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19 J. S. Legal Hist. 123 (2011)
Briggs v. Elliott Revisited: A Study in Grassroots Activism and Trial Advocacy from the Early Civil Rights Era

handle is hein.journals/jslh19 and id is 131 raw text is: ARTICLE Briggs v. Elliott Revisited: A Study in Grassroots Activism and Trial Advocacy from the Early Civil Rights Era by Wade Kolb III * I. A Visit to Clarendon County, South Carolina - 1947 We ain't got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.' Such was the reply in 1947 of R.W. Elliott, a local school board chairman in Clarendon County, South Carolina, to a group of black parents who had sent him a petition to provide bus transportation for their children. These parents knew that some thirty buses carried the county's white children to school each morning, and perhaps they also knew something of the legal doctrine of separate but equal, which had been estab- lished in Plessy v. Ferguson and supposedly governed the distribu- tion of educational funds in South Carolina. Far more real to them, however, than a largely ignored legal doctrine would have been the daily realities of economic hardship, racism, and limited opportunity. So the parents who went to beg R.W. Elliott for a bus could probably have guessed what his reply would be, but their situation was extreme. Perhaps they hoped for some charity * Associate in the law firm of Wyche, Greenville, South Carolina. Former Law Clerk, The Honorable Ed Carnes, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. University of South Carolina (B.A., 2000); Duke University School of Law (.D., 2010). The Author wishes to thank Michael Tigar of Duke University, Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Law, whose teaching helped inspire and shape this Article. Many historians and researchers incorrectly used the family sUrname of Delaine or DeLaine. However, the correct spelling is with a space, as De Laine, as noted throughout this Article.