The Disability History of Brown v. Board of Education

Authors

Britney R. Wilson, New York Law SchoolFollow

Abstract

In 1952, two years before the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education, Black deaf students in Washington, D.C., who had been prohibited from attending the local school for white deaf students and forced to go to school in Maryland, won the right to be educated in their hometowns in Miller v. Board of Education of District of Columbia. Brown is heralded as one of the most important racial justice cases of all time. It overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s longstanding “separate but equal” mandate and ruled that the segregation of students based on race violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, less is known about Brown’s connection to disability history. Beyond the obvious similarities between Miller and Brown, the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs in Miller also represented the plaintiffs in Bolling v. Sharpe, one of the five companion cases that ultimately comprised Brown v. Board of Education. Additionally, one of the named plaintiffs in Gebhart v. Belton, another one of the Brown companion cases, challenged the segregation of Delaware schools so that her daughter, who had a heart condition, would not have to travel several miles to attend the only high school in the state for Black students.

Yet, when most civil rights legal scholars discuss the history of Brown, its disability history is not part of the story. Additionally, when disability legal scholars discuss Brown, the primary conversation concerns Brown as a precedent for the right of students with disabilities to be educated in integrated settings with nondisabled students, not the role of disability in Brown itself.

This Article uses Miller and Gebhart to challenge what I call the Black civil rights-disability rights binary—the traditional characterization of “Black civil rights” and “disability rights” as separate and chronological movements—found in legal scholarship and advocacy. It situates Miller within the context of other key cases whose incremental precedents set the stage for the victory in Brown. Using case filings and other primary sources, it also examines civil rights attorneys’ advocacy for racial equality on behalf of Black disabled students considering the attitudes towards race at the time, let alone the attitudes towards other marginalized identities like disability. This Article concludes that the recognition of the disability history of a prominent civil rights case like Brown adds important nuance to the story of desegregation. Its absence helps explain the often-critiqued challenges to intersectional organizing and reveals important lessons for the improved inclusion of disability in civil rights advocacy more broadly.

Recommended Citation

Britney R. Wilson, The Disability History of Brown v. Board of Education, 32 Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. 1 (2026).
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol32/iss1/3