-
The Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public facilities were legal.
-
The decision by the Supreme Court would later lead in sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites, which would be known as the Jim Crow laws.
-
This group was working hard to challenge segregation laws in publics schools. They also filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virgina, and Delaware
-
In a case that would become the most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. He filed this lawsuit after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary school.
-
When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
-
The Justices were divided at first, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren
-
On May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”