Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (full name George Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas) was a Landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States.

In 1950 in Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grade girl named Linda Carol Brown had to run more than a mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her segregated school for black children. However, there was an elementary school for white children less than seven blocks away.  At that time, many schools in the United States were segregated.  Black children and white children were not allowed to go to the same schools.

Her father, Oliver Brown, tried to get Linda into the white school, but the principal of the school refused.  Twelve more black parents joined Oliver Brown in trying to get their children into the white elementary school.  The two schools were supposed to be "separate but equal."  However, they were not.

In 1951, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) helped the parents file a class action lawsuit. There were five lawsuits in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia about having black students going to legally segregated schools. In 1896, the Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal, as long as separate places for blacks and whites were "separate but equal."  The NAACP's lawyers argued that the white and black schools in Topeka were not "separate but equal."

Kenneth Clark is a psychologist that gave young African-American children black and white dolls to see how they felt about segregation and integration. The children liked the white dolls. After the doll test, Clark also gave the black children drawings of a kid and asked them to color it like themselves. Some of the children colored themselves with a white or yellow crayon, which was also used in the case.

The case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court.  After years of work, in 1954, Thurgood Marshall and a team of other NAACP lawyers won the case. It was named "Brown" because she was alphabetically the first name on the list of plaintiffs. After the lawsuit many of the plaintiffs lost their jobs and respect in society.

The ruling 

The Supreme Court has nine justices. The vote on Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous, meaning that all nine justices voted the same way.  One of the judges, Robert Jackson, had recently had a heart attack and was not supposed to come back to court until the next month.  However, he came to the court when the judges read their decision, possibly to show that every one of the judges agreed.

The ruling in the case was written by Earl Warren, who was Chief Justice. He said “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."   This decision made the racial segregation of schools against the law in every US state.

Some states did not obey this court decision at first. The supreme Court ruled the schools had up to 5 years to desegregate. It was not until the early 1970s that all United States public schools were integrated (the opposite of segregated).  Integrating America's schools required many state and Supreme Court decisions to force schools to integrate.

Related pages
 Plessy v. Ferguson
 Segregation
 Civil Rights Movement

References

Other websites 
 The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision from FindLaw
 United States National Park Service Historic Site: Monroe Elementary School, one of the segregated elementary schools in Topeka
 Ten Things You Should Know About Brown v. Board of Education

1954 in the United States
American civil rights
Topeka, Kansas
United States law
United States Supreme Court cases
1950s in law