Brown v. Board of Education

Landmark US Supreme Court decision of 1954 which ruled that racially segregated educational facilities were intrinsically unequal and therefore in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling negated the long-standing ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, and helped fuel the civil-rights movement in the USA.

This case consolidated several suits challenging segregation laws in four states and the District of Columbia. The petitioner, Oliver Brown, was the father of a schoolgirl who was forced to travel across town to attend class in an all-black school rather than attend the school near her home. Lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People presented arguments for school desegregation, led by civil-rights activist and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. The court ruled unanimously that segregation violated the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. The ruling, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, said that the development of children from a minority were hindered by segregation. Lower courts were directed to desegregate schools with ‘all deliberate speed’, but desegregation met with strong resistance, as occurred at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, where federal troops had to intervene.