Brown V Board Of Education Summary

One of the greatest Supreme Court decisions is Brown v. Board of Education. Children during the 1950’s were racially segregated in public schools which violated the Equal Protection

Clause under the Fourteenth Amendment (“Brown v. Board of Education, par 1.) A significant amount of the United States had segregated schools in 1954 because the court case Plessy v.

Ferguson in 1896, states that segregated schools were constitutional as long as the black and white facilities were equal. The black families had to send their children to all-black schools that were usually miles away from where they lived. The schools were not as great as the white schools, and the buildings were often run down and dangerous. School supplies were scarce and the textbooks

decided to intervene. Together they formed a group that was represented by lawyers for the

NAACP so that they could sue the school boards that made colored children travel miles from their home just to go to school. There were five cases that had concerns about separate public schools. They were Brown v. Board of Education, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. board of Prince

Edward County, Boiling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel (History - Brown v. Board of Education

Re-enactment, par 10.) In the Briggs v. Elliot case that took place at Clarendon County, South

Carolina, they sued to create equal schools because the white schools had far better facilities, the teachers got payed more, and the white schools provided free school buses. The United States district court ordered equal funding to black schools but refused to integrate.

Oliver Brown, parent of Linda Brown, was denied to attend Topeka’s white school, so

Oliver filed a lawsuit against the school board of Topeka, Kansas, known as Brown v. Education.

His daughter had to travel one hour and twenty minutes to get to her school that was twenty-one blocks away from her house while the white kids got to attend a local school that was only

Almost everywhere there were marches, protest, countermarches, and counter protests. It was a time where children had to be braver than adults, when pastors had to walk the streets with strangers, when soldiers with guns were assigned to keep peace or to protect a young girl walking to school. Sometimes the white parents kept their children home when they let the schools integrate because they didn’t want them to go to school with colored children. President Eisenhower used troops at Little Rock Arkansas to show that schools couldn’t remain segregated after the court ordered the schools to desegregate (Klarman, par 12.) But massive resisters were threatening to close their schools since the court decided segregation was illegal. The governors of Arkansas and Virginia closed numerous schools in

1958 that the courts ordered to integrate. In the meantime, “modern” southern politicians battled to keep schools open by promising to limit integration. For this they were classified as traitors and weaklings. Thurgood Marshalls response was “If we slow down any more, we’ll be going backward.” Attorney General, William P. Rogers, made a statement that the peace