Economic freedom, or economic liberty, is the ability of people of a society to take economic actions. This is a term used in economic and policy debates as well as in the philosophy of economics. One approach to economic freedom comes from the liberal tradition emphasizing free markets, free trade, and private property under free enterprise. Another approach to economic freedom extends the welfare economics study of individual choice, with greater economic freedom coming from a larger set of possible choices. Other conceptions of economic freedom include freedom from want and the freedom to engage in collective bargaining.
The liberal free-market viewpoint defines economic liberty as the
freedom to produce, trade and consume any goods and services acquired
without the use of force, fraud, theft or government regulation. This is
embodied in the rule of law, property rights and freedom of contract,
and characterized by external and internal openness of the markets, the
protection of property rights and freedom of economic initiative. There are several indices of economic freedom
that attempt to measure free market economic freedom. Based on these
rankings, correlative studies have found higher economic growth to be
correlated with higher scores on the country rankings.
With regards to other measures such as equality, corruption, political
and social violence and their correlation to economic freedom, it has
been argued that the economic freedom indices conflate unrelated
policies and policy outcomes to conceal negative correlations between
economic growth and economic freedom in some subcomponents.
In the 1960s, Alan Greenspan argued that economic freedom requires the gold standard for protection of savings from confiscation through inflation
According to the liberal free-market view, a secure system of private property rights
is a necessary part of economic freedom. Such systems include two main
rights, namely the right to control and benefit from property and the
right to transfer property by voluntary means. David A. Harper argues
that a system of private property is required for entrepreneurship,
because "entrepreneurs would not be able to formulate or carry out
their plans unless they were reasonably sure that the people with whom
they trade have exclusive control over the relevant resources."
Bernard H. Siegan holds that a secure system of property rights also
reduces uncertainty and encourages investments, creating favorable
conditions for an economy to be successful. According to Hernando de Soto,
much of the poverty in Third World countries is caused by a lack of
Western systems of laws and well-defined and universally recognized
property rights. De Soto argues that because of legal barriers and
because it is often unclear who owns what property, poor people in those
countries cannot utilize their assets to produce more wealth. David L. Weimer, surveying a series of empirical studies
about economic growth, reports that "a number of economic historians
have noted the importance of credible property rights, especially in
terms of freedom from arbitrary seizures of property by governments, for
understanding relative rates of growth in different time periods and
regions," and concludes that countries with strong property rights
systems have economic growth rates almost twice as high as those of
countries with weak property rights systems.
At the same time, he notes that the risk of unexpected seizure, and not
state ownership in and of itself, is responsible for this outcome,
saying: "the degree of state ownership of property does not have a
statistically significant effect on growth rates after controlling for
the risk of seizure."
Freedom of contract
Freedom of contract
is the right to choose one's contracting parties and to trade with them
on any terms and conditions one sees fit. Contracts permit individuals
to create their own enforceable legal rules, adapted to their unique
situations. Disputes arising from contracts are typically resolved by the judiciary branch of government, but not all contracts need to be enforced by the state. For example, in the United States there is a large number of third-party arbitration tribunals which resolve disputes under private commercial law.
Negatively understood, freedom of contract is freedom from government
interference and from imposed value judgments of fairness. The notion of
"freedom of contract" was given one of its most famous legal
expressions in 1875 by Sir George JesselMR:
[I]f
there is one thing more than another public policy requires it is that
men of full age and competent understanding shall have the utmost
liberty of contracting, and that their contracts when entered into
freely and voluntarily shall be held sacred and shall be enforced by
courts of justice. Therefore, you have this paramount public policy to
consider – that you are not lightly to interfere with this freedom of
contract.
The doctrine of freedom of contract received one of its strongest expressions in the US Supreme Court case of Lochner v. New York which struck down legal restrictions on the working hours of bakers.
Critics of the classical view of freedom of contract argue that this
freedom is illusory when the bargaining power of the parties is highly
unequal, most notably in the case of contracts between employers and
workers. As in the case of restrictions on working hours, workers as a
group may benefit from legal protections that prevent individuals
agreeing to contracts that require long working hours. In its West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish decision in 1937, overturning Lochner, the Supreme Court cited an earlier decision:
The
legislature has also recognized the fact, which the experience of
legislators in many States has corroborated, that the proprietors of
these establishments and their operatives do not stand upon an equality,
and that [p. 394] their interests are, to a certain extent,
conflicting. The former naturally desire to obtain as much labor as
possible from their employees, while the latter are often induced by the
fear of discharge to conform to regulations which their judgment,
fairly exercised, would pronounce to be detrimental to their health or
strength. In other words, the proprietors lay down the rules and the
laborers are practically constrained to obey them. In such cases,
self-interest is often an unsafe guide, and the legislature may properly
interpose its authority.
From this point on, the Lochner view of freedom of contract has been rejected by US courts.
