Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),^[1] was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence are unconstitutional, even if the segregated facilities are presumed to be equal. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson,^[a] which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal" and was rejected in Brown based on the argument that separate facilities are inherently unequal. The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement,^[3] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.^[4]

The case involved the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, which in 1951 had refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to her home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court, who issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

In the Southern United States, the reaction to Brown among most white people was "noisy and stubborn", especially in the Deep South where racial segregation was deeply entrenched in society.^[5] Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems, most notably immortalised by the Little Rock crisis. The Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown in Cooper v. Aaron, explicitly stating that state officials and legislators had no jurisdiction to nullify its ruling.

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