During the civil rights era, segregation divided public education by race, an aggravating system for African Americans. At the same time as activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were fighting for fair treatment, a strong group of parents and their schoolchildren brought the issue of segregation in public schools to the supreme court. This powerful collection of cases eventually led to major changes in the civil rights movement with the invalidation of laws restricting the rights of African Americans in the US.
During the 1950s in the south, public schools were segregated, meaning black and white children could not attend the same school under the principle “separate but equal.” In Topeka Kansas in the 1950s, Linda Brown, a black schoolgirl, and her sister were not permitted to attend the all-white school closest to their home. They had to walk across a dangerous railroad switchyard to the bus stop that would take them to their all-black elementary school. The family of the girls believed segregation in schools violated the rights of the Fourteenth Amendment, so they took the case to court in what would become known as Brown vs. the Board of Education. The Plessy vs. Ferguson act was passed in
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the Board of Education was the leading case of five others wanting to end racial segregation in schools. This included cases in Kansas (Brown), Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Virginia. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) laid the “legal groundwork” for these cases to take place. Thirteen parents volunteered to partake in the case for their twenty schoolchildren, all of which had been denied access to white schools. Many of them had to travel far distances to one of four African American schools in their neighborhood. Theses brave parents and families took a stand against a large obstacle to equal treatment in the nationwide fight for civil rights, starting by working to desegregate public