Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 9, 1952 Reargued December 8, 1953 Decided May 17, 1954
Full case name	Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al.
Citations	347 U.S. 483 (more) 74 S. Ct. 686; 98 L. Ed. 873; 1954 U.S. LEXIS 2094; 53 Ohio Op. 326; 38 A.L.R.2d 1180
Decision	Opinion
Case history
Prior	Judgment for defendants, 98 F. Supp. 797 (D. Kan. 1951); probable jurisdiction noted, 344 U.S. 1 (1952).
Subsequent	Judgment on relief, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) (Brown II); on remand, 139 F. Supp. 468 (D. Kan. 1955); motion to intervene granted, 84 F.R.D. 383 (D. Kan. 1979); judgment for defendants, 671 F. Supp. 1290 (D. Kan. 1987); reversed, 892 F.2d 851 (10th Cir. 1989); vacated, 503 U.S. 978 (1992) (Brown III); judgment reinstated, 978 F.2d 585 (10th Cir. 1992); judgment for defendants, 56 F. Supp. 2d 1212 (D. Kan. 1999)
Holding
Segregation of students in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities are inherently unequal. District Court of Kansas reversed.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton
Case opinion
Majority	Warren, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (in part) Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) Berea College v. Kentucky (1908)

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),^[1] was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal".^{[note 1]} The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement,^[3] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.^[4]

The case originated in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown's daughter at the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.

In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (349 U.S. 294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

In the Southern United States, the reaction to Brown among most white people was "noisy and stubborn", especially in the "Deep South" where racial segregation was deeply entrenched in society.^[5] Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as "massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown, and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no power to nullify its ruling.

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