Brown vs Board of Education

BROWN V BOARD OF EDUCATION

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) has been acknowledged as one of the greatest US Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, in which the court unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the decision did not succeed in fully desegregating public education in the United States, it put the Constitution on the side of racial equality and galvanized the nascent civil rights movement into a full revolution. It acted as a precursor to various such cases of inequality which were later brought to the view of the law and the verdicts thereof were instrumental in shaping the non–discriminatory character of the US for which today it is known the world over.

History

The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to a compilation of five separate cases though different in nature but having the same intent, were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Boiling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools. The case was represented by Mr Thurgood Marshall and funded by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Background

Racial segregation has dominated the US race relation for a long time, preceding much before the Brown case and it dates back to 1896. In that year, this policy was endorsed by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessey v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment ("no State shall... deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws.").

However, there was a...