Economic and political freedom
Some free market advocates argue that political and civil liberties
have simultaneously expanded with market-based economies, and present
empirical evidence to support the claim that economic and political freedoms are linked.
In Capitalism and Freedom
(1962), Friedman further developed Friedrich Hayek's argument that
economic freedom, while itself an extremely important component of total
freedom, is also a necessary condition for political freedom. He
commented that centralized control of economic activities
was always accompanied with political repression. In his view,
voluntary character of all transactions in a free market economy and
wide diversity that it permits are fundamental threats to repressive
political leaders and greatly diminish power to coerce. Through
elimination of centralized control of economic activities, economic
power is separated from political power, and the one can serve as
counterbalance to the other. Friedman feels that competitive capitalism
is especially important to minority groups, since impersonal market
forces protect people from discrimination in their economic activities
for reasons unrelated to their productivity.
Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises
argued that economic and political freedom were mutually dependent:
"The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of
economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is
the corollary of economic freedom. It is no accident that the age of
capitalism became also the age of government by the people."
In The Road to Serfdom,
Hayek argued that "Economic control is not merely control of a sector
of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of
the means for all our ends." Hayek criticized socialist policies as the slippery slope that can lead to totalitarianism.
Gordon Tullock
has argued that "the Hayek-Friedman argument" predicted totalitarian
governments in much of Western Europe in the late 20th century – which
did not occur. He uses the example of Sweden, in which the government at
that time controlled 63 percent of GNP, as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom
is "that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The
steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any
loss of non-economic freedoms." While criticizing Hayek, Tullock still
praises the classical liberal notion of economic freedom, saying,
"Arguments for political freedom are strong, as are the arguments for
economic freedom. We needn't make one set of arguments depend on the
other."
The annual surveys Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) and Index of Economic Freedom
(IEF) are two indices which attempt to measure the degree of economic
freedom in the world's nations. The EFW index, originally developed by
Gwartney, Lawson and Block at the Fraser Institute was likely the most used in empirical studies as of 2000.
The Economic Freedom of the World score for the entire
world has grown considerably in recent decades. The average score has
increased from 5.17 in 1985 to 6.4 in 2005. Of the nations in 1985, 95
nations increased their score, seven saw a decline, and six were
unchanged. Using the 2008 Index of Economic Freedom methodology world economic freedom has increased 2.6 points since 1995.
Members of the World Bank Group also use Index of Economic Freedom
as the indicator of investment climate, because it covers more aspects
relevant to the private sector in wide number of countries.
Criticism
The nature of economic freedom is often in dispute. Robert Lawson, the co-author of EFW,
even acknowledges the potential shortcomings of freedom indices: "The
purpose of the EFW index is to measure, no doubt imprecisely, the degree
of economic freedom that exists."
He likens the recent attempts of economists to measure economic freedom
to the initial attempts of economists to measure GDP: "They
[macroeconomists] were
scientists who sat down to design, as best they could with the tools at
hand, a measure of the current economic activity of the nation. Economic
activity exists and their job was to measure it. Likewise economic
freedom exists. It is a thing. We can define and measure it." Thus, it
follows that some economists, socialists and anarchists
contend that the existing indicators of economic freedom are too
narrowly defined and should take into account a broader conception of
economic freedoms.
Critics of the indices (e.g. Thom Hartmann) also oppose the inclusion of business-related measures like corporate charters and intellectual property protection. John Miller in Dollars & Sense
has stated that the indices are "a poor barometer of either freedom
more broadly construed or of prosperity." He argues that the high
correlation between living standards and economic freedom as measured by
IEF is the result of choices made in the construction of the index that
guarantee this result. For example, the treatment of a large informal
sector (common in poor countries) as an indicator of restrictive
government policy, and the use of the change in the ratio of government
spending to national income, rather than the level of this ratio.
Hartmann argues that these choices cause the social democratic European countries to rank higher than countries where the government share of the economy is small but growing.
Economists Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs
have separately noted that there appears to be little correlation
between measured economic freedom and economic growth when the least
free countries are disregarded, as indicated by the strong growth of the
Chinese economy in recent years.
Morris Altman found that there is a relatively large correlation
between economic freedom and both per capita income and per capita
growth. He argues that this is especially true when it comes to
sub-indices relating to property rights and sound money, while he calls
into question the importance of sub-indices relating to labor regulation
and government size once certain threshold values are passed. John Miller further observes that Hong Kong and Singapore, both only "partially free" according to Freedom House,
are leading countries on both economic freedom indices and casts doubt
on the claim that measured economic freedom is associated with political
freedom.
However, according to the Freedom House, "there is a high and
statistically significant correlation between the level of political
freedom as measured by Freedom House and economic freedom as measured by
the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation survey."
