1954
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION:
The Civil Rights Movement Begins
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, as long as the facilities for Black people and whites were “equal.”
The ruling constitutionally sanctioned “Jim Crow” laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities with whites and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.
But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.
In the case that would become famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.
In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The case would ultimately wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was combined with four other cases related to school segregation. In 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall the first Black Supreme Court justice.
Though the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board didn’t achieve school desegregation on its own, the 1954 ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States. It helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
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