Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court over the years has made some very important decisions regarding the rights of American citizens.   Only a few of these, though, still linger in the minds of almost every person residing in the United States.   One of these cases is Brown v. Board of Education.   This case dealt with the question: Does the segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprive the minority children of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment?   This question was dividing the nation and the Supreme Court knew that it had to hand out a just and unanimous decision.
During this time in history the doctrine of   "separate but equal" was the law.   This came to be because of an earlier Supreme Court case entitled Plessy v. Ferguson.   In this case, the Supreme Court stated that separate, but equal public facilities for people of different races was legal under the 14th Amendment.   The time that this case happened was in 1896.   In 1951, a black railroad worker named Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education for not allowing his daughter to attend an all-white school near her home.   Similar cases were being brought against the states of South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.   These states, and others, had Jim Crow laws limiting the constitutional rights of African-Americans.   People were unwilling to accept what they thought of as an inferior race.   The plaintiffs had all lost their cases in the district courts, so the appealed to the Supreme Court.   The Supreme Court agreed to hear their cases, but as one case based on one issue, desegregation.   The plaintiffs argued their case in the 1952 term while Chief Justice Frederick Vinson was in office.   The justices were perplexed, so they called to have the sides reargue their cases in the 1953 term on the basis of the 14th Amendment.
In 1953, though, Chief Justice Vinson, from Kentucky, died in office before the cases could be reargued.   President Eisenhower...