Brown vs. Board of Education

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Brown vs. Board of Education

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas . State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment states; “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This historic decision marked the end of the "separate but equal" precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement during the decade of the 1950s. The brown v. board of Education decision solved one problem of many with the treatment of blacks in the white society but

The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark court case of 1954 in which the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously declared that it was unconstitutional to create separate schools for children on the basis of race. The Brown ruling ranks as one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century. At the time of the decision, seventeen southern states and the District of Columbia required that all public schools be racially segregated. A few northern and western states, including Kansas, left the issue of segregation up to individual school districts....

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Martin, E. Waldo. Brown v. Board of Education. Boston: New York, 1998.

Sarratt, Reed. The Ordeal of Desegregation: The First Decade. Harper & Row

Publishers, 1966.

West, H. Earle. The Black American and Education. Charles Merrill Publishing

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Whitman, Mark. ed. Removing A Badge Of Slavery: The Record of Brown v. Board of

Education. Princeton & New York, 1993.

Wilkinson, Harvie. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration:

1954-1978. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

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