Brown V. Board of Education, Brown I Decision

The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I), interpreted the equal protection of the laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, maintaining that separate was inherently unequal and overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that permitted segregation. The Brown I decision [Page 88]actually represents the culmination of several court cases: Briggs v. Elliot (South Carolina, 1952), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia, 1952), Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart (Delaware, 1952), Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia, 1954), and Brown v. Board of Education (Kansas, 1954). All were later folded into the other cases when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) encouraged the plaintiffs to turn ...