Bolling v. Sharpe: The School Case Nobody Knows

In September of nineteen fifty, twelve-year-old Spottswood Bolling Junior and eleven other Black students from Anacostia walked to the brand-new John Philip Sousa Junior High School near their homes. The building had just opened. It had a gymnasium and a cafeteria, which their own school, Shaw Junior High, did not have. They asked to enroll.

They were turned away because they were Black.

Four years later, on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty-four, the Supreme Court decided Brown versus Board of Education, the landmark ruling that declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. On the same day, in a companion decision, the Court also decided Bolling versus Sharpe. Almost nobody outside constitutional law knows the second case.

The difference matters. Brown versus Board addressed segregated schools in Kansas under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, which prohibits states from denying equal protection of the laws. The Fourteenth Amendment applies to states, not the federal government. Washington DC is not a state. Its schools were, in nineteen fifty-four, directly controlled by Congress.

So the lawyers who brought Bolling versus Sharpe, arguing before the Court on behalf of Spottswood Bolling Junior, had to make a different constitutional argument. They invoked the Fifth Amendment's due process clause, the provision that applies to the federal government, and argued that maintaining racially segregated schools in the capital violated it. James Nabrit Junior of Howard University Law School argued the case. The Supreme Court agreed.

Spottswood Bolling Junior grew up in Anacostia. The school he was turned away from, John Philip Sousa Junior High, still stands. The companion case that changed the law for the federal government, and by extension its capital, bears his name, not the school's.