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Brown V. Board of Eduacation

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On May 17, 1954, in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court ended federally sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools by ruling unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." A groundbreaking case, Brown not only overturned the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had declared "separate but equal facilities" constitutional, but also provided the legal foundation of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Although widely perceived as a revolutionary decision, Brown was in fact the culmination of changes both in the Court and in the strategies of the Civil Rights Movement. (see case summaries below)

The Supreme Court had become more liberal in the years since it decided Plessy, largely due to appointments by Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Though still all-white, the Court had issued decisions in the 1930s and 1940s that rendered racial separation illegal in certain situations. Now consolidated under the name Brown v. Board of Education, the five cases came before the Supreme Court in December, 1952. The lead attorney on the case, Thurgood Marshall, and his colleagues wrote that states had no valid reason to impose segregation, that racial separation — no matter how equal the facilities — caused psychological damage to black children, and that "restrictions or distinctions based upon race or color" violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The opinion, written by Warren and read on May 17, 1954, was short and straightforward. It echoed Marshall's expert witnesses, stating that for African American schoolchildren, segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone." The decision

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Brown vs. Board of Education

...Brown v. Board of Education Brown v. Board of education case took place in 1954. It is one of the most important cases in the American history of racial prejudice. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. This decision became an important event of struggle against racial segregation in the United States. The Brown case proved that there is no way a separation on the base of race to be in a democratic society. Brown v. Board of education is not a case just about education and children, it is a case of everybody being equal. Brown v. Board of Education was a beginning for American people to understand that separate but equal is not the same. The Brown case revealed this. It was the reason why blacks and whites do not have separate accomodations any more. Separate and equal does not exist any more, Brown v. Board of eduacation made everyone equal. The first case in which African American challenged the doctrine of separate but equal in the United States public education system was in Boston Massachusetts in 1849. Prior to Brown v. Board (1954), from 1881 to 1949 there were eleven cases initiated to try an integrate schools in Kansas. The schools that the African American children attended were not equal to their white counterparts. Most of the time the African American students had to travel farther than white students to get to their schools. The schools for African Americans were run down with-of-date...

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