Brown Vs. Board of Education

The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Oliver L. Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is amongst the most noteworthy judicial turning points in the progress of our country. The Supreme Court jointed five cases under the heading of Brown vs. Board of Education, because each sought after the same legal outcome. The combined cases came from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC. Originally led by Charles H. Houston, and later Thurgood Marshall, it picked apart the legal foundation for racial segregation in schools and other public places. By stating that the prejudiced setting of racial segregation violated the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws, Brown vs. Board of Education laid the groundwork for forming upcoming national policies concerning human rights.

In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grade girl named Linda Brown was forced to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school. She had to walk a mile to school every single day even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda Brown's father, Oliver Brown, did his best to try and enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school stood strong in her decline. Brown went to a man named McKinley Burnett, who was the head of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and asked for help. The NAACP was willing to assist the Browns because they had long wanted to confront segregation in public schools. With Brown's complaint, other black parents joined him, and in 1951, the NAACP requested an injunction that would prohibit the segregation of Topeka's public schools.

Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 with the other combined cases. The Supreme Court first heard the case on December 9, 1952, but failed to arrive at a conclusion. In another argument, heard from December 7-8, 1953, the Court requested that both sides converse about the conditions surrounding the acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. The argument shed very little light on the topic. The Court had to make its verdict based not on whether or not the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind when they wrote the amendment in 1868. At the same time they needed to decide also on whether or not desegregated