In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” Little Rock Nine Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.ĭisplaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)Īt first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M.
(Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine.
In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.
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