Choice sets and economic freedom
Amartya Sen
and other economists consider economic freedom to be measured in terms
of the set of economic choices available to individuals. Economic
freedom is greater when individuals have more economic choices available
– when, in some technical sense, the choice set of individuals expands.
Positive and negative freedom
The differences between alternative views of economic freedom have been expressed in terms of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom. Classical liberals favour a focus on negative freedom as did Berlin himself. By contrast Amartya Sen argues for an understanding of freedom in terms of capabilities to pursue a range of goals.
One measure which attempts to assess freedom in the positive sense is
Goodin, Rice, Parpo, and Eriksson's measure of discretionary time, which
is an estimate of how much time people have at their disposal during
which they are free to choose the activities in which they participate,
after taking into account the time they need to spend acquiring the
necessities of life. In his book, Capitalism and Freedom,
Milton Friedman explains the preservation of freedom is the reason for
limited and decentralized governments. It creates positive freedom
within the society allowing for freedom of choice for an individual in a
free society.
Freedom from want
Franklin D. Roosevelt included freedom from want in his Four Freedoms
speech. Roosevelt stated that freedom from want "translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a
healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world". In terms of US policy, Roosevelt's New Deal included economic freedoms such as freedom of trade union
organisation, as well as a wide range of policies of government
intervention and redistributive taxation aimed at promoting freedom from
want. Internationally, Roosevelt favored the policies associated with the Bretton Woods Agreement which fixed exchange rates and established international economic institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Herbert Hoover
saw economic freedom as a fifth freedom, which secures survival of
Roosevelt's Four freedoms. He described economic freedom as freedom "for
men to choose their own calling, to accumulate property in protection
of their children and old age, [and] freedom of enterprise that does not
injure others."
Freedom of association and unions
The Philadelphia Declaration (enshrined in the constitution of the International Labour Organization)
states that "all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have
the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual
development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security
and equal opportunity." The ILO further states that "The right of
workers and employers to form and join organizations of their own
choosing is an integral part of a free and open society."
Socialist views
The socialist
view of economic freedom conceives of freedom as a concrete situation
as opposed to an abstract or moral concept. This view of freedom is
closely related to the socialist view of human creativity and the
importance ascribed to creative freedom. Socialists view creativity as
an essential aspect of human nature, thus defining freedom as a
situation or state of being where individuals are able to express their
creativity unhindered by constraints of both material scarcity and
coercive social institutions. Marxists stress the importance of freeing the individual from what they view as coercive, exploitative and alienating
social relationships of production they are compelled to partake in, as
well as the importance of economic development as providing the
material basis for the existence of a state of society where there are
enough resources to allow for each individual to pursue his or her
genuine creative interests.
Socioeconomic impact of economic freedom
One
of the ways to measure economic competitiveness is by comparing an
extent of economic freedom that countries have, which as surveys show
can also largely explain differences in economic well-being across the
world. Generally, countries with higher economic freedom have higher
gross domestic product per capita and its growth rates, as well as
better health care, education quality, environment protection, income
equality, and happiness results. These trends of increasing prosperity
are confirmed even when we compare these indicators within territories
of countries. Nevertheless, despite these benefits societies have to be
aware that with increasing economic freedom they will have to face going
through a phase of increasing inequality, which basically is a result of decreased redistribution, as well as other negative effects from economic liberalization,
i.e., running of local enterprises out of business, takeover of
competitive firms, enforcing of interests of foreign companies,
dependence on foreign capital, deteriorating work rights, harmful
manufacturing for the environment, introducing of commercial practices
that are not favorable for consumers, as well as endangerment for
survival of national cultures. However, these negative effects from
economic freedom tend to be felt in a shorter term, and if countries use
the opportunities of economic freedom in our increasingly globalized
economy in a right way, as research shows their socioeconomic conditions
will be significantly better than in a case of less economic freedom.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools
are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise
equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896
decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's decision in Brown paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.
The underlying case began in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown's
daughter at the elementary school closest to their home, instead
requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away.
The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations
filed a class-action
lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education,
alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special
three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas rendered a verdict against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.
In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in
favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that "separate educational
facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them
violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method
for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second
decision in Brown II (349U.S.294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
In the Southern United States, especially the "Deep South", where racial segregation was deeply entrenched, the reaction to Brown among most white people was "noisy and stubborn". Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown, and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no power to nullify its ruling.
Background
Educational segregation in the US prior to Brown
For much of the 60 years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate
races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause ("no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws"). Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states
that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited.
Beginning in the 1930s, a legal strategy was pursued, led by scholars at
Howard University and activists at the NAACP, that sought to undermine states' public education segregation by first focusing on the graduate school setting. This led to success in the cases of Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents,
339 U.S. 637 (1950), suggesting that racial segregation was inherently
unequal (at least in some settings), which paved the way for Brown.
The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that the system of racial separation
in all schools, while masquerading as providing separate but equal
treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated
inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Brown was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question. This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism. Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration.
