Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

The 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is arguably the most famous and biggest Supreme Court cases in the history of the United States. It overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, and established that "separate but equal," in fact, cannot and is not true. Blacks had been denied access to segregated white schools that were clearly much better than the black schools, and the cases came up all through the court system to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren, the same person who mandated the internment of the Japanese after the incident at Pearl Harbor, wrote for the unanimous decision in favor of Brown.Warren took from a Kansas state court ruling that said that "segregation...has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system." With the state of the black facilities in comparison with the white facilities and with the Fourteenth Amendment in mind, the Court decided that separate could not be equal.

This monumental decision was very well argued and thought-out, and reflected the changing views of society at the time. During the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, slavery had recently been eliminated, and accepting blacks into society was very difficult for whites then, but as society progressed, blacks began to fight for their rights more, and whites began to accept blacks as equals, like they should be viewed. I agree with this ruling because there was no way that any of the crappy blacks only facilities were anywhere close to as good or clean as the white only facilities, illustrating that there was no way that having separate facilities could be equal

This clip on YouTube from PBS below examines the case of Brown v. Board of Education. It provides a good feel as to what times were like when this court ruling took place with video footage of the different and unequal facilities.

The case of Brown v. Board of Education was different than Sweatt v. Painter in that the case of Sweatt dealt primarily with universities, and the University of Texas Law School in particular, while Brown dealt with public education facilities for grades K-12.