From Brown to Brown - Brown v. Board of Education

As America entered the 1950s, school segregation was required by law in 17 states, Washington, D.C., and countless other jurisdictions. All of these embraced the “separate but equal” doctrine declared by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Thurgood Marshall, lead counsel for the NAACP, rose to attack legal segregation head-on in the first of five lawsuits that would reach the Supreme Court and be argued together as Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that “In the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Possibly no action taken by any of the three branches of government has changed the social fabric of the nation more dramatically than this ruling. Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site was established in 1992 to preserve and interpret the story of that case, and to commemorate one of the most transformative legal rulings in United States History.

Brown v. Board of Education was actually a culmination of 5 cases dealing with school desegregation. The four other cases were as follows:


Belton v. Gebhart (Delaware, 1951): This case dealt with school facilities being highly unequal between black and white schools in that district. Segregated schools were often too far away for black students to reasonably travel to and attend. In addition, no busing was available to black students.


Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C., 1954): This case dealt with a newly opened school in Washington, D.C. that refused to admit black students. The plaintiffs in this case argued that segregation violated the equal rights of those black students.


Briggs v. Elliott (Clarendon County, South Carolina, 1952): This case involved the issue of unequal and inadequate facilities for black students. In addition, no busing for black students existed in this district.


Davis v. County School Board (Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1952): This case dealt with unequal resources and poor school conditions for black students. This case was unique in that the fight for equality was led largely by a group of students. High school student Barbara Johns and hundreds of other students organized a two-week student protest to argue for better schools and equal funding.


At the heart of these cases was the issue of equal protection under the law. Ultimately, Brown made racial segregation in the field of public education illegal, thus securing equal protection of the law for black children.