, stating that "it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government." This reverse incorporation reasoning effectively applied an equal protection standard to the federal government through the Due Process Clause, a landmark constitutional interpretation.

Relation to Brown v. Board of Education

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