This is the ruling by the Supreme Court concerning the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in the year 1954. This ruling decision transformed education in America forever. This ruling dismantled segregation of African American and European American children in public schools and declared it unconstitutional.
The court’s ruling was based on its decision that any form of separation was unequal and in direct opposition to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. States were instructed to assimilate all ethnic backgrounds into public schools and removed laws that enforced segregation in other facilities.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka discarded the “separate but equal” policy as advanced by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). According to this ruling, laws mandating separate public facilities for African Americans and whites don’t defy the equal protection clause if the amenities are just about equal. But the 1954 decision made the law inapplicable to public education. Although the ruling strictly applied just to public schools, it meant that segregation wasn’t permissible in other public facilities. Regarded as one of the most significant rulings in the court’s history, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case helped motivate the American civil rights movement of the late 1950s and ‘60s.
The consequence of Brown v. Board of Education cannot be exaggerated. The case was sponsored by the NAACP, with heavy influence from Du Bois. The case was brought up because of the complaint of an African American father whose daughter was forced to travel a mile and a half every day to get to school when there was an all-white school available a couple of blocks away from her home.
There were four other cases presented along with the Brown hearing. The counsel of the plaintiff was none other than Thurgood Marshall, a man who would eventually become a Supreme Court justice. The decision to outlaw segregation shocked the entire country, and it was largely due to the influence of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Since the Supreme Court expected opposition to its ruling, particularly in the southern states, it didn’t give directions for the immediate implementation. Instead, it asked all the attorney generals of those states that had laws allowing segregation in their public schools to submit plans for ways to proceed with desegregation. It was on May 31, 1955, when the Justices finally handed down a plan for desegregation.
