In its campaign to undo longstanding precedent allowing the limited consideration of race in admissions to higher education, SFFA attempts to re-write one of the most important Supreme Court cases in our nation’s history, Brown v. Board of Education. Abandonment of the Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as 2016 in Fisher v. University of Texas, as requested by SFFA, would force colleges and universities to ignore race and the unfair advantages and disadvantages stemming from ongoing educational inequalities when attempting to assemble a student body that will foster the educational benefits of diversity.
When LDF successfully litigated Brown 68 years ago, the plaintiffs and their lawyers, including LDF founder and eventual Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, were not fighting for, nor did the Supreme Court envision, SFFA’s version of a “colorblind” Fourteenth Amendment that ignores the persistent reality of racial inequalities. LDF and the original Brown plaintiffs sought to uproot the subordination of Black people and secure equal citizenship for Black Americans by ending this country’s racial caste system. That is the vision that the Supreme Court affirmed in Brown and that LDF and the NAACP assert it is dutybound to honor.
Read the full amicus brief here.