Description

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence are unconstitutional, even if the segregated facilities are presumed to be equal. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal" and was rejected in Brown based on the arguement that separate facilities are inherently unequal. The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.