Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall Marshall, who also served as lead counsel in the Brown v. Board of Education case, went on to become the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history.
Oliver Brown (American activist)Oliver BrownDiedJune 20, 1961 (aged 42) Topeka, Kansas U.S.EducationTheologyOccupationAfrican Methodist Episcopal PastorKnown forBrown v. Board of Education1 more row
On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.
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).
Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 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.
Death. Brown passed away in her longtime hometown of Topeka on March 25, 2018.
In an opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the nation's highest court ruled that not only was the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional in Linda's case, it was unconstitutional in all cases because educational segregation stamped an inherent badge of inferiority on African American students.
In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Library of Congress tracks the historic list of overruled Supreme Court cases in its report, The Constitution Annotated. As of 2020, the court had overruled its own precedents in an estimated 232 cases since 1810, says the library.
As the first white attorney for the NAACP, Jack Greenberg helped to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the U.S. Supreme Court level.
The pivotal roles of Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren on the arguing and deciding of Brown v. Board of Education makes them vital and influential players in the American story of race relations and the evolution of the American judicial tradition.
Marshall won a series of court decisions that gradually struck down that doctrine, ultimately leading to Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, finally overturning “separate but equal” and acknowledging that segregation greatly diminished students' self-esteem.