In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruling, the US Supreme Court declared separate schools based on race unequal and unconstitutional.
The unanimous ruling raised African American hopes and expectations for equality in schools, jobs, and housing. But the promise of Brown was hard to fulfill.
White southerners staged massive resistance efforts that held up desegregation in most districts for another ten years. The wording in a second Supreme Court Brown opinion in 1955—to carry out the ruling “with all deliberate speed”—left a vague timeframe for change.
Brown was a major breakthrough in the struggle for equal education. It capped the NAACP’s attack on de jure (by law) school segregation. By overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which allowed segregation, Brown put the law on the side of the movement. But the fight for quality education continues to this day.