The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War
during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court justices,
were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism were doing to
America's international image. When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India
in 1950, the first question he was asked was, "Why does America
tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" Douglas later wrote that he had
learned from his travels that "the attitude of the United States toward
its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with
India." Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower,
echoed Douglas's concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar
Association, proclaiming that "Our American system like all others is on
trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the
spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run
do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the
number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of
racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate
elementary schools due to a 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did
not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities
for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over
15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the
Topeka NAACP. Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett; Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter; and Lucinda Todd.
The named African-American plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, as well as an assistant pastor at his local church. He was convinced to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend, Charles Scott. Brown's daughter Linda Carol Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.
As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted
to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall
of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and redirected to the
segregated schools.
The case "Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas" was named after Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have
a man at the head of the roster. The lawyers, and the National Chapter
of the NAACP, also felt that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster
would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court justices. The 13
plaintiffs were: Oliver Brown, Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie
Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, and Lucinda Todd. The last surviving plaintiff, Zelma Henderson, died in Topeka, on May 20, 2008, at age 88.
District court opinion
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson. Judge Walter Huxman
wrote the opinion for the three-judge District Court panel, including
nine "findings of fact," based on the evidence presented at trial.
Although finding number eight stated that segregation in public
education has a detrimental effect on negro
children, the court denied relief on the ground that the negro and
white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to
buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of
teachers. This finding would be specifically cited in the subsequent Supreme Court opinion of this case.
All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only case of the five originating from a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School. The Gebhart case was the only one where a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court,
found that discrimination was unlawful; in all the other cases the
plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found discrimination to
be lawful.
The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no
contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical
plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial
equality as to all such factors. The lower court, in its opinion, noted
that, in Topeka, "the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of
study, qualification and quality of teachers, as well as other
educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable."
The lower court observed that "colored children in many instances are
required to travel much greater distances than they would be required to
travel could they attend a white school" but also noted that the school
district "transports colored children to and from school free of
charge" and that "no such service [was] provided to white children." In the Delaware case the district court judge in Gebhart
ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school
due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made
the separate schools unequal.
Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall—who
was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967—argued the case
before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general
Paul Wilson—later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas—conducted the state's ambivalent defense in his first appellate argument.
In December 1952, the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief in the case. The brief was unusual in its heavy emphasis on foreign-policy considerations of the Truman administration
in a case ostensibly about domestic issues. Of the seven pages covering
"the interest of the United States," five focused on the way school
segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War competition for the
friendship and allegiance of non-white peoples in countries then gaining
independence from colonial rule. Attorney General James P. McGranery
noted that "the existence of discrimination against minority groups in
the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other
countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist
propaganda mills." The brief also quoted a letter by Secretary of StateDean Acheson
lamenting that "the United States is under constant attack in the
foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies
as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in
this country."
British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has written that "Although the Court's opinion in Brown
made no reference to these considerations of foreign policy, there is
no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision."
Consensus building
The
members of the U.S. Supreme Court that on May 17, 1954, ruled
unanimously that racial segregation in public schools is
unconstitutional.
In spring 1953, the court heard the case but was unable to decide the
issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention
to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause
prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and
blacks.
The court reargued the case at the behest of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who used reargument as a stalling tactic, to allow the court to gather a consensus around a Brown
opinion that would outlaw segregation. The justices in support of
desegregation spent much effort convincing those who initially intended
to dissent to join a unanimous opinion. Although the legal effect would
be same for a majority rather than unanimous decision, it was felt that
dissent could be used by segregation supporters as a legitimizing
counter-argument.
Conference notes and draft decisions illustrate the division of opinions before the decision was issued. Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Harold Hitz Burton, and Sherman Minton were predisposed to overturn Plessy. Fred M. Vinson noted that Congress had not adopted desegregation legislation; Stanley F. Reed discussed incomplete cultural assimilation and states' rights, and was inclined to the view that segregation worked to the benefit of the African-American community; Tom C. Clark wrote that "we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it out." Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson disapproved of segregation, but were also opposed to judicial activism and expressed concerns about the proposed decision's enforceability. Chief Justice Vinson had been a key stumbling block. After Vinson died in September 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren had supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster. However, Eisenhower invited Earl Warren to a White House
dinner, where the president told him: "These [southern whites] are not
bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet
little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big
overgrown Negroes." Nevertheless, the Justice Department sided with the African-American plaintiffs.
While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the judicial restraint
faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the court the power to
order its end. The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment
did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren,
who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate confirmed his appointment.
Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them
the simple argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an
honest belief in the inferiority of Negroes. Warren further submitted
that the court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive Southern
resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion. Although most
justices were immediately convinced, Warren spent some time after this
famous speech convincing everyone to sign onto the opinion. Justice
Jackson dropped his concurrence and Reed finally decided to drop his
dissent. The final decision was unanimous. Warren drafted the basic
opinion and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion
endorsed by all the members of the court. Reed was the last holdout and reportedly cried during the reading of the opinion.
Decision
Chief justice Earl Warren, the author of the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in Brown
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in
favor of the Brown family and the other plaintiffs. The decision
consists of a single opinion written by chief justiceEarl Warren, which all the justices joined.
The Court's opinion began by noting that it had tried to determine whether the Fourteenth Amendment
was meant to abolish segregation in public education—even hearing a
second round of oral arguments from the parties' lawyers specifically on
the historical sources—but to no avail.
Reargument was largely devoted to
the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment
in 1868. It covered exhaustively consideration of the Amendment in
Congress, ratification by the states, then-existing practices in racial
segregation, and the views of proponents and opponents of the Amendment.
This discussion and our own investigation convince us that, although
these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem
with which we are faced. At best, they are inconclusive.
— Brown, 347 U.S. at 489.
The Court said that the question was complicated by the major social
and governmental changes that had taken place in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. The Court observed that public schools had been
uncommon in the American South in the late 1860s, when the Fourteenth
Amendment had been adopted. At that time, Southern white children whose
families could afford schooling usually attended private schools, while
the education of black children was "almost nonexistent" to the point
that in some Southern states, any education of black people had been
forbidden by law.
The Court contrasted this with the situation in 1954: "Today, education
is perhaps the most important function of our local and state
governments."
The Court concluded that, in making its ruling, it would have to
"consider public education in light of its full development and its
present place in American life throughout the Nation."
During the segregation era, it was common for black schools to
have fewer resources and poorer facilities than white schools despite
the equality required by the "separate but equal" doctrine. The Brown
Court did not address this issue, however, probably because some of the
school districts involved in the case had made improvements to their
black schools to "equalize" them with the quality of the white schools. This prevented the Court from finding a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause
in "measurable inequalities" between all white and black schools, and
instead required it to look to the effects of segregation itself.
Thus, the Court framed the case around the more general question of
whether the principle of "separate but equal" was constitutional when
applied to public education.
We come then to the question
presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the
basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible"
factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of
equal educational opportunities?
— Brown, 397 U.S. at 493.
In answer, the Court held that it did.
It ruled that state-mandated segregation, even if implemented in
schools of otherwise equal quality, is inherently unequal because of its
psychological impact.
To separate [black children] from
others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race
generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community
that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be
undone.
— Brown, 347 U.S. at 494.
The Court supported this conclusion with citations—in a footnote, not
the main text of the opinion—to several psychological studies
purporting to show that segregating black children made them feel
inferior and interfered with their learning. These studies included those of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose experiments in the 1940s had suggested that black American children from segregated environments preferred white dolls over black dolls.
The Court then concluded its relatively short opinion by
declaring that segregated public education was inherently unequal,
violated the Equal Protection Clause, and therefore was
unconstitutional:
We conclude that in the field of
public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place.
Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we
hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the
actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained
of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the
Fourteenth Amendment.
— Brown, 397 U.S. at 495.
The Court did not close with an order to implement the integration of
the schools of the various jurisdictions. Instead, it requested the
parties re-appear before the Court the following Term to hold arguments
on what the appropriate remedy should be. This became the case known as Brown II, described below.
Reaction and aftermath
Although Americans generally cheered the Court's decision in Brown, most white Southerners decried it. Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe—a Black Monday—a day something like Pearl Harbor."
In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating
American schools moved slowly. The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:
The reaction of the white South to
this judicial onslaught on its institutions was noisy and stubborn.
Certain "border states," which had formerly maintained segregated school
systems, did integrate, and others permitted the token admission of a
few Negro students to schools that had once been racially unmixed.
However, the Deep South made no moves to obey the judicial command, and
in some districts there can be no doubt that the Desegregation decision
hardened resistance to integration proposals.
In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd organized the Massive Resistance movement that included the closing of schools rather than desegregating them.
For several decades after the Brown decision,
African-American teachers, principals, and other school staff who worked
in segregated Black schools were fired or laid off as Southerners
sought to create a system of integrated schools with White leadership.
According to historian Michael Fultz, "In many ways the South moved
faster, with more 'deliberate speed' in displacing Black educators than
it did in desegregating schools."
Deep South
Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd organized a campaign to generate legal obstacles to the implementation of desegregation.
Also in 1957, Florida's response was mixed. Its legislature passed an Interposition Resolution denouncing the decision and declaring it null and void. But Florida GovernorLeRoy Collins,
though joining in the protest against the court decision, refused to
sign it, arguing that the attempt to overturn the ruling must be done by
legal methods.
