Brown V. Board Of Education: A Landmark Supreme Court Case

Brown v Board of Education was a landmark supreme court case. In the 1950s, most of the schools in the United States were racially segregated. This was legal due to Plessy V Ferguson, which stated that segregated schools were constitutional as long as they were equal. However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights activists began to take a stand. They began to challenge racial segregation. Schools for black students had out dated textbooks and not enough supplies. Families began seeking that the school districts allow black students to attend the white public schools. In Topeka, Kansas, there were only four African- American schools, compared to eighteen white schools. One family in particular from Topeka, made the difference. Oliver Brown

They, along with four other lower court cases, requested an order to forbid segregation in Topeka’s public schools. The United States District Court heard Brown’s case on June 25 and 26, 1951. On October 1, 1951, Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court. This led to Brown v Board of Education, which hoped to desegregate schools. Their main argument was that segregated schools were not equal, as it gave the impression that whites were superior to blacks. On the other hand, the Board of Education argued that the segregation in the school systems was there to prepare black children of the segregation they would face as adults in the future. This case was meant to pave the way for future generations and establish equality within the school system, and although the case declared segregated schools unconstitutional, matters did not change as they hoped. White schools were still mostly white, black schools were still mostly black, and there was still a clear separation between the races. Today, the case may be considered successful, however, at the time that it took place, it did not appear that

They ruled that separate schools for blacks and whites violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This case was the one that ultimately decided on separate but equal public facilities in 1896. The decision of Brown v Board of Education immediately sparked the American civil rights movement. It ended the federal tolerance on racial segregation and sided the constitution with racial equality. However, Brown v Board of Education failed to fully desegregate public schools, which was the main goal of the case. Before the case, there were 17 states that required their schools to be racially segregated. It took many years after the case for these segregated states to accept de jure integration. The year after the decision, the Supreme Court published guidelines that required public schools to integrate “with all deliberate speed,” meaning they had to speed up the process. Between the years of 1955 and 1960, over 200 school hearings about desegregation were heard in federal courts. In 1957, only 11 African American students were admitted to schools that were previously all white in North Carolina. In 1958, a march in Washington D.C was held in hopes of pushing integration into effect, as no major change had occurred. Over 10,000 people marched. By 1959 in North Carolina, only 40 of the 300,000 African American students went to integrated schools. That is not