Brown vs. Board of Education

The year is 1954. Amidst all the civil rights issues regarding the treatment of African Americans, one little girl in Kansas and her family altered the fabric of American society forever. This little girl, an African-American third grader named Linda Brown, was forced each schoolday to walk one mile along a railroad to reach her segregated school for African Americans, even though the white school was seven miles away. However, this was not the main issue. The problem was that the African-American schools were totally inferior to the schools that the white children attended. When Linda Brown tried to enroll in the white school, she was refused. Oliver Brown, Linda's father, helped begin an injunction ran by the NAACP. When Brown brought this case to the District Court of Kansas, there was much indecision on what to rule. When the District Court ruled in favor of segregation, Brown decided to take this matter further. He appealed their decision to the Supreme Court, and this case was combined with others from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, deliberated extensively (they first heard the case in 1952 but did not reach a decision until 1954). Finally, on May 17, 1954, Warren announced their decision: "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.". With this ruling, the long history of inequality of African-Americans, from slavery to Plessy vs. Ferguson, seemed to be nearing a possible end.

http://brownvboard.org/summary/

http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/brown.html