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At 12:52 in the afternoon on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren began reading the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and the American South understood immediately what it meant, even before Warren reached the conclusion. The decision was nine pages long. It had been written to be readable by a newspaper audience, not just by lawyers — a deliberate choice that Warren made because he understood that this opinion would have to convince the country, not just the legal profession. The key passage arrived without elaborate preamble: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
The reporters at the press table scrambled. The wire services had two versions of a bulletin prepared — one for each possible outcome — and the AP bulletin that moved at 12:57 read: “Supreme Court rules racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.” The ruling had been expected; it had been argued twice before the court, in 1952 and again in December 1953, after Warren replaced the suddenly deceased Fred Vinson. What had not been expected was the unanimity. The 9-0 vote was Warren’s greatest political achievement, reached through months of persuasion behind closed doors, and it was essential: a split decision would have given the South grounds to resist, to argue that the constitutional question was genuinely unsettled. The 9-0 vote was a statement that the question was settled.
What Separate Actually Meant
The case that reached the Supreme Court in 1954 was actually five consolidated cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia — bundled under the Kansas case partly for strategic reasons, because Kansas was not a Deep South state and its inclusion made clear this was not simply a Southern problem. The lead plaintiff in the Kansas case was Oliver Brown, a welder and part-time pastor in Topeka, whose daughter Linda had to travel twenty-one blocks to her Black elementary school though a white school was only seven blocks from their home. Brown’s name went first on the brief alphabetically. The case’s lead attorney was Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who had spent years building the legal strategy that made Brown possible and who would later become the first Black Supreme Court Justice.
The “separate but equal” doctrine it overturned had been established by another May decision fifty-eight years earlier — Plessy v. Ferguson, decided on May 18, 1896, which held that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act was constitutional because separate facilities could be equal. The practical effect of Plessy was to provide constitutional cover for a system that was almost never equal in any material sense: Black schools received less funding, had less experienced teachers, inferior buildings, outdated textbooks. The gap between the rhetoric of “separate but equal” and the reality of separate and systematically unequal was the gap that Marshall documented, case by case, for decades before Brown.
The implementation of Brown proved as difficult as the decision was clean. The follow-up ruling in 1955 — Brown II — ordered desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed,” a phrase that pleased no one and authorized delay. Little Rock came in 1957. The Civil Rights Act came in 1964. The Voting Rights Act in 1965. The legal superstructure of segregation fell, and the social and economic structures it had protected proved harder to dislodge. The opinion Warren read in twelve minutes on May 17, 1954, began a process that is not over.
Twenty-Four Men Under a Buttonwood Tree
On May 17, 1792, twenty-four stockbrokers and merchants gathered beneath a buttonwood tree outside 68 Wall Street in Manhattan and signed the Buttonwood Agreement, establishing the rules for trading securities among themselves and creating what would eventually become the New York Stock Exchange. The agreement was two sentences long. They would deal only with each other. They would charge a minimum commission of one-quarter percent. That was the entire document. The NYSE was founded on seven hundred characters of plain text.
The buttonwood tree (a sycamore) outside 68 Wall Street had been a gathering place for securities traders since at least the early 1790s, when the new U.S. government’s debt instruments — bonds issued to pay off the Revolutionary War — created an active secondary market. Alexander Hamilton, as the first Secretary of the Treasury, had insisted on the government honoring those bonds at full face value, at enormous expense, partly to create exactly this: a functioning financial market that would make the new nation’s credit credible. Hamilton’s fiscal policies created the conditions for the Buttonwood Agreement. The buttonwood tree, whatever its symbolic value, was eventually cut down. The corner of Wall and Broad Streets, where the NYSE building stands today, is not where the original tree was.
The NYSE that grew from those twenty-four signatures is now one of the two largest stock exchanges in the world by market capitalization, trading on the order of a billion shares per day in its busiest periods. The open-outcry trading floor that defined its image for two centuries — the chaos of hand signals and paper slips, the roar of the pit — was largely replaced by electronic trading after 2007. The floor is still there, staffed by Designated Market Makers, and the opening and closing bells are still rung by celebrities and corporate executives, but the actual price discovery happens on servers in Mahwah, New Jersey. The ceremony continues after the substance has migrated elsewhere. This is true of more institutions than it is comfortable to acknowledge.
Erik Satie and the Music That Was Not Furniture
Erik Alfred Leslie Satie was born on May 17, 1866, in Honfleur, in Normandy, and died in 1925, having spent his life being impossible to categorize, which is why every generation rediscovers him. He was the son of a shipping agent who moved to Paris, where Erik was sent at age six to live with grandparents after his mother died. His grandmother’s name was “Sea” — née de la Mer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, was deemed untalented, went back, was deemed hardworking but mediocre, left. He spent years as a café pianist in Montmartre, collaborated with occult societies, befriended Debussy, invented what he called musique d’ameublement — “furniture music,” music designed to be unobtrusive, to blend into the environment rather than demand attention. He is considered a forefather of ambient music. Brian Eno cites him. Philip Glass cites him. John Cage cites him.
