11/6/2019 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka: Why Did the Supreme Court Rule That Segregation Was Illegal?Read NowThe 1954 United States Supreme Court did two things that were extremely unusual when ruling on the Brown v. board of Education of Topeka case. First off, they overturned the previous ruling in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Secondly, the Supreme Court made this ruling unanimously, something that almost never happens, even to this day. "The plaintiffs contended that segregated schools are not 'equal' and cannot be made 'equal', and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws" (Fraser, 278). This statement from the plaintiffs of the case were found to be correct in their reasoning by the Supreme Court and were directly quoted later by many of the justices of the Supreme Court.
In the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court had ruled that facilities could be segregated given that, "facilities were equal". When a decision was reached in the Brown v. board of Education of Topeka case, it sparked the Civil Rights Movement including the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in 1955, the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, and most notably; the March on Washington DC led by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 (Urban, 284). The Supreme Court at the time knew of the importance of the Brown v. board of Education of Topeka case and they knew the impact that it would have on the nation, and that is speculated to be one of the reasons that they ruled unanimously on the decision.
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December 2019
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