The NAACP's Early Courtroom Battles for Educational Equality

This paper examines the emergence of the NAACP and its strategies in fighting for equal education in the first three decades of the twentieth century.  Founded at a time when the school litigation of the Reconstruction era had begun to taper off, the NAACP focused on inequality in education from the beginning. The organization’s legal strategy changed to center on integrated schools eventually, but its earliest cases indicate an attempt to obtain a coherent definition of separate but equal schools from the courts. In the Cumming v. Georgia case in 1899, for example, which preceded the NAACP, but became vital to its later legal campaigns, the plaintiffs demanded equality on economic terms. This economic equality demand was understood by the plaintiffs to be intertwined with racial equality, but was interpreted by the Supreme Court in terms of taxation and federalism. The NAACP was able to refine this initial argument into a more successful attempt to gain better funding for black schools. 

In addition to examining the petitions and claims that led to the NAACP cases seeking equal facilities, equal teachers’ pay, and other forms of equality in education during this period, this project also examines a handful of lesser-known education financing cases involving the segregation of Native American, Mexican American and Asian American children.  In requests, letters, and formal legal claims, the sources show a complex understanding of racial and economic inequalities in education on the part of these families that was not addressed or often even acknowledged by the courts or attorneys.  Ultimately, I argue, the failure of many organizations, lawyers, and courts to acknowledge how educational segregation was rooted in both race and class inequalities has contributed to the ongoing crisis of simultaneously underfunded and segregated public schools.