ABSTRACT
The separate-but-equal doctrine threw a cloak of constitutional respectability around six decades of unbridled discrimination against black Americans. Texas prohibited interracial boxing matches. Florida prohibited white and black students from using the same textbooks. An aspiring black law student sued and in 1938 the Supreme Court ordered Missouri to either build a law school for blacks or let the black man into the white school. The University of Oklahoma tried another approach. It admitted black applicant George McLaurin to the graduate program in education, but required him to sit in a “coloreds only” section in all of his classes, to study at a segregated table in the university library and to eat at a segregated table in the cafeteria. William H. Rehnquist, the current chief justice, was a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson when the court first heard the Brown case. Rehnquist wrote a memo arguing in favor of continuing the separate-but-equal doctrine.
