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(Monday, May 17, 1954, 12:52 p.m. EDT; marking the end of Jim Crow era (1896–1954) and beginning of civil rights movement (1954–1968)) — In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka unanimously ruled this afternoon that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
The decision partially overruled the Court’s 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, 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.”
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, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.
Video: 'Ending School Segregation | Brown v. Board of Education'
The case originated in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown’s daughter at the school closest to their 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 that 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, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court today issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns, ruling that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
However, the decision’s 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools.
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.
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.
