preview

The Importance of Brown V. The Board of Education Essay

Decent Essays

The Importance of Brown V. The Board of Education

To understand the importance of Brown V. The Board of Education of Topeka, one must take into account the gravity of the prevailing law and attitude that existed in 1954. In 1896, the Supreme Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine in the case of Plessy V. Ferguson. Essentially the court was saying that blacks should be treated equally but due to an obvious difference, race, blacks could be treated equally but separate.

Justice Henry Brown wrote in his majority opinion; "The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could …show more content…

In fact a series of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware all found their way to the Supreme Court. But a distinguished attorney with the NAACP named Thurgood Marshall brought Linda Browns case to prominence.

By this time, Thurgood Marshall was an experienced Supreme Court advocate. He had already challenged all white primary elections in Smith V. Allwright, and restrictive covenants in Shelley V. Kraemer. His style was straightforward and plainspoken. He held no punches and got to his point without a lot of dramatics. When asked for a definition of the word "equal" by Justice Felix Frankfurter, Marshall replied, "Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place."2 This was the basis of his case.

Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over the case, and on May 17, 1954 decided in Brown's favor. In a brief, unanimous opinion delivered by Warren, the Court declared that; "separate education facilities are inherently unequal"3 and that racial segregation violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, thus overruling the Plessy case. Many Americans praised Warren's decision agreeing that in

Get Access