Talk:Brown v. Board of Education

Semi-protected edit request on 13 May 2021

uests will be declined. -->

}} 64.88.4.225 (talk) 13:44, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Run n Fly (talk) 13:51, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 May 2021

I intend to include additional section within response and aftermath. This will surround the international response to Brown V. Board. WallisH2 (talk) 14:57, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@WallisH2: You put an edit request here. If you intended to, please restart the edit request by changing answered=no to answered=yes. If you didn't, please be careful not to add the edit request when adding to talk pages. Thanks! :) --Ferien (talk) 18:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@Ferien: I think that should be "change 'answered=yes' to 'answered=no'". Am I wrong? Fabrickator (talk) 18:32, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@Fabrickator: oops, I meant the other way round. My bad. --Ferien (talk) 18:35, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Huxman Findings of Fact

Failing to mention Judge Huxman's "findings of fact" at the appeals levelis a serious omission. Without that, things would quite likely have gone the other way at the Supreme Court. These findings included the detrimental effect of a segregated education upon the children. This is arguably the linchpin on which the Supreme Court decision was made.

This brief newspaper account mentions it. Other sources provide the full set of "findings of fact", explaining why the appeals court had to rule the way it did, while handing this case to the Supreme Court with the facts that would justify overturning Plessey v. Ferguson. Yet there is absolutely no mention of this in the article.

Adding this link to view Huxman's opinion of the Tenth Circuit Court case. Fabrickator (talk) 23:18, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

That's not a Tenth Circuit decision. It's the trial decision from the District of Kansas that was appealed directly to SCOTUS under the old version of 28 U.S.C. § 2284.  White Whirlwind  00:24, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I admit I have been confused about this. I assumed Federal cases would have to go through an appeals court before they could be heard by the supreme court? And as well, I had assumed that a 3-judge panel indicated it was at the appeals level.

So to clarify, because this case raised constitutional issues, it was initially heard by a 3-judge panel and then they could request a writ of certiorari for it to be heard by the Supreme Court. Is that right? But these are old rules and no longer apply? Am I close? Fabrickator (talk) 00:55, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

In the past, the Supreme Court had much less say in the cases it took than it does today. Many cases could be appealed to the Supreme Court as a matter of right. During the late 19th century, Congress passed a law saying that certain types of cases could be heard by a panel of three judges immediately upon being filed in the trial court. These cases could be appealed directly to the Supreme Court as a matter of right. No certiorari was involved. You can identify these cases because the prior history will say "probable jurisdiction noted" instead of "cert. granted". One type of case that could be heard this way was any action in which the constitutionality of a state or federal law was challenged. Congress removed those types of cases from the statute in 1976. Only a small subset of cases still work this way, as you can see from § 2284(a).  White Whirlwind  04:57, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

New "Issues" in Decision section

@Fabrickator: Would you mind describing the new issues you perceived my edits to have introduced? I thought my edits were quite minor.  White Whirlwind  05:57, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

@White whirlwind: I will admit to having a bias to give some deference to the existing text. I think that's the right position to have. For better or worse, the smallest change (particularly to such a consequential article) is likely to be examined in some detail by a fair number of people, and just because a change appears to be minor doesn't mean that it will be easy to properly analyze its impact.

I presume that you believe these changes provide a meaningful improvement, I think this is not actually the case. So compare...

The Brown Court did not address this issue, however, probably because some of the school districts [had "equalized" black and white schools].

vs.

The Court's decision did not address this issue, most likely because some of the school districts [had "equalized" black and white schools].

What are the subtle ramifications of these two wordings? That "court" doesn't need to be qualified by "Brown"? That the justices might have actually discussed it while deciding that this discussion should be omitted from the written opinion?

In the second version, it kind of puts the responsibility on the decision itself, rather than on the court itself. Of course it's not unusual to personify a "decision" in this way, but why let the "decision" be in control when the pre-existing wording already puts the "court" properly in control?

... even hearing a second round of oral arguments from the parties' lawyers specifically on the historical sources—but to no avail.

... even hearing a second round of oral arguments from the parties' lawyers specifically on history—but to no avail.

I suppose that "historical sources" may leave one wondering just which sources, but cutting this down to "history" makes it even more vague. Fabrickator (talk) 07:25, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for elaborating. Allow me to respond. First, I now understand your argument about having the agent be the Court, rather than the decision. But why revert to "the Brown Court"? What other court would it have been? The one from Roe v. Wade 20 years in the future that time-traveled to the present? If you want to emphasize that it was the justices in the majority, surely the better change is "the Court" instead of reverting to "Brown Court". Second, regarding "historical sources", neither rendition is very good. We should probably specify that the sources the Court was examining were the Amendment's legislative history, and its goal was to see if an original intent regarding schools was discernible. I just worry about being too wordy.  White Whirlwind  08:35, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

If you'll notice, I recently (i.e. in the last day or two) made an observation on this talk page that there is no mention of Walter Huxman's contribution to the Brown v. Board decision (Huxman being the judge who wrote the opinion of the appeals court in this case). Now why do I mention that here?

