Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. 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". 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.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling 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 came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.
Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Constitution prohibits segregated public schools in the District of Columbia. Originally argued on December 10–11, 1952, a year before Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling was reargued on December 8–9, 1953, and was unanimously decided on May 17, 1954, the same day as Brown. The Bolling decision was supplemented in 1955 with the second Brown opinion, which ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed". In Bolling, the Court did not address school desegregation in the context of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which applies only to the states, but rather held that school segregation was unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court observed that the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution lacked an Equal Protection Clause, as in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, the Court held that the concepts of equal protection and due process are not mutually exclusive, establishing the reverse incorporation doctrine.
Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952), on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, challenged school segregation in Summerton, South Carolina. It was the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional by violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Following the Brown decision, the district court issued a decree that struck down the school segregation law in South Carolina as unconstitutional and required the state's schools to integrate. Harry and Eliza Briggs, Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, and Levi Pearson were awarded Congressional Gold Medals posthumously in 2003.
Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862, aff'd, 91 A.2d 137, was a case decided by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1952 and affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court in the same year. Gebhart was one of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court which found unconstitutional racial segregation in United States public schools.
Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the exclusion on account of race of a child of Chinese ancestry from a public school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision effectively approved the exclusion of any minority children from schools reserved for whites.
The Iowa Supreme Court is the highest court in the U.S. state of Iowa. The Court is composed of a chief justice and six associate justices.
Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that denied the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas the right to delay racial desegregation for 30 months. On September 12, 1958, the Warren Court delivered a decision that held that the states are bound by the Court's decisions and must enforce them even if the states disagree with them, asserting the judicial supremacy established in Marbury v. Madison (1803). The decision in this case upheld the rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Brown II that had held that the doctrine of separate but equal was unconstitutional.
The Muscatine Community School District (MCSD) is a public school district located in Muscatine, Iowa, serving almost all of the city and the surrounding rural areas, including the unincorporated areas of Fairport and Montpelier.
Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964), is a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that the County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia's decision to close all local, public schools and provide vouchers to attend private schools were constitutionally impermissible as violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), was an important United States Supreme Court case involving school desegregation. Specifically, the Court dealt with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court's mandate in Brown II in 1955. The Court held unanimously that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not adequately comply with the school board's responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis. The Supreme Court mandated that the school board must formulate new plans and steps towards realistically converting to a desegregated system. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County was a follow-up of Brown v. Board of Education.
The Lemon Grove Case, commonly known as the Lemon Grove Incident, was the United States' first successful school desegregation case. The incident occurred in 1930 and 1931 in Lemon Grove, California, where the local school board attempted to build a separate school for children of Mexican origin. On March 30, 1931, the Superior Court of San Diego County ruled that the local school board's attempt to segregate 75 Mexican and Mexican American elementary school children was a violation of California state laws because ethnic Mexicans were considered White under the state's Education Code. Although often overlooked in the history of school desegregation, the Lemon Grove Case is increasingly heralded as the first victory over segregative educational practices and as a testimony to the Mexican immigrant parents who effectively utilized the U.S. legal system to protect their children's rights.
Alexander G. Clark was an African-American businessman and activist who served as United States Ambassador to Liberia in 1890–1891, where he died in office. In 1867 Clark sued to gain admission for his daughter to attend a local public school in Muscatine, Iowa. The case of Clark v. Board of School Directors achieved a constitutional ruling for integration from the Iowa Supreme Court in 1868, 86 years before the United States Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). He was a prominent leader in winning a state constitutional amendment that gained the right for African Americans in Iowa to vote (1868). Active in church, freemasonry, and the Republican Party, he became known for his speaking skills and was nicknamed "the Colored Orator of the West." He earned a law degree and became co-owner and editor of The Conservator in Chicago. His body was returned from Liberia in 1892 and buried in Muscatine, where his house has been preserved.
In the United States, school integration is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.
Hedgepeth and Williams v. Board of Education, Trenton, NJ, 131 N.J.L. 153, 35 A.2d 622 (1944), also known as the Hedgepeth–Williams case, was a landmark New Jersey Supreme Court decision decided in 1944. The Court ruled that since racial segregation was outlawed by the New Jersey State Constitution, it was unlawful for schools to segregate or refuse admission to students on the basis of race. The case led to the formal desegregation of New Jersey public schools and was a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education.
Ward v. Flood 48 Cal. 49–52 (1874) was the first school segregation case before the California Supreme Court, which established the principle of "separate but equal" schools in California law, 22 years before the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. Following Ward v. Flood, litigation over racial segregation in schools in California continued for over a century.
