Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court declared that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. " As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This ruling paved the way for further racial integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement.
In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were 13 Topeka parents who, on behalf of their 20 children, called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The plaintiffs argued that systematic racial segregation, while seeming to provide separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. The lead plaintiff was Oliver L. Brown, whose daughter Linda had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was only seven blocks from her house.
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the case moved to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren convened a meeting of the justices and presented to them with the argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of African-American citizens. Warren further submitted that the Court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive southern resistance. Warren drafted the basic opinion and kept circulating and revising it until the opinion was endorsed by all the members of the Court.
Eventually, the key decision of the Court was that even if segregated black and white schools were of equal quality in facilities and teachers, segregation by itself was socially and psychologically harmful to black students and, therefore, unconstitutional. This aspect was vital because the question was not whether the schools were "equal," which under Plessy they nominally should have been, but whether the doctrine of separate was constitutional.
The Warren Court
The members of the Warren Court that unanimously agreed on Brown v. Board of Education.