Brown vs. Board of Education was a critical point in American history as it was one of the key points to desegregation in the nation. As we know, slavery was a big problem in the United States. It started back in 1619, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people from Africa were kidnapped and forced to work on the manufacturing of crops in the American colonies. Due to slavery, despite the Declaration of Independence's statement that "All men are created equal," it wasn't until after the Civil War that this statement became law in the United States (and, arguably, wasn't completely fulfilled for some time after that). As of 1865, slavery was finally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, Fourteenth …show more content…
In one of their most famous cases, Oliver Brown sued the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951 after his daughter, Linda Brown, wasn't allowed into all-white elementary schools. As part of his lawsuit, Brown complained that Black kids weren't getting the same education as white kids, and that segregation violated the 14th Amendment's "equal protection clause," which says no state can "deny equal protection to anyone within its jurisdiction." The U.S. District Court in Kansas upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine despite the fact that segregation had "detrimental effects on colored children." In 1952, the Supreme Court combined Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka with four other school segregation cases to form one …show more content…
Board didn't bring about school desegregation, the ruling (and the steadfast opposition to it throughout the South) fueled and led to the initiation of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, a year after Brown v. Board of Education. When she was arrested, the Montgomery bus boycott began, and other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations followed (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), leading to the fall of Jim Crow laws. After overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court set a precedent for overturning segregation laws elsewhere. Even though the historic verdict had a lot of impact, it didn't achieve its main goal of integrating the nation's schools. More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, racial inequalities continue to be debated in the nation's schools, mainly because of residential patterns and resource differences between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged