Brown II Orders Desegregation with "All Deliberate Speed," Enabling Decade of Resistance

On May 31, 1955, one year after declaring school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court issued Brown II, its implementation ruling. Rather than setting firm deadlines or providing specific remedies, the Court ordered desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed” and delegated enforcement to local federal district courts. This vague mandate became the legal loophole through which Southern states sustained segregation for more than a decade.

The phrase “all deliberate speed” originated in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s suggestion, drawn from a 1911 opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Court believed gradual implementation would reduce resistance and allow for orderly transition. Instead, Southern officials interpreted “deliberate” as permission for indefinite delay and “speed” as optional.

NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall had argued for a firm deadline—he proposed September 1956 for all schools to begin desegregation. The Court rejected this approach, instead establishing a multi-factor test allowing local courts to consider “varied local school problems” in fashioning remedies. This effectively gave segregationist officials authority to define the pace of their own compliance.

The results were catastrophic for Black students awaiting equal education. By the 1964-65 school year—a decade after Brown II—only 2.3% of Black students in the eleven former Confederate states attended school with white students. In Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina, fewer than 1% of Black students were in desegregated schools. Virginia closed entire school systems rather than integrate. Some districts remained segregated until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Brown II demonstrated how seemingly neutral procedural decisions—deference to local authority, flexible timelines, case-by-case adjudication—could systematically undermine substantive constitutional rights. The “all deliberate speed” formula provided legal cover for massive resistance while appearing to affirm Brown’s principles, a template for procedural obstruction of civil rights that would recur in voting rights, housing discrimination, and other contexts.