Brown v. Board of Education

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Brown v Topeka Board of Education which reversed the 1896 "separate but equal" Plessy v Ferguson decision. A short excerpt from the article:

"Separate But Equal Doctrine
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called 'equal protection clause' of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'”