re is also reason to believe that the mental attitudes of the Supreme
             Court justices were influenced by the tenor of life in the United States in
             the early 1950s, the very cultural changes that made it almost unthinkable
             that the Court would have decided differently. Since the middle of World
             War II, change in the conduct of racial relations had been in the air. The
             decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 had set up the conditions under
             which Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka could be argued. In Plessy,
             the Supreme Court had, in fact, decided in favor of separate but equal
             hotel accommodations. That decision was acceptable at the time. That
             decision was made, however, during the Lochner Era, an era when the Supreme
             Court was very much in favor of protecting business interests, which the
             By the start of World War II, it was obvious that big business, the
             beneficiary of the Plessy decision, didn't have quite as much pull as
             before. In 1941, ten thousand black Ford workers supported the United Auto
             Workers in a strike that forced Ford to unionize, bringing wages up
             especially for blacks. (Pietrykowski, 1995) In 1943, there were well-
             ...