One of the remarkable facts about Brown v. Board of Education — the school desegregation case whose 50th anniversary celebrations start this week — is the makeup of the Supreme Court that handed down the decision. The Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, had been elevated by a Republican president on the theory that he was a conservative. The other justices were all white males, and at least one, Hugo Black, was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the nine came to a unanimous decision that the doctrine of separate schools for black pupils and white was inherently unequal and, under the 14th Amendment, unconstitutional. They swept aside an entrenched constitutional precedent and set the stage for the great but unfinished revolution in race relations that, 50 years later, is under way in America.

The story offers many lessons, but certainly one of them is particularly relevant for a country that has spent the last generation feuding over the personal ideological bona fides of judges. Brown is a reminder that the lurches forward in our constitutional law have come not through pre-selection of judges based on ideological tests but through the hard work of litigation. Brown was the triumph of one of the greatest litigators in American history, Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but he stood at the head of dozens, probably hundreds of lawyers, including such famous names as Charles Hamilton Houston, Jack Greenberg, and Spottswood W. Robinson III. They spent years pressing myriad cases from several constitutional perspectives in several states before persuading the nine justices with an argument from which not one would dissent.

The first thing the court noted in handing down its opinion was that the cases came not only from Kansas, home of the lead plaintiff, but also South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. In each case, it said, “minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis.” In each instance, it noted, they had been denied admission under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. In each case, segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of equal protection under the 14th Amendment. In each case, save Delaware, district courts had denied relief on the grounds of “separate but equal,” the standard the court had half a century earlier promulgated in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Behind each of these cases were individual plaintiffs and their families, as well as chapters of the NAACP and other community and political institutions. There were discouraging defeats. When the vast legal movement that was set in motion finally reached the court, and arguments were made before the high bench in 1952, the justices were unable to resolve all the issues related to the 14th Amendment and what kinds of practices with respect to racial segregation existed in America at the time of its adoption. So in the following term, a whole re-argument was conducted before the Supreme Court that left the justices feeling the questions were”inconclusive,” at best. Nor was the court satisfied with the state of play in 1868, when the mighty 14th was adopted. It concluded that public education would have to be considered “in the light of its full development and its present place in American life.”

The court had previously dealt, in Sweatt v. Painter, with a segregated law school and, in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, with the case of a black person admitted to a white graduate school. In Brown, it concluded the considerations it weighed in those cases — such as the ability to study, to engage in discussions, to exchange views — applied “with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race,” the court found,”generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.…The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law.” It brushed aside “whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy” and bowed to “modern authority,” concluding “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

That this was only the beginning of the struggle the court itself recognized, noting that the formulation of decrees presented problems of considerable complexity. But it left no doubt as to its conclusion that segregation in public education is a denial of the equal protection of the laws. The judges had come from different states and backgrounds. Some were racists, no doubt, and no doubt some weren’t. It’s hard to imagine all of them, or even most of them, getting confirmed by the Senate according to the standards and politics applied to justices today. But in Brown, they were unanimous, a fact that can be seen today by plaintiffs and their lawyers contending on such vast constitutional questions as school vouchers, abortion, homosexuality, religious freedom, federalism, takings, campaign finance — to name but a few of the issues being fought over by our generation — as both sobering and inspiring.