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The “End of Segregation” Didn’t Go as Planned
What Happened After Brown v. Board of Education?
In 1951, Oliver Brown attempted to enroll his daughter Linda in the all-white Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas. Linda Brown was turned away because she was Black. Oliver filed a lawsuit claiming that Black schools weren’t equal to white schools and violated the “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment. The U.S. District Court agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children and contributed to a sense of inferiority,” but let stand the “separate but equal doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Plessy v. Ferguson has long been considered one of the worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court, though Chief Justice William Rehnquist indicated he would have supported it as late as 1952.
The Brown lawsuit was combined with four other school desegregation cases and came before the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education in 1952. The chief attorney for the plaintiffs was Thurgood Marshall with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The NAACP had worked for several years to bring this issue before the Supreme Court and now had their chance.
