Brown+v.+Board+of+Education



Brown v. Board of Education was a significant case pertaining to the fourteenth amendment, here is its story. The time was fall, 1950, Oliver Brown, a Kansas minister, wanted to apply his daughter, Linda, at a local elementary school five blocks from their house. The school rejected his application to the elementary school and requested that she go to a different school fifteen blocks from their house. Oliver Brown took his case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topieka, Kansas, all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now back before this the separate, but equal problem was fought in another case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the case was in 1896, and was ruled that the cars on the train may have been separate, but they were equal. That type of case wasn't looked apon again until the Sweatt v. Painter case in 1950, where the attention that was needed for the problem about separate facilities not being equal was given. In 1952, the Supreme Court was brought five other cases on separate schools not being equal. In 1952, Thurgood Marshall asked the court about the efforts of the school segregation, but John W. Davis said that the Fourteenth Amendment never intended to prevent the separation of public education. After Fred Vinson, old Chief Justice, died Earl Warren became the new Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court, his first case was with Brown v. Board of Education of Topieka, Kansas. In the Brown case Davis's argument, in the battle of both sides to answer the case, was adressed by Warren and the court, but Marshall's case that was given proved more compelling than the other. On May 17, 1954, Earl Warren turned to the other Justices and asked for the unanimous decision of no segregation in education. Earl Warren belived that separate schools were in fact not equal, but the school systems wouldn't have the decision of the court. In 1955, after the Brown2 case the school systems were asked to end segregation, but sadly unlike the firts case, the Brown2 case decision fell short of strong clauses of enforcement. That case was a great fight on the laws of segregation that proved to have been not forgotten by the South, but more importantly by all of us as americans.