Brown V. Board of Education

Brown V. Board of Education

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision overruling the constitutionality of the "separate but equal" doctrine that had been the legal basis for racial segregation of the nation's public schools.

Although the desegregation of southern schools mandated by the decision was slow in coming, Brown v. Board of Education is considered the most significant civil rights court case of the 20th century for the legal precedent it set and for the hope it gave to black people throughout the nation.

Since the turn of the 20th century, the southern states had had a legal justification for requiring black students to attend segregated schools. The Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregated railroad car seating in Louisiana on the grounds that "equal but separate" seating did not violate the black passengers' rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. For half a century, this nearunanimous decision (only one justice dissented) served as the legal grounds for racial segregation in virtually all areas of southern life, including education. However, segregated schools in the South, while separate, were definitely not equal, as documented by photographs taken in South Carolina in the 1930s. Whites attended school in brick and stone buildings, while black students were relegated to unheated, overcrowded shacks with crude furniture, inadequate libraries, and underqualified teachers.

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