Black History—Brown v Broad of Education

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the “Separate but Equal” doctrine and outlawed the ongoing segregation in schools. The court ruled that laws mandating and enforcing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools were separate but equal in standards. The Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous and felt that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and hence a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, since the ruling did not list or specify a particular method or way of how to proceed in ending racial segregation in schools, the Court’s ruling in Brown II (1955) demanded states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”

The events relevant to this specific case first occurred in 1951, when a public school district in Topeka, Kansas refused to let Oliver Brown’s daughter enroll at the nearest school to their home and instead required her to enroll at a school further away. Oliver Brown and his daughter were black. The Brown family, along with twelve other local black families in similar circumstances, filed a class action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of education in a federal court arguing that the segregation policy of forcing black students to attend separate schools was unconstitutional…

(Click on link below to read the rest of the article)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brown_v_board_of_education_(1954)

(Click on Crash Course video below for a brief look at this historical case)