Bolling V. Sharpe - Background

Background

Beginning in late 1949, a group of parents from the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, DC, calling themselves the Consolidated Parents Group, petitioned the Board of Education of the District of Columbia to open the nearly completed John Phillip Sousa Junior High as an integrated school. The school board denied the petition and the school opened, admitting only whites. On September 11, 1950, Gardner Bishop, Nicholas Stabile and the Consolidated Parents Group attempted to get eleven African-American students (including the case's plaintiff, Spottswood Bolling) admitted to the school, but were refused entry by the school's principal.

James Nabrit, a professor of law at the historically black Howard University, filed suit on behalf of Bolling and the other students in the District Court for the District of Columbia seeking assistance in the students' admission. When the court dismissed the claim, the case was granted a writ of certiorari by the Supreme Court. It's worth noting that while Nabrit's argument in Bolling rested on the unconstitutionality of segregation, the much more famous Brown v. Board of Education (decided on the same day) argued that the idea of 'separate but equal' facilities mandated by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) was a fallacy as the facilities for black students were woefully inadequate. Though the schools attended by the plaintiffs of Bolling were certainly in exceedingly poor shape, that issue was not addressed. The lead attorney for Bolling was George Edward Chalmer Hayes.