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BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION
Linda Brown was in third grade when her parents Leola and Oliver took her case to court. They did not feel she was receiving the same quality education as her white peers were. At the time, racially segregated schools were legal and were required in many states. This meant that white children went to one school and black children went to another school. There were of course children of other races in America at the time, and there were rules as to which race could attend which school. Attending a school based on the color of your skin sounds ridiculous, right? It was, and the Brown family was not going to stand for it any longer. They brought a legal case against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1951.
The case was brought to higher and higher courts, and in 1953, reached the Supreme Court. They heard arguments in 1953, but were not able to reach a decision. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, a black lawyer who worked for the NAACP, re-argued the case in front of the nine Supreme Court justices, who at the time were all male and all white. The historic ruling was unanimous - all nine justices agreed that "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional. This effectively ended the racial segregation of schools, and bolstered other Civil Rights Movement causes.
Fun fact: what we know as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was not just the Brown's case, but a combination of five cases with similar education equality complaints. The Brown family's name was first alphabetically, so it was chosen to be in the title of the case.
Historically, schools were not always segregated, and many states forbade the segregation of schools. Shortly after the end of the Civil War (1865) the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were added to the Constitution, these are know as the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established equal protection of laws for all people, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) expanded voting rights to all men no matter their race or the color of their skin (women would have to wait 50 more years to vote until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920).
After the Civil War, a collection of state and local laws were passed in many states that instituted segregation in public spaces. These are referred to collectively as "Jim Crow Laws." They were passed in the 1870s, and were a response to some white people feeling threatened by the new freedoms of black people. The ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka put an end to these harmful laws.
It took many years for schools to desegregate, and our country is still working through the negative effects that segregation had on our society.
Thurgood Marshall went on to become a Supreme Court Justice in 1967. He served on our Nation's highest court until he retired in 1991. Marshall passed away in 1993 at the age of 84. Linda Brown continued to fight for equal rights her whole life. She sued the Board of Education of Kansas again for failing to fully integrate their schools, she won this case in 1993. Brown passed away in 2018 at the age of 75.
You can visit the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, KS. There are many spaces that are dedicated to Thurgood Marshall, including the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, DC, and Thurgood Marshall College at the University of California, San Diego.
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