Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Brown v. Board of Education was not the first Supreme Court case of its

kind. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" segregation of public facilities was not a violation of the constitution. This ruling was considered constitutional as long as the schools for blacks provided the same education as the whites received at their schools; this was obviously not the case. Following this ruling, separate schools for blacks and whites became a basic rule in the south. At this time, Jim Crow Laws had also been passed throughout the south which established separate facilities for blacks and whites in everything from schools to water fountains.

Seven year old Linda Brown walked a mile to her school in Topeka, Kansas every day. Even though there was a school, Sumner Elementary, located within four blocks of her house, Linda was not allowed to attend. Every day when she would walk to the bus stop, this young girl would pass by the school and wonder to herself why she couldn't simply go there but instead had to travel so far to a different school. The reason she couldn't go to the local school was simple, she was black.

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Oliver Brown was able to get twelve other African Americans from Topeka, who's children were also forced by law to attend segregated elementary schools, to stand by him in his fight to overturn the "separate but equal" ruling from Plessy v. Brown went to the Topeka, Kansas branch of the NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, and sought the help of its head, McKinley Burnett. Separate but equal educational facilities are inherently unequal. Was separate really equal? Warren did not want to say that the ruling was "wrongly decided" (Horwitz pg. Brown felt that there was absolutely no reason why young Linda Brown should not be able to attend this school with the other children. 27) Since in 1896, during the Plessy case, access to these studies was not possible, warren stated that at that time the people were blind to the effects of racial segregation. At this trial, a spokesperson on behalf of the NAACP argued that segregation of blacks and whites in the public school system made black children feel a sense of inferiority over the white students, and therefore the schools were not equal at all.

Warren argued that not only had the meaning of the term racial segregation changed since the Plessy v.

The verdict of this case was unanimous and on May 17, 1954, almost three years after the case had been heard in Kansas District Court and almost two years after it had been heard at the superior level, Chief Justice Earl Warren read his now landmark decision:

"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does… We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. District Court of Kansas on June 25, 1951. Although this was the first step, Mr.

Approximate Word count = 1085
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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