In Mississippi, fear of violence prevented any plaintiff from bringing a school desegregation suit for the next nine years. When Medgar Evers sued in 1963 to desegregate schools in Jackson, Mississippi, White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith murdered him. Two subsequent trials resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was not convicted of the murder until 1994.
Native American communities were also heavily impacted by
segregation laws with native children also being prohibited from
attending white institutions.
Native American children considered light-complexioned were allowed to
ride school buses to previously all white schools, while dark-skinned
Native children from the same band were still barred from riding the
same buses. Tribal leaders, having learned about Martin Luther King Jr.'s
desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, contacted him for
assistance. King promptly responded to the tribal leaders and through
his intervention the problem was quickly resolved.
Upper South
In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown
ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D. E. Hudgins Jr., a
former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school
board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in
the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city
resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles
to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years
afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in
compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully
integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local
lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have
noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a
progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.
In Moberly, Missouri,
the schools were desegregated, as ordered. However, after 1955, the
African-American teachers from the local "negro school" were not
retained; this was ascribed to poor performance. They appealed their
dismissal in Naomi Brooks et al., Appellants, v. School District of City of Moberly, Missouri, Etc., et al.; but it was upheld, and SCOTUS declined to hear a further appeal.
Virginia had one of the companion cases in Brown, involving the Prince Edward County schools. Significant opposition to the Brown verdict included U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, who led the Byrd Organization and promised a strategy of Massive Resistance. Governor Thomas Stanley, a member of the Byrd Organization, appointed the Gray Commission, 32 Democrats led by state senator Garland Gray,
to study the issue and make recommendations. The commission recommended
giving localities "broad discretion" in meeting the new judicial
requirements. However, in 1956, a special session of the Virginia
legislature adopted a legislative package which allowed the governor to
simply close all schools under desegregation orders from federal courts.
In early 1958, newly elected Governor J. Lindsay Almond
closed public schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County
rather than comply with desegregation orders, leaving 10,000 children
without schools despite efforts of various parent groups. However, he
reconsidered when on the Lee-Jackson state holiday, the Virginia Supreme
Court ruled the closures violated the state constitution, and a panel
of federal judges ruled they violated the U.S. Constitution. In early
February 1959, both the Arlington County (also subject to a NAACP
lawsuit, and which had lost its elected school board pursuant to other
parts of the Stanley Plan) and Norfolk schools desegregated peacefully.
Soon all counties reopened and integrated with the exception of Prince
Edward County. That took the extreme step of choosing not to appropriate
any funding for its school system, thus forcing all its public schools
to close, although Prince Edward County provided tuition grants for all
students, regardless of their race, to use for private, nonsectarian
education. Since no private schools existed for blacks within the
county, black children in the county either had to leave the county to
receive any education between 1959 and 1963, or received no education.
All private schools in the region remained racially segregated. This
lasted until 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Prince Edward
County's decision to provide tuition grants for private schools that
only admitted whites violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th
Amendment, in the case of Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
North
Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem,
New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the
turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist, even as the
Second Great Migration
caused overcrowding of existing schools. Existing schools tended to be
dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Northern officials
were in denial of the segregation, but Brown helped stimulate activism among African-American parents like Mae Mallory who, with support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and State of New York on Brown's
principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the
pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the
boycott, some of the first Freedom Schools
of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by
permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically-white
schools. (New York's African-American community, and Northern
desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with
the problem of white flight, however.)
Topeka
Judgment and order of the Supreme Court for the case
The Topeka junior high schools had been integrated since 1941. Topeka
High School was integrated from its inception in 1871 and its sports
teams from 1949 onwards. The Kansas law permitting segregated schools allowed them only "below the high school level".
Soon after the district court decision, election outcomes and the
political climate in Topeka changed. The Board of Education of Topeka
began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August
1953, integrating two attendance districts. All the Topeka elementary
schools were changed to neighborhood attendance centers in January 1956,
although existing students were allowed to continue attending their
prior assigned schools at their option.
Plaintiff Zelma Henderson, in a 2004 interview, recalled that no
demonstrations or tumult accompanied desegregation in Topeka's schools:
"They accepted it ... It wasn't too long until they integrated the
teachers and principals."
The Topeka Public Schools administration building is named in honor of McKinley Burnett, NAACP chapter president who organized the case.
Monroe Elementary was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on October 26, 1992, and redesignated a National Historical Park on May 12, 2022.
The intellectual roots of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation in 1896 under the doctrine of "separate but equal" were, in part, tied to the scientific racism of the era. However, the popular support for the decision was more likely a result of the racist beliefs held by many whites at the time. In deciding Brown v. Board of Education,
the Supreme Court rejected the ideas of scientific racists about the
need for segregation, especially in schools. The court buttressed its
holding by citing social science research about the harms to black children caused by segregated schools.
