May 17, 1954 | Supreme Court Declares School Segregation Unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education - NYTimes.com

May 17, 1954 | Supreme Court Declares School Segregation Unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education - NYTimes.com:

May 17, 1954 | Supreme Court Declares School Segregation Unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education

By THE LEARNING NETWORK

Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph CollectionIn Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall successfully argued that school segregation was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

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On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, which declared that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal.

The decision overturned the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court ruled that segregation laws were constitutional if equal facilities were provided to whites and blacks. Segregation was therefore justified under the doctrine “separate but equal,” but in few cases were segregated facilities actually equal. The disparity was particularly clear in public schools, where the amount of financing and the standard of education for all-black schools lagged far behind all-white schools.

In 1951, the NAACP recruited families from Topeka, Kan., to take part in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school segregation. The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, had a daughter who was forced to take a bus to an all-black school rather than attend the all-white school blocks from her house. The case was combined with similar cases from other parts of the country and argued before the Supreme Court by a team of NAACP lawye