U. S. Supreme Court — Brown Vs Board of Education

Imagine a rule that says two schools are equal as long as they have the same number of desks, the same textbooks, and the same qualified teachers — even if one is reserved for one race and the other for another. For fifty-eight years that rule was the law of the United States. In 1954 a unanimous Supreme Court looked at that rule and said it could never be equal, no matter how identical the desks were. This is the most-asked question in your entire paper, and it is asked so often because the reasoning, not just the result, is what every examiner wants to see.

In two minutes

In Brown v. Board of Education , 347 U.S. 483 (1954), a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court held that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even where the physical facilities are equal, and overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson , 163 U.S. 537 (1896), as it applied to education.

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