Both scholarly and popular ideas of hereditarianism played an important role in the attack and backlash that followed the Brown decision. Mankind Quarterly was founded in 1960, in part in response to the Brown decision.
William Rehnquist wrote a memo titled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education
decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued: "I realize that it is an
unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated
by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson
was right and should be reaffirmed." Rehnquist continued, "To the
argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its
constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound
in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what
the constitutional rights of the minorities are." Rehnquist also argued for Plessy with other law clerks.
However, during his 1971 confirmation hearings, Rehnquist said,
"I believe that the memorandum was prepared by me as a statement of
Justice Jackson's tentative views for his own use." Jackson had
initially planned to join a dissent in Brown.
Later, at his 1986 hearings for the slot of Chief Justice, Rehnquist
put further distance between himself and the 1952 memo: "The bald
statement that Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed, was not an
accurate reflection of my own views at the time." In any event, while serving on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist made no effort to reverse or undermine the Brown decision, and frequently relied upon it as precedent.
Chief Justice Warren's reasoning was broadly criticized by contemporary legal academics with Judge Learned Hand decrying that the Supreme Court had "assumed the role of a third legislative chamber" and Herbert Wechsler finding Brown impossible to justify based on neutral principles.
Some aspects of the Brown decision are still debated. Notably, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, himself an African American, wrote in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995) that at the very least, Brown I has been misunderstood by the courts.
Brown I did not say that
"racially isolated" schools were inherently inferior; the harm that it
identified was tied purely to de jure segregation, not de facto
segregation. Indeed, Brown I itself did not need to rely upon any
psychological or social-science research in order to announce the
simple, yet fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate
among its citizens on the basis of race. …
Segregation was not unconstitutional because it might have caused
psychological feelings of inferiority. Public school systems that
separated blacks and provided them with superior educational resources
making blacks "feel" superior to whites sent to lesser schools—would
violate the Fourteenth Amendment, whether or not the white students felt
stigmatized, just as do school systems in which the positions of the
races are reversed. Psychological injury or benefit is irrelevant …
Given that desegregation has not produced the predicted leaps forward in
black educational achievement, there is no reason to think that black
students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own
race as when they are in an integrated environment. (…) Because of their
"distinctive histories and traditions," black schools can function as
the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of
independent black leadership, success, and achievement.
Some Constitutional originalists, notably Raoul Berger in his influential 1977 book "Government by Judiciary," make the case that Brown cannot be defended by reference to the original understanding of the 14th Amendment. They support this reading of the 14th Amendment by noting that the Civil Rights Act of 1875
did not ban segregated schools and that the same Congress that passed
the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate schools in the District of
Columbia. Other originalists, including Michael W. McConnell, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in his article "Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions," argue that the Radical Reconstructionists who spearheaded the 14th Amendment were in favor of desegregated southern schools.
Evidence supporting this interpretation of the 14th Amendment has come
from archived Congressional records showing that proposals for federal
legislation which would enforce school integration were debated in
Congress a few years following the amendment's ratification.
In response to Michael McConnell's research, Raoul Berger argued
that the Congressmen and Senators who were advocating in favor of school
desegregation in the 1870s were trying to rewrite the 14th Amendment in
order to make the 14th Amendment fit their political agenda and that
the actual understanding of the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 (which
is when the 14th Amendment was actually passed and ratified) does, in
fact, permit US states to have segregated schools.
Berger criticized McConnell for being unable to find any reference to
school segregation—let alone any reference to a desire to prohibit
it—among supporters of the 14th Amendment in the congressional history of this amendment (specifically in the recordings of the 39th United States Congress,
since that was the US Congress that actually passed the 14th Amendment)
and also criticized McConnell's view that the 1954 view of "civil
rights" should be decisive in interpreting the 14th Amendment as opposed
to the 1866 view of "civil rights." Berger also argues that McConnell failed to provide any evidence that the state legislatures
who ratified the 14th Amendment understood it at the time as
prohibiting school segregation and that whenever the question of school
segregation's compatibility with the US Constitution (as opposed to the
separate question of school segregation's compatibility with US state
law and/or US state constitutions,
where courts have often ruled against school segregation) reached the
judiciary in the couple of decades after the passage and ratification of
the 14th Amendment (whether in Ohio, Nevada, California, Indiana, or New York), courts have always affirmed the constitutionality of school segregation—as did Michigan Supreme CourtChief JusticeThomas M. Cooley in his 1880 treatiseThe General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America.
In addition, Berger argues that the views of the draftsmen of the 14th
Amendment in 1866 are decisive—as opposed to the views of later readers
of the 14th Amendment (including the views of supporters of the 14th
Amendment after this amendment's passage and ratification due to the
fact that even their views and beliefs about the meaning and scope of
this Amendment could and sometimes did change over time—like with Nevada U.S. SenatorWilliam Morris Stewart, who initially opposed school desegregation but later changed his mind and supported it). To back up his view about original intent being decisive, Berger cites—among other things—an 1871 quote by James A. Garfield to John Bingham
where Garfield challenged Bingham's recollection of a statement that
Bingham had previously made in 1866—with Garfield telling Bingham that
he can make but not unmake history.