The Gymnopédies — three piano pieces composed in 1888, when Satie was twenty-one — are the work most people know, pieces of such transparent simplicity that they have been used in countless films, advertisements, and television scores to convey melancholy, introspection, or vague 3 AM feelings. They are also technically strange: built on parallel fifths and quartal harmonies that violate the rules Satie’s Conservatoire professors tried to teach him, achieving their dreamlike quality partly through “wrong” voicings that somehow feel more right than the correct ones. Satie did not compose them as furniture. He composed them to be listened to. The furniture music was a separate, later project, proposed for an art exhibition where music was to be played loudly during intermissions to prevent the kind of attentive listening Satie otherwise wanted. He walked through the crowd during the performance demanding that people stop listening. They listened anyway. He was furious.
When Satie died, his friends entered his apartment for the first time — he had never allowed visitors — and found it filled with hundreds of identical gray velvet suits (he wore only one outfit, but bought duplicates), dozens of umbrellas, piles of unopened mail, and unperformed compositions written on whatever paper was available. Among them were pieces for four hands that could not be played on a normal piano because the intervals exceeded the span of an octave in each hand simultaneously. Whether these were practical jokes, thought experiments, or simply the output of a man who was not thinking about performance is not clear. Satie would not have been troubled by the ambiguity.
The Morning Massachusetts Changed
On May 17, 2004, at one minute past midnight, the first same-sex marriages in the United States became legal in Massachusetts, following a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the previous November. The court had given the legislature 180 days to act; the legislature failed to act in a way that would have offered civil unions as an alternative; the 180 days expired at midnight on May 17, and the clerk’s offices in Cambridge and other cities opened at midnight to issue marriage licenses. The couples who had been waiting for years, in some cases decades, formed lines that had the quality of a collective exhale.
The Cambridge City Hall opened at 12:01 AM. Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey, together for eighteen years, were first in line and first married. Julie and Hillary Goodridge, plaintiffs in the original case (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health), married at 9 AM. Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed the ruling, noted that he expected a constitutional amendment process to reverse it. The constitutional amendment process did not succeed. Instead the Massachusetts model spread: Connecticut in 2008, Iowa in 2009, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in 2009, and then, by degrees, the rest of the country, culminating in Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015, which established a federal constitutional right.
The distance between the Buttonwood Agreement’s two sentences — a private arrangement among two dozen men about how to trade among themselves — and the Massachusetts marriage equality decision is the distance between law as a compact among the already-powerful and law as a claim on universal dignity. Both are contracts. The question a society asks, in any era, is who gets to be a party to them.
Also on This Day
- 1590: Pope Urban VII dies, having held the papacy for thirteen days — the shortest papal reign in history. He had been elected on September 15 and died on September 27, having never been officially consecrated. He is remembered, if at all, for issuing the first known public smoking ban: a papal edict prohibiting the use of tobacco in any form in church doorways or interiors, under penalty of excommunication. The ban predates most European awareness of tobacco’s health effects by about three centuries. It was about decorum, not health. It was also largely ignored.
- 1900: The Siege of Mafeking ends after 217 days, as British forces relieve the besieged town in South Africa. The relief of Mafeking triggers celebrations in Britain so frenzied that a new word enters the English language: “mafficking,” meaning to celebrate in an exuberant, disorderly way. The town’s defenders had been commanded by Robert Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scouts, partly based on methods he used to keep boys occupied during the siege. The civilian population of Mafeking, predominantly Black, suffered significantly more during the siege than the historical celebration suggests — rations were distributed unequally, and the heroic narrative was built almost entirely around the white garrison.
- 1973: The Senate Watergate Committee begins its televised hearings, bringing the Watergate scandal into American living rooms for the first time. The hearings, broadcast live on ABC, CBS, and NBC, are watched by an estimated 85 percent of American households at some point during their run. The phrase “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” — asked by Senator Howard Baker — becomes the template for every subsequent political scandal’s central question. The hearings lead directly to the discovery of the White House taping system, and the taping system leads directly to Nixon’s resignation fourteen months later.
May 17 keeps presenting variations on the theme of the contract and who is bound by it. The Buttonwood Agreement was a handshake among insiders. Brown v. Board was a claim that the Constitution‘s promises applied to everyone regardless of race. The Massachusetts marriage licenses were a claim that the same applied regardless of whom you loved. Erik Satie signed no agreements and entered no public institutions, which is perhaps why his music has outlasted so many institutions that seemed more permanent. The furniture outlives the house.
Related Articles
- May 18: Mount St. Helens, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the First Anti-Slavery Law in America
- May 15: Mercator Bends the World, L. Frank Baum Opens Oz, and Nylon Stockings Cause a Riot
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What’s the big deal about Brown v. Board of Education?
Brown v. Board ended school segregation in 1954, declaring “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Its simple, direct language made the ruling accessible to all, not just lawyers, and the unanimous vote left no room for Southern resistance—it was a game-changer for civil rights.
Why was the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision so important?
A split vote would’ve let the South argue the issue was unsettled. Chief Justice Warren pushed for unity, and the 9-0 vote silenced dissent. It showed the nation—and the world—that segregation in education was morally and legally dead.
How did the ruling affect people beyond Kansas?
The case bundled five states (Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, D.C.) to highlight segregation as a national crisis. Oliver Brown, the Kansas plaintiff, became a symbol of courage, but the ruling impacted Black families nationwide fighting for equal schools.
Why did Chief Justice Warren write the opinion for the whole country?
Warren made the opinion easy to read so newspapers—and everyday folks—could grasp it. He knew the decision needed to resonate beyond courtrooms. By 12:57 PM, the AP had already declared segregation unconstitutional. It was law, but also a call to action.
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