Black History: Brown v Board of Education

The verdict of the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson held that segregated public facilities were constitutional as long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other. As a result of this, large portions of the United States had racially segregated schools. This started to change with the verdict made on May 17, 1954 with the case of Brown v. Board of Education, where the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka’s white schools. Brown claimed that Topeka’s racial segregation violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because the city’s black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be. The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were “substantially” equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together. Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs.

The Court concluded that, even if the tangible facilities were equal between the black and white schools, racial segregation in schools is “inherently unequal” and is thus always unconstitutional. At least in the context of public schools, Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled. In the Brown II case decided a year later, the Court ordered the states to integrate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Widespread racial integration of the South was achieved by the late 1960s and 1970s. In the meantime, the equal protection ruling in Brown spilled over into other areas of the law and into the political arena as well. The decision in Brown v. Board represents a turning point in the struggle for racial equality in the U.S.