Brown II 'All Deliberate Speed' Ruling Enables Decades of Delay

In Brown II on May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court orders school desegregation proceed with 'all deliberate speed' — a deliberately vague standard proposed by Justice Felix Frankfurter. The phrase is interpreted by Southern school districts as permission to delay indefinitely. In 1964, ten years after Brown I, only 2.3 percent of Black students in the South attend school with white students. The 'all deliberate speed' standard is widely criticized as sacrificing Black children's rights to political feasibility.