Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Brown v. Board of Education held that state-mandated segregation of public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause. The unanimous decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and triggered the modern civil rights movement.

For half a century after Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Supreme Court permitted state-mandated racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal." Schools, transportation, hospitals, and almost every other public facility in much of the country were operated on a segregated basis. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, pursued a long legal strategy to dismantle the doctrine, chipping away at it case by case. Brown was the culmination. The case consolidated suits from Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, all challenging segregated public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren, newly appointed by President Eisenhower, worked to produce a unanimous decision. He understood that a divided ruling would invite resistance. The decision came down on May 17, 1954. The Court held unanimously that "in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Segregation, the Court held, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A second decision in 1955, Brown II, ordered desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed." Implementation was slow and often resisted. Federal troops escorted Black students into Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Many Southern school districts remained substantially segregated into the 1960s and beyond. But Brown changed the constitutional landscape. It was the first decision to dismantle the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow, and it laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is widely regarded as one of the most important decisions in American history.