LibGuides: U.S. Supreme Court Cases: Brown v Board of Education, 1954

Brown v Board of Education, 1954

"Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a legal case decided in 1954. In it, the Supreme Court of the United States said that racial segregation, or separating people by race, in public schools was against the law. Segregation went against the rights given to all the people by the Constitution of the United States. The full name of the case is Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas.

In the case, Oliver Brown, an African American railroad worker in Topeka, Kansas, sued the Topeka Board of Education for not allowing his daughter to attend an all-white school near her home. At that time, many areas of the United States, especially in the South, were racially segregated. In segregated areas, Black and white people went to separate schools, lived in separate neighborhoods, rode in separate parts of buses, and drank from separate drinking fountains.

More than 50 years before the Brown case, in 1896, a Supreme Court decision had permitted separate facilities for Black and white people as long as they were equal in nature. The 1896 decision established what was called the "separate but equal" rule, which later was used to uphold other kinds of segregation. Thurgood Marshall, an African American lawyer, decided to use the Brown case to challenge the "separate but equal" idea.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court declared that separate schools for Black and white students could never be equal. Therefore, segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This amendment requires that all citizens be treated equally.

The court’s decision advanced the legal movement to desegregate all of U.S. society. Over the following decades, the federal government and the courts took several actions to force communities to integrate their public schools—that is, to make them more racially mixed. Today, many schools are more integrated than they once were. But other schools remain mostly white or mostly Black."

"Linda Brown" World Book Kids, World Book, 2021. Online image, www.worldbookonline.com/kids/media?id=pc346212.

Murphy, Bruce Allen. "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka." World Book Student, World Book, 2021, www.worldbookonline.com/student/article?id=ar079300.

Brown V. Board of Education by Judith Conaway
When Oliver Brown took his daughter to enroll at a local school, she was refused admission because she was an African-American. Brown was one of several parents who challenged the local school board in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This case, among the most famous in American history, eventually made it to the Supreme Court and came to represent all cases for the integration of schools across the United States. The court's decision forever changed the lives of all Americans.
Separate but Equal by Anne Wallace Sharp
Despite many legal attempts to overturn state-sponsored racial segregation in schools, public spaces, and on public transportation during the early twentieth century, the practice of segregation was legally enforced in the United Sates until the late 1960s. This informative edition describes the inequality of education between white and African American students after the Civil War, the legal cases that forced the integration of schools, and the reactions to the desegregation of schools that still continue today.