“Brief for appellants in nos. 1, 2 and 4 and for respondents in no. 10 on reargument in the Supreme Court of the United States, October term, 1953.”

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case unanimously ruled that segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal. The ruling allowed “Jim Crow” laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites. By the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge “separate but equal” laws.

In the case that would become most famous, in 1951 Oliver Brown sued the Board of Education after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka Kansas’ all-white elementary schools. The lawsuit pointed out that schools for Black children were not equal, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Several similar cases were combined by the Supreme Court, all under the banner of Brown v Board. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.) At first, the justices were divided, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson supporting the Plessy verdict. In September 1953, before the case was heard, Vinson died. President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California. The new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal,” counter to “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

★ Reprint of brief filed “pursuant to an order of [the Supreme Court] setting the school segregation cases down for reargument.” Personal copy of Jack Greenberg, co-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who later headed the organization from 1961 to 1984. New York: Supreme Printing Co., 1953. #27080.99