It's because this is an astounding omission. The quote ascribed to Earl Warren is what Huxman included as one of the nine "findings of fact" that was incorporated into that opinion. I can't say it enough: This is an astounding omission!

And why that is relevant here is because you've bothered to make highly insignificant changes, and made additional efforts trying to defend these changes (whereas my position in objecting to these insignificant changes is that changes of this nature, changes which are highly subjective as to whether there is an improvement, and at best this is an improvement of the smallest magnitude, I'm trying to take the position of "first do no harm").

So agree with me or not about whether your own changes are an improvement, there is really (IMO, of course) no room for doubt about the vastness of this omission regarding Huxman. So please, check this out. Please add this to the article. Failing to give Huxman credit, it's not just a vast injustice to Huxman, its omission makes this whole article a lie. That is a change where you can hardly go wrong as long as you just get the facts fairly straight. Fabrickator (talk) 12:16, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

None of the major sources I've consulted mention Huxman at all. It would have violated the WP:DUE aspect of WP:NPOV to mention him. If you can find some good sources that mention him, we can mention him to the extent that those major sources do. Our personal opinions on these matters are mostly irrelevant.  White Whirlwind  20:04, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

This is no personal opinion. Here is one source: A Historical and Social Perspective on Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka with Present and Future Implications:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of the law, therefore, has a tendency to (retard) the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of-the benefits they would receive in a racialy [sic] integrated school system.

The Supreme Court opinion quotes the specific finding of fact that's included in Huxman's opinion. This is all online, if you make the effort to find it, and it's from sources you cannot dismiss, whether that's the official court opinion, newspaper reports (available at Chronicling America), or sites dedicated to reporting the Brown v. Board case (see, for instance: https://www.famous-trials.com/brownvtopeka/658-brownhuxman ). Fabrickator (talk) 22:26, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Ok, then add a brief mention. I'd personally recommend staying away from "famous-trials.com", from its name I suspect it might have WP:RS problems. I mainly stick to legal treatises, with the occasional law review article or monograph from a major journal or press thrown in. I take RS very seriously.

By the way, what "opinion of the appeals court" are you referencing? There was no intermediate appellate decision in Brown.  White Whirlwind  23:10, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

@White whirlwind:I don't want to improve on your changes, I want to discourage changes that don't even make a "subjective" improvement. We should avoid changing the text when it doesn't constitute an improvement, and we shoud obviously avoid changes that make the text worse, which is at least arguably the case with this set of changes. Fabrickator (talk) 22:21, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

I disagree, but the changes are so minor that I don't think it's worth arguing over so I'll move on.  White Whirlwind  06:13, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Mention of railway cars has been deleted

An edit comment complained that Plessy v. Ferguson was linked in numerous places in the article, why should it be linked so late in the article (Special:diff/old/1082725522), and thus removed the link.

I wondered what the article looked like when before all these many other links were added ... see the revision of 4 April 2005.

With the recent edit, the article does not have any mention of railway cars.

Does that matter? I'm not here to consider the philosophical question that perhaps separate but equal is less egregious in railway cars than it is in schools, but it's a relevant fact of the case, so for those who take the trouble to look at the talk page, you are now aware of this deleted fact. Fabrickator (talk) 23:07, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

This article is about Brown v Board, not Plessy v Ferguson. It would be outside the scope of this article's topic to add too much detail about the Plessy case. Readers can go to the Plessy article for that. SamWilson989 (talk) 23:11, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

@SamWilson989: I think your response counts as "begging the question", e.g. you have to assert that including this point of information would in fact be excessive detail. You've had most of the last 20 years to point out this alleged defect, and yet failed to do so. You can't reasonably claim you didn't have time to check this article for such excess detail sooner, since you had the time to come up with this highly dubious justification. Fabrickator (talk) 11:41, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with SamWilson989. The railway cars in Plessy have no significant relevance to this article. Also, SamWilson made no mention of "not having time to check the article". I do not know why one would bring that up.  White Whirlwind  18:55, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I figured that if the mention of the railway cars were actually irrelevant, then this should have been mentioned long before 20 years. (In other cases, I've seen people claim that a change constitutes consensus when nobody has objected to the change after a couple of weeks. Who's really right?) It is mentioned several times in the article that the court found that "separate but equal" did not apply in the field of public education. Left to their own imagination, people who don't check the Plessy case will be likely to make some assumption that's almost surely incorrect.

