Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had ruled that racial segregation laws were constitutional as long as the facilities for each race were equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and it became a model for many future impact litigation cases.

The case involved the public school system in Topeka, Kansas. In 1951, it had refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to her home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against them, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court. In May 1954, the Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in their favor. However, the Court's 14-page opinion did not spell out any specific method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".