Brown V. Board: The Landmark Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court

The transcripts, never before available to the general reading public, of “the most important American governmental act of any kind since the Emancipation Proclamation” (Louis Pollack, Yale University)

Brown v. Board of Education sparked a revolution in race relations that transformed America’s social and political landscape. Argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, the case was a historic encounter between the forces of racial segregation and the burgeoning civil rights movement. The resulting decision, which outlawed segregation in public schools, set the stage for decades of legal and political disputes that have yet to be resolved.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the decision, The New Press is publishing the transcripts of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Brown case. Never before available to a general reading audience, the Brown transcripts are among the most revealing documents of contemporary history, with a cast of characters—Thurgood Marshall, Hugo Black, and Felix Frankfurter—that includes some of the towering legal and political figures of the past century.