By the 1960s, the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP had established a reputation for using direct protest and court-centered litigation to dismantle the legal foundations of racial segregation. The organization's legal team successfully argued cases to equalize teacher salaries, end the "whites only" Democratic Party, and abolish segregation in public schools and transportation. After the student protest movement emerged in the spring of 1960, NAACP lawyers provided legal assistance to arrested students. Of the hundreds of sit-in cases prosecuted nationally, the United States Supreme Court heard 17, including four from South Carolina. Three of those cases, Peterson v. Greenville (1963), Barr v. Columbia (1964), and Bouie v. Columbia (1964), established durable precedents striking down state-enforced segregation and affirming protesters' right to free speech and access to public spaces. The 1964 decisions helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.