After trying a few pending voting-rights cases and a teachers' salary case in Mississippi, in which I supervised and assisted Constance Baker Motley, who had just become a full-time member of the staff in her first trial, I began concentrating on education. By 1950, after the Supreme Court's decisions in Sweatt v. Painter, Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (my first argument before the High Court), qualified blacks were entitled to admission to state university colleges and graduate and professional schools on a basis that left the separate-but-equal doctrine moribund but still alive.

Public school segregation was our next and final target. In approaching this issue it was clear that the Court's rationale for determining whether the facility set aside for blacks at the university level met the requirements of the Plessy doctrine (for example, the black facility would be found lacking on the basis of comparing its alumni against the long line of distinguished alumni of the main institution; the public would perceive the black facility as an inferior academy; and there was a need for free intellectual intercourse) would not be persuasive in seeking to outlaw segregation in primary and secondary schools, where the physical facilities, curriculums, courses of instruction and teaching personnel were supposed to mirror one another. We could prove there were disparities in the physical facilities, but eliminating these deficiencies, though it could result in improvements at the segregated schools, would leave the Plessy doctrine alive and well. We were eager to have "separate but equal" explicitly overruled.

I thought I had found what was needed in a study by Otto Klineberg, a professor in the social science department at Columbia University. He showed that the longer black children migrating from the South to Philadelphia remained in the city's integrated schools, the higher they scored on IQ and intelligence tests administered by school officials. I interpreted this data as evidence that segregation had a deleterious effect on black children's ability to learn.

I went to see Professor Klineberg and told him that we were preparing for a trial in Clarendon County, South Carolina, attacking segregation in its public schools and that his study supported our contention that segregation adversely affected the ability of black children to learn. I asked him to testify as one of our experts. Klineberg said no, but told me about the work of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, both products of Columbia University graduate school, who used dolls to show the impact of discrimination on black children.

The Clarks had founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, a not-for-profit agency for disturbed children and their families. It was the only such agency of its kind in New York, and probably the nation. Mamie ran the center, while Kenneth held professorial rank at City University, teaching courses in psychology.

Their doll test is as follows: African-American children are shown a black and a white doll and asked to indicate which is the good doll and which is the bad doll. African-American children invariably attributed all negative traits to the black doll, all positive ones to the white doll and bonded with the white doll as being most like them. We had Kenneth use the dolls to test the children in the South Carolina case (Briggs v. Elliott) and relate the results as one of our expert witnesses. The Clarks also sat at the counsel table with me in the two other cases I tried, helping me prepare the cross-examination of the state's psychologist and psychiatrist in those cases. I took Jack Greenberg, who had joined the legal staff circa 1948, with me to Topeka to supervise and assist him in trying his first case.

Brown v. Board of Education is the rubric under which the four state cases brought under the Fourteenth Amendment were combined and litigated. I tried Briggs v. Elliott from South Carolina, Brown v. Board of Education from Topeka and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County from Virginia. Jack Greenberg and Louis Redding handled Gebhart v. Belton from Delaware, following the legal strategy formulated by me and utilized in all the NAACP-sponsored cases. In addition, there was a case from the District of Columbia (Bolling v. Sharpe), which was not part of the NAACP litigation, that sought to have segregated educational facilities struck down under the Fifth Amendment.

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