种族隔离
For much of the sixty years preceding the "Brown" case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment ("no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws"). Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Beginning in the 1930s, a legal strategy was pursued, led by scholars at Howard University and activists at the NAACP, that sought to undermine states' public education segregation by first focusing on the graduate school setting. This led to success in the cases of "Mendez v. Westminster", 64 F.Supp. 544 (C.D. Cal. 1946), "Sweatt v. Painter", 339 U.S. 629 (1950) and "McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents", 339 U.S. 637 (1950), suggesting that racial segregation was inherently unequal (at least in some settings), which paved the way for "Brown".