Spottswood bolling biography of michael

1954 United States Supreme Court case

Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), is a landmarkUnited States Supreme Courtcase in which the Court held that the Constitution prohibits segregated public schools in the District of Columbia. Originally argued on December 10–11, 1952, a year before Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling was reargued on December 8–9, 1953, and was unanimously decided on May 17, 1954, the same day as Brown. The Bolling decision was supplemented in 1955 with the second Brown opinion, which ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed". In Bolling, the Court did not address school desegregation in the context of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which applies only to the states, but rather held that school segregation was unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court observed that the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution lacked an Equal Protection Clause, as in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, the Court held that the concepts of equal protection and due process are not mutually exclusive, establishing the reverse incorporation doctrine.

Background

In Carr v. Corning (1950), the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (with Judges Bennett Champ Clark, Henry White Edgerton, and E. Barrett Prettyman presiding) affirmed a ruling of the District of Columbia U.S. District Court that upheld school segregation in the District citing seven laws passed by Congress from 1862 through 1874 that had segregated the District of Columbia Public Schools. Under Article I, Section VIII of the U.S. Constitution, "Congress shall have the power ... [t]o exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District ... as may, by Cession of particular States... become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over

WikiTree is a community of genealogists — including 67 Bolling genealogists and amateur family historians — dedicated to growing an accurate collaborative family tree that's 100% free and accessible to everyone forever.   Please join us.

The story of activist youth in the United States is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied.

In 1951, students at R. R. Moton High School in rural Virginia led a student walkout and contacted the law firm of Hill, Martin, and Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, to file one of the five pivotal court cases that comprised the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, twenty-four Burke High School students in Charleston, South Carolina, organized the first direct action, nonviolent protest in the city at the downtown S. H. Kress department store. Months later in the small town of McComb, Mississippi, an entire high school walked out in protest of the conviction of a student who sat-in on a local Woolworth lunch counter in 1961, guiding the agenda for the historic Freedom Summer campaign of 1964.

A New Kind of Youth brings high school activism into greater focus, illustrating how Black youth supported liberatory social and political movements and inspired their elders across the South. [Adapted from publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781469671390 | University of North Carolina Press

“No one knows how much trouble we went through out here in southeast Washington trying to get suitable facilities for our children,” Luberta Jennings told the Washington Afro-American on May 18, 1954, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools.

Indeed, the Jennings family had been on the front lines of the fight for equality in Washington for the better part of four years. In the summer of 1950, Luberta and her husband, James, members of Campbell AME Church in Anacostia, had joined the Consolidated Parent Group’s grassroots effort to desegregate District schools.

The Jennings had signed up two of their children, Adrienne and Barbara, to be among the group of students who would attempt to enroll at the all-white John Philip Sousa High School in September 1950. The students were turned away because of the color of their skin, and Adrienne and Barbara were soon listed as two of the plaintiffs of the Bolling v. Sharpe case that would go on to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Most chronologies of this story often leave off at the Supreme Court decision, a nice bow-on-top finish to a long struggle against segregation, but in reality, the process of integrating the schools was far from over.

“A Great Day for DC”

On the fateful day of the Supreme Court decision, Adrienne Jennings was in class at Spingarn High School when the news broke, and when she returned home her mother told her “this was a great day for DC.”

Spottswood Bolling, whose name would be burnished into history by the landmark case, avoided the press for years while the case was being litigated. On the day of the verdict, Bolling was pulled out of class unexpectedly and told to go home early. He feared something had happened to his mother. “When a teacher explained that he had, in name at least, won one of the most important Supreme Court cases in history and that nothing was wrong at home, Spottswood was relieved and disinterested.”

W