The case also has attracted some criticism from more liberal
authors, including some who say that Chief Justice Warren's reliance on
psychological criteria to find a harm against segregated blacks was
unnecessary. For example, Drew S. Days III has written:
"we have developed criteria for evaluating the constitutionality of
racial classifications that do not depend upon findings of psychic harm
or social science evidence. They are based rather on the principle that
'distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by
their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded
upon the doctrine of equality,' Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943). . . ."
In his book The Tempting of America (page 82), Robert Bork endorsed the Brown decision as follows:
By 1954, when Brown came up for
decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if
ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the
physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those
provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of
cases … The Court's realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon
the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation
in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice
would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no
possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were
mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that,
both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court
must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose
that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before
the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
In June 1987, Philip Elman,
a civil rights attorney who served as an associate in the Solicitor
General's office during Harry Truman's term, claimed he and Associate
Justice Felix Frankfurter were mostly responsible for the Supreme
Court's decision, and stated that the NAACP's arguments did not present
strong evidence.
Elman has been criticized for offering a self-aggrandizing history of
the case, omitting important facts, and denigrating the work of civil
rights attorneys who had laid the groundwork for the decision over many
decades. However, Frankfurter was also known for being one of court's most outspoken advocates of the judicial restraint philosophy of basing court rulings on existing law rather than personal or political considerations.
Public officials in the United States today are nearly unanimous in
lauding the ruling. In May 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the ruling,
President George W. Bush spoke at the opening of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, calling Brown "a decision that changed America for the better, and forever." Most Senators and Representatives issued press releases hailing the ruling.
In a 2016 article in Townhall.com, an outlet of the Salem Media Group, economist Thomas Sowell argued that when Chief Justice Earl Warren declared in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education that racially separate schools were "inherently unequal," Dunbar High School
was a living refutation of that assumption. And it was within walking
distance of the Supreme Court." In Sowell's estimation, "Dunbar, which
had been accepting outstanding black students from anywhere in the city,
could now accept only students from the rough ghetto neighborhood in
which it was located" as a detrimental consequence of the SCOTUS
decision.
Brown II
In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools
requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their
decision, which became known as "Brown II"
the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to
district courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all
deliberate speed," a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven".
Supporters of the earlier decision were displeased with this
decision. The language "all deliberate speed" was seen by critics as too
ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste for compliance with the court's
instruction. Many Southern states and school districts interpreted
"Brown II" as legal justification for resisting, delaying, and avoiding
significant integration for years—and in some cases for a decade or
more—using such tactics as closing down school systems, using state
money to finance segregated "private" schools, and "token" integration
where a few carefully selected black children were admitted to former
white-only schools but the vast majority remained in underfunded,
unequal black schools.
For example, based on Brown II, the U.S. District Court ruled that Prince Edward County, Virginia
did not have to desegregate immediately. When faced with a court order
to finally begin desegregation in 1959 the county board of supervisors
stopped appropriating money for public schools, which remained closed
for five years, from 1959 to 1964.
White students in the county were given assistance to attend
white-only "private academies" that were taught by teachers formerly
employed by the public school system, while black students had no
education at all unless they moved out of the county. But the public
schools reopened after the Supreme Court overturned "Brown II" in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County,
declaring that "...the time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out"
and that the county must provide a public school system for all children
regardless of race.
Brown III
In 1978, Topeka attorneys Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson and Charles Scott Jr. (son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith—who now had her own children in Topeka schools—to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown.
They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open
enrollment" had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also
believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would
shift their children to "preferred" schools that would create both
predominantly African-American and predominantly European-American
schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown
case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs' request finding
the schools "unitary". In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on a 2–1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District's request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit's mandate.
After a 1994 plan was approved and a bond issue passed,
additional elementary magnet schools were opened and district attendance
plans redrawn, which resulted in the Topeka schools meeting court
standards of racial balance by 1998. Unified status was eventually
granted to Topeka Unified School District No. 501 on July 27, 1999. One of the new magnet schools is named after the Scott family attorneys for their role in the Brown case and civil rights.
Other comments
A PBS film called Simple Justice retells the story of the Brown vs. Board of Education
case, beginning with the work of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund's
efforts to combat 'separate but equal' in graduate school education and
culminating in the historical 1954 decision.
...we lived in an integrated
neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different
nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to
go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember
walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the
steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And
I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went
into the inner office with the principal and they left me out ... to sit
outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I
could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the
conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office,
took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn't
understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to
go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.
Linda Brown died on March 25, 2018, at the age of 75.
