-
The supreme court ruled that racially segregated public facilities were legal as long as the facilities were equal. The ruling stopped African American from taking the buses, school and public facilities as whites and establishes the separate but equal doctrine.
-
the national association for advancement of colored people (NAACP) started challenging segregation laws in public schools. They started filing lawsuits in states like Delaware, Virgina and Carolina.
-
Oliver Brown files a class action suit against the board of education of Topeka Kansas after his daughter Linda Brown was denied entrance to Topeka all white elementary schools. In his lawsuit Mr. Brown stated the schools for blacks were not equal to the school for whites and segregation violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
-
the case went to the district court in which they agreed public school segregation had a "detrimental effect of colored children." and contributed to "a sense of inferiority." but they still upheld the separate but equal doctrine.
-
when the case was first brought to the court, they combine it with four other cases but under the name Brown vs the board of education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall who was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. The justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand.
-
In September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and he was replaced with Earl Warren. And as new chief justice he succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.
-
In the decision, which was issued May 17th, 1954, Warren stated that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” and as a result the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”
-
In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II). which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation.