| May 17th marks the anniversary of a pivotal turning point in civil rights history—the landmark 1954 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
Prompted by Linda Brown, who was denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because she was black, Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas paved the way for large-scale desegregation. The decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that sanctioned "separate but equal" segregation of the races, ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It was a victory for NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who would later sit on the Supreme Court as its first black justice.
The Supreme Court's ruling ushered in more victories in the civil rights movement. On May 6, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which introduced penalties to anyone who obstructed an individual's attempt to register to vote or someone's attempt to actually vote. From this act, the Civil Rights Commission was created. And in May 1961, the "freedom riders" began taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.
The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education
In his book The Politics of School Integration, Robert L. Crain discusses desegregation as a community decision, focusing on case studies from the 1960s. His work represents the first attempt to conduct a genuinely scientific analysis of the political process by which school systems were desegregated during this period.
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