Brown v Board of Education

The court decision that Martin Luther King is referring to is Brown v Board of Education. The Supreme Court actually decided this case along with four other similar cases. The NAACP stretched the decision of this case to its limit, using it as grounds for many other actions. It was famous for overruling the precedent set in Plessy v Ferguson that separate but equal was fair. The court ruled that separate schools for blacks and whites were inherently unequal and  unconstitutional.

Martin Luther King cleverly uses this ruling to show two things: first, that he was not an anarchist, he followed laws that he felt were just, and second, that it was his responsibility to break laws that were unjust. After all, the Supreme Court decision of Brown v Board of Education would never have come about if a law was not broken and then argued before the Supreme Court. The fact that King was writing this from prison and the fact that he followed  just laws points out to the clergymen that he must be in prison because of an unjust law.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

There is more to the Brown v Board of Education decision than a realization by the court that segregation promotes racism, however. In "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative" published in the Stanford Law Journal it is argued that the decision was made to preserve the image of the United States as the pinnacle of democracy around the world. It is important to understand the Civil Rights movement from a global perspective.

    Link to Plessy v Ferguson

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