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In a year full of celebrations commemorating the 50 th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Georgetown University Law Center will host an event that focuses specifically on the Supreme Court companion case to Brown – Bolling v. Sharpe – that brought an end to racial segregation in the public schools of Washington, D.C.

The two-day conference, which is supported in part by a grant from The Washington Post, will feature presentations by members of the D.C. community, including D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was a student in Washington at the time. There will also be lectures on other current race and education issues by leading legal scholars. The conference will run Thursday, April 15 and Friday, April 16 and is chaired and organized by Associate Dean for Research T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Professor Susan Low Bloch.

Brief History of the Case:

In the late 1940s, Gardner Bishop and the Consolidated Parents' Group in Anacostia began a campaign to challenge the separate but equal doctrine, and petitioned the D.C. school board to use Sousa Junior High School – a brand-new, all-white school – on an integrated basis as an alternative to the overcrowded and rundown all-black junior high schools in Anacostia. At the beginning of the school term in 1950, Bishop, along with 12-year-old Spottswood Bolling and 11 other African-American school children, presented themselves at the Sousa School , where they were refused admission.

James Nabrit Jr., a professor of law at Howard University (where he would later become president), brought suit on behalf of Bolling and four other plaintiffs against C. Melvin Sharpe, president of the D.C. Board of Education, charging that segregation per se was unconstitutional discrimination. The federal district court dismissed the case on the basis of a prior ruling of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Carr v. Corning that segregated schools were constitutional in the District. Nabrit filed an appeal and was awaiting a hearing when the Supreme Court agreed to consolidate the Bolling case with Brown v. Board of Education and the other segregation cases then pending. The Court handed down its decision in Bolling the same day it decided Brown: May 17, 1954.

Revised April 7, 2004