Oklahoma State University – Oklahoma City
Civil Rights and Liberties - POLS 1320
Winter 2022
Lecture Notes Thirteen
Contents: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Lecture Notes Thirteen
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices
ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v.
Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the
precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
Separate but Equal Doctrine
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were
legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.
The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses,
schools and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate
but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.
But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was
working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of
plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.
In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit
against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied
entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.
In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and
that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds
that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had
a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still
upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine.
When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme
Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka.
Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief
attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as
the first Black Supreme Court justice.)
At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M.
Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v.
Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him
with Earl Warren, then governor of California.
