What Brown vs. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Decision. Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision ordering the desegregation of America's public schools, is perhaps the most famous case in American constitutional law.
The ruling of the case “Brown vs the Board of Education” is, that racial segregation is unconstitutional in public schools. This also proves that it violated the 14th amendment to the constitution, which prohibits the states from denying equal rights to any person. How is the 14th amendment related to Brown vs Board of Education?
What parties were in Brown vs Board of Education? The NAACP and Thurgood Marshall took up their case, along with similar ones in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, as Brown v. Board of Education. Oliver Brown, a minister in his local Topeka, KS, community, challenged Kansas’s school segregation laws in the Supreme Court.
What was the ultimate consequence of the Brown v BOE decision? State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the “separate but equal” precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement.
Thurgood Marshall led a life in the pursuit of equality, and was on a path destined to lead him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Read More...
The first African American admitted to the Delaware bar, Louis Redding was part of the NAACP legal team that challenged school segregation.
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.
Thurgood Marshall led a life in the pursuit of equality, and was on a path destined to lead him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Read More...
George E.C. Hayes was responsible for starting the oral argument of Bolling v. Sharpe, the case which originated in the District of Columbia
Houston developed a "Top-Down" integration strategy, and became known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow" for his desegregation work.
Nabrit took over Charles Hamilton Houston's work on the Bolling v. Sharpe case which went to the U.S. Supreme Court alongside four others.
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 the 25th anniversary of Brown, President Jimmy Carter convened hundreds of civil rights leaders at the White House to commemorate the ruling and announce the nomination of NAACP General Counsel Nathaniel Jones to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Founded in 1909 in response to the ongoing violence against Black people around the country, the NAACP is the largest and most pre-eminent civil rights organization in the nation. We have over 2,200 units and branches across the nation, along with well over 2M activists.
The Brown decision demonstrated that the courts are critical guardians of our civil rights. The decision represents decades of hard-fought progress on issues of civil rights and equal protection.
In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP. NOTE: The Legal Defense Fund, also referred to as the NAACP-LDF, was founded in 1940 as a part of the NAACP, but separated in 1957 to become a completely separate entity.
Baltimore, MD – Today, Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, issued the following statement on the 67th anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education:
Black children are five times as likely as white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race and ethnicity. We call upon educators and policymakers at the national, state, and local level to reinvigorate efforts to provide all children with a quality education.
Jack Greenberg graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948. Greenberg became the leading counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after the Brown case, replacing Thurgood. He also helped find the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and helped establish other organizations that help global humanitarian.
About. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was found in 1909. They are an organization that is against racial segregation and they fight for equality. Their goal was to allow laws to pass that defends African Americans from execution by convincing the Congress and other legislative bodies.
Charles Hamilton Houston was the head of the NAACP. Later in 1938, his partner, Thurgood Marshall took his place as the head of the Legal Fund. The NAACP focused on five areas; anti- lynching legislation, voter participation, employment, due process under the law, and education.
In 1960, he was appointed dean of Howard’s law school and became Chief Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals till retirement. McKinley Burnett later became the president of the Topeka NAACP.
After he graduated Northwestern University Law School, he became a faculty to help establish school’s coursework in civil rights law at Howard University. Later, he became president of Howard University. He also became a deputy ambassador of the UN. Robert Carter helped argue in the Kansas case.