Hope Arrives

Beginning in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used its Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a team of skilled lawyers to challenge “separate but equal” education laws by filing lawsuits on behalf of Blacks against all-White schools or colleges that refused to admit them. State courts usually ruled against these cases, so appeals went to higher courts. By the end of 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court had combined five of these lawsuits into Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP legal team persuaded the Court that racially segregated and unequal public schools made Blacks feel inferior and that without a fair education these children would never be equal in American society.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States