The U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, was bundled with four related cases and a decision was rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M.
The phrase "equal justice under law" is featured in this photograph. It was proposed by the architects planning the U.S. Supreme Court building and then approved by the justices in 1932. What does “equal justice under law” mean?
"George E. C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit congratulating each other on the Brown decision," Associated Press, 17 May 1954. Courtesy of Library of Congress
On February 28, 1951 the NAACP filed their case as Oliver L. Brown et. al. vs. The Board of Education of Topeka (KS). The District Court ruled in favor of the school board and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the Topeka case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, it was combined with the other NAACP cases ...
In Kansas there were eleven school integration cases dating from 1881 to 1949, prior to Brown in 1954. In many instances the schools for African American children were substandard facilities with out-of-date textbooks and often no basic school supplies.
Jack Greenberg. Jack Greenberg , who was born in 1924, argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, and worked on the briefs in Belton v. Gebhart. Jack Greenberg served as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1961 to 1984.
Board of Education that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. The Five Cases Consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Briggs v.
Board of Education. In 1952, the Supreme Court agreed to hear five cases collectively from across the country, consolidated under the name Brown v. Board of Education.
Linda Brown. Linda Brown, who was born in 1943, became a part of civil rights history as a third grader in the public schools of Topeka, KS. When Linda was denied admission into a white elementary school, Linda's father, Oliver Brown, challenged Kansas's school segregation laws in the Supreme Court.
Born in 1908, Thurgood Marshall served as lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott. From 1930 to 1933, Marshall attended Howard University Law School and came under the immediate influence of the school’s new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall, who also served as lead counsel in the Brown v.
Ethel Louise Belton#N#Ethel Belton and six other adults filed suit on behalf of eight Black children against Francis B. Gebhart and 12 others (both individuals and state education agencies) in the case Belton v. Gebhart. The plaintiffs sued the state for denying to the children admission to certain public schools because of color or ancestry. The Belton case was joined with another very similar Delaware case, Bulah v. Gebhart, and both would ultimately join four other NAACP cases in the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Belton was born in 1937 and died in 1981.
Robert L. Carter. Born in 1917, Robert Carter, who served as an attorney for the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott, was of particular significance to the Brown v. Board of Education case because of his role in the Briggs case.
Marshall attended the all-black Lincoln University (the oldest African-American institution of higher education in the country) and, after being rejected from the University of Maryland School of Law because of his race, went on to attend law school at Howard University and graduated first in his class. It was at Howard University that Marshall met Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice-dean of the law school. In 1935, Houston directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Marshall was his right-hand man.
Together with Houston, Marshall participated in the cases Murray v. Maryland (1936) and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938). When Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall took over the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and argued Sweat v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950). Having won these cases, and thus, establishing precedents for chipping away Jim Crow laws in higher education, Marshall succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
His legacy earned him the nickname "Mr. Civil Rights.". Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. Tired of having his friends poke fun at his first name, he decided to try to improve the situation and, at the age of six, legally changed it to Thurgood.
Arguably, Marshall's introduction to law came in high school when, as a punishment for a prank he had pulled, the school's principal made him read the U.S. Constitution. Marshall immediately liked the document and set about memorizing various parts of it. He took special interest in Article III and the Bill of Rights. Article III establishes the judicial branch of government and the Bill of Rights lists the rights that all American citizens are supposed to enjoy. Growing up in an era when Jim Crow laws still permeated much of the country, Marshall knew that many African-Americans were not enjoying all of their constitutional rights. From an early age, Marshall was aware of racial injustices in America, and he decided to do something about them. Moreover, he also knew that the courts might be the best means for doing so.
Education. Marshall attended the all-black Lincoln University (the oldest African-American institution of higher education in the country) and, after being rejected from the University of Maryland School of Law because of his race, went on to attend law school at Howard University and graduated first in his class.
Article III establishes the judicial branch of government and the Bill of Rights lists the rights that all American citizens are supposed to enjoy. Growing up in an era when Jim Crow laws still permeated much of the country, Marshall knew that many African-Americans were not enjoying all of their constitutional rights.
Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. Tired of having his friends poke fun at his first name, he decided to try to improve the situation and, at the age of six, legally changed it to Thurgood. As a young man, perhaps the person who had the most influence on him was his father, ...
(son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith —who now had her own children in Topeka schools—to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown. They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open enrollment" had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would shift their children to "preferred" schools that would create both predominantly African American and predominantly European American schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs' request finding the schools "unitary." In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on 2–1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District's request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit's mandate.
The case originated in 1951 when the public school district in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black elementary school farther away.
483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, the author of the Court's unanimous opinion in Brown. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Brown family and the other plaintiffs. The decision consists of a single opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren , which all the justices joined.
Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe —a Black Monday —a day something like Pearl Harbor ." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly:
In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D. E. Hudgins Jr., a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.