When they make the wrong assumption, I presume you will say it's their own fault. But this is like putting the burden on students of figuring out what material they're responsible for in a course... if you're a good student, you'll figure this out on your own. And you'd be right! A sufficiently diligent reader would realize that there was a "missing gap" and check on the details of Plessy before continuing on. But Wikipedia isn't offered up as a challenge to identify the holes in a story, it's supposed to be something which presents the material facts of the topic in a non-puzzling way, and given that Plessy had a different result than Brown, that difference would certainly seem to be a material fact. Fabrickator (talk) 21:07, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

If you think a change is needed, just succinctly suggest a concrete edit.  White Whirlwind  08:25, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Proposed change: In the edit of 14 April 2022 (and which had been initially added in the edit of 8 January 2003), reinsert the text

which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars

which that edit had deleted. Fabrickator (talk) 15:16, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Oh, that's great. From your mention of railway cars and your other comments, it wasn't clear to me that you really just wanted a brief description of Plessy and its holding. I think your suggested edit would be a perfectly reasonable addition here. Do you agree, SamWilson989?  White Whirlwind  18:06, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

I support this change. I think its succinct enough to not distract from the topic of the article. Cheers, @Fabrickator. I appreciate you both waiting for my reply! SamWilson989 (talk) 19:30, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm just seeing the replies on this talk page now so I'll reply to the whole thing in a second. However, I wanted to make a point about this specific comment: "You've had most of the last 20 years to point out this alleged defect, and yet failed to do so." I think it's important to remember as Wiki editors that there is no deadline. If we see something that could be improved, it doesn't matter how long it's stayed unimproved or incorrect. And no editor is under any obligation to keep a watchful eye over every single article. You asked for comment, I gave my view. Sure, it's been there since 2003 but that doesn't matter if it shouldn't stay on its own merits. This is why AfD exists and often deletes articles that have been up for over a decade. But I digress, I'll reply to the actual discussion further down the page. Appreciate your patience. SamWilson989 (talk) 19:27, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Good Article Reassessment

Brown v. Board of Education

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • GAN review not found

Result: No consensus. Good articles are not even required to have one citation per paragraph, as this article has general references (see WP:GACN). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

A GA from 2007. The biggest problem is the massive amount of unsourced material in the article that, if not taken care, will result in the article's delisting. Hopefully someone can work on this. Onegreatjoke (talk) 03:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Also a Vital Article (L5) and should be promoted there. Gusfriend (talk) 10:54, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I placed a 'catch all' notice on the talk page. There are a large number of Vital articles being reassessed and it wouldn't be worth cluttering their talk page. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 03:29, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

It's hard to say and I believe that the article could be better. There are citations at the end of most paragraphs but usually high quality essays will have a citation at the end of each statement. I do not know if it should be delisted by Wikipedia standards but it could use some additional work. Jorahm (talk) 19:39, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

@Jorahm: if everything in the paragraph supported by the citation given, that's fine by Wikipedia standards. You do not need to repeat the same citation multiple times within a paragraph. That if is a big if for some articles; some people put a citation at the end of the paragraph that only supports the last sentence, and forget to put a citation needed tag for the rest of the paragraph. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 14:21, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I am just unclear on how much research is needed for a good article. Citing an entire paragraph to a single source might not be enough in my opinion. It's an area for potential improvement but I am not sure if it would trigger a full review process. Jorahm (talk) 18:17, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 25 March 2023

Brown v. Board of Education → Brown v. Bd. of Educ. – Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal, the title of this case should follow Bluebook format which mandates these abbreviations. Other pages have recently been moved per this guide. See Nat'l R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Boston & Me. Corp.; Zippo Mfg. Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, Inc.; and Mt. Healthy City Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Doyle. Consistency is needed. See title policy (stating that topic-specific naming conventions must be followed). Joesom333 (talk) 18:52, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Steel1943 (talk) 19:44, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

  I went ahead and created Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka as a redirect though. Steel1943 (talk) 20:03, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

  The fact that a redirect didn't already exist is clear evidence that the proposed title is not the common name. Rreagan007 (talk) 20:06, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

  @Rreagan007: May want to look at the nomination again: The nominator updated the template, but never fixed the actual nomination ... which I did a few edits ago, and even then considered {{Db-g7}}-ing the redirect I created. Steel1943 (talk) 20:09, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME and WP:RECOGNIZABILITY. Standard Bluebook formatting is fine for most legal case article titles, but not this one. This case is too widely known by the general public and recognizable as the current title to force this type of title formatting just for the sake of consistency with other completely unrelated articles. Britannica also uses Brown v. Board of Education as their article title. Rreagan007 (talk) 19:57, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

  Do you think that an exception applies? Joesom333 (talk) 21:35, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

  It's not a matter of WP:IAR, but rather which policy has a stronger case here, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal or WP:COMMONNAME ... but what is ironic here is that Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal#Article titles in the very first sentence states to use WP:COMMONNAME for article titles. Steel1943 (talk) 22:08, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

• Strong oppose, because of the prominence of this case outside of the legal field, WP:COMMONNAME applies.Esolo5002 (talk) 19:58, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose based on what we have seen the current title is clearly the common name and the guideline used to support the rename actually recommends using the common name for titles meaning the main argument for the rename is inaccurate.--70.24.249.205 (talk) 22:48, 25 March 2023 (UTC)