LAD/Blog #39: Brown V. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court case in 1954. The judges unanimously ruled that segregating schoolchildren by race was unconstitutional. This was the opposite of what judges had ruled in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, when they ruled "separate but equal" as being constitutional. However, many things had changed by the 1950's, and efforts were being made to integrate public schools. In 1951, when Linda Brown was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools, had father filed a lawsuit. He claimed that the black schools were not equal to the white ones and that segregation violated the "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment. After the US District Court of Kansas upheld the "separate but equal" idea, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, where the judges ruled unanimously that the segregation of schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Linda Brown Norman Rockwell Painting of Linda Brown