In a matter of hours after first coming to the Supreme Court, I learned more about the important cases that were lumped as the school desegregation cases.

There were five of them, from Kansas, Virginia. South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. While the latter was in a somewhat different setting because it did not involve a state law, they all involved the “separate but equal” doctrine as established by the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v, Ferguson (1896). That decision declined to prohibit separate railroad accommodations for blacks and whites. It sought to justify racial segregation for almost every movement or gathering so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided, and it became known as the “Jim Crow” doctrine. The central issue in each of these school cases was,

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?

The five cases had been argued during the 1952 term before I came to the Court but had not been decided and had been put over for re-argument, with a set of specific questions for discussion.

The United States government, through Assistant Attorney General J. Lee Rankin, supported by a brief signed also by Attorney General Herbert Brownell and other Justice Department attorneys, argued as a friend of the Court in favor of the positions maintained by the black students’ lawyers. The first case was argued December 7, 1953, and it was easy to understand why the Court felt it necessary to have a full complement of Justices. Resubmission of the case for argument would normally indicate a difference of opinion within the Court. In these circumstances, particularly if any Justice is absent or disqualifies himself, the danger exists of an evenly divided, four-to-four Court, which means that the decision of the lower court is affirmed without opinion from the Supreme Court and without any precedential value.

Some of the cases under review had been decided against the black petitioners in the lower courts on the authority of the much eroded “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.

To have affirmed these cases without decision and with the mere statement that it was being done by an equally divided Court, if such had been the case, would have aborted the judicial process and resulted in public frustration and disrespect for the Court. The Court was thoroughly conscious of the importance of the decision to be arrived at and of the impact it would have on the nation. With this went realization of the necessity for secrecy in our deliberations and for achieving unity, if possible.

We realized that once a person announces he has reached a conclusion, it is more difficult for him to change his thinking, so we decided that we would dispense with our usual custom of formally expressing our individual views at the first conference and would confine ourselves for a time to informal discussion of the briefs, the arguments made at the hearing, and our own independent research on each conference day, reserving our final opinions until the discussions were concluded.

We followed this plan until February, when we felt that we were ready to vote.