Brown v. Board of Education — 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case which declared school segregation unconstitutional
The Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 ruling ended the legal basis for racial segregation in U.S. public schools, overturning the 'separate but equal' doctrine.
Key Facts
- Decision date
- May 17, 1954
- Vote
- Unanimous 9–0 in favor of plaintiffs
- Precedent overruled
- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
- Lead counsel
- Thurgood Marshall, NAACP chief counsel
- Originating case location
- Topeka, Kansas
- Constitutional basis
- Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause
By the Numbers
Location
Cause → Event → Consequence
Since 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson had permitted racial segregation in public facilities provided they were nominally equal. In 1951, the Topeka, Kansas school board refused to enroll Oliver Brown's daughter at the nearest school, forcing her to attend a distant segregated school. The Browns and twelve other Black families filed a class action lawsuit challenging this policy, which lower courts upheld under the Plessy precedent.
The U.S. Supreme Court, with the plaintiffs represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, issued a unanimous 9–0 ruling on May 17, 1954. The Court held that state laws mandating racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, explicitly rejecting the 'separate but equal' doctrine regardless of the physical quality of facilities.
The ruling was a major victory for the civil rights movement and became a model for future impact litigation. However, the decision provided no implementation mechanism, and the follow-up ruling Brown II (1955) only required desegregation 'with all deliberate speed.' Southern states mounted 'massive resistance,' most visibly in the Little Rock crisis, and the Court reaffirmed its ruling in Cooper v. Aaron.