Plessy …show more content…
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (Greene). The Ink Fund lawyers used cases relating to the segregation of schools in different parts of the United States to present their arguments before the Supreme Court justices in the Brown trial. Their goal was to change the “separate but equal” doctrine which was established by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. The Court heard the Brown arguments, but sent the case back to the Ink Fund with numerous detailed questions that needed to be …show more content…
They wanted to analyze debates of the state and congress, before and after the Fourteenth Amendment was passes, to verify if there were statements made relating to racial segregation in schools or any other institution. The Ink Fund recruited John Hope Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was an expert on the Reconstruction era of United States history. Franklin who was also an African American professor at Howard University, agreed to be a part of the team and address questions asked by the justices. Franklin traveled to the Ink Fund offices in New York City every week between September and December 1953, to help with the research and to write a position paper (Ham). Other scholars also came from various institutions such as Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, Wayne State College, and Johns Hopkins University. When one of the Ink attorneys, Thurgood Marshall, reviewed Franklin’s position paper, he commended it and described it as sounding like a lawyer’s brief. Franklin later related that he “deliberately transformed the objective data provided by historical research into an urgent plea for