Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown v. Board of Education Case

Oliver L. Brown of Topeka, Kansas, attempted to enroll his 7-year-old daughter Linda in a white elementary school. However, the school principal refused to allow Brown's daughter to attend the school. This incident became the impetus for a class action suit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of Oliver L. Brown, Mrs. Richard Lawton, Mrs. Sadie Emanuel, and other parents in the states of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, and the District of Columbia whose children were being discriminated against in their school districts. The U.S. Supreme Court consolidated the Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware cases in 1952 when it agreed to hear appeals in each of them, as well as in a fifth case against segregation in the District of Columbia. More than 200 plaintiffs were included in the Brown v. Board of Education case. The states of Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia had state constitutions or statutes that required segregation. Segregation was permitted but not legally required in the state of Kansas and in Washington, D.C. The landmark case bears the name of Linda C. Brown, the plaintiff. The attorneys who argued the case were Thurgood Marshall (Chief [Page 276]Counsel), Robert Carter, and Jack Greenberg, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund; and Charles Bledsoe, Charles Scott, and John Scott, from the Kansas NAACP. The common thread in the cases was that the 1896 separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads,