The Trials
On May 23, 1951, two lawyers from the NAACP, Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, filed suit on behalf of the students against the school district to integrate the schools. The district was represented by T. Justin Moore, Archibald G. (Archie") Robertson and John W. Riely of the Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson, a large Virginia law firm, with its primary office in Richmond (now known as Hunton & Williams). James Lindsay Almond, as Attorney General, represented the Commonwealth of Virginia. The state court ruled against the plaintiffs, who appealed the case to the U.S. District Court.
The students' request was unanimously rejected by a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court. "We have found no hurt or harm to either race," the court ruled. The case was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and consolidated with four other cases from other districts around the country into the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. In it, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public education was, effectively, unconstitutional and illegal.
Read more about this topic: Davis V. County School Board Of Prince Edward County
Famous quotes containing the word trials:
“Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel’s face. Every man deems that he has precisely the trials and temptations which are the hardest of all others for him to bear; but they are so, simply because they are the very ones he most needs.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)
“It is time to provide a smashing answer for those cynical men who say that a democracy cannot be honest, cannot be efficient.... We have in the darkest moments of our national trials retained our faith in our own ability to master our own destiny.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)