Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision Declares School Segregation Unconstitutional

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Court declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that had mandated “separate but equal” facilities. This monumental decision represented the legal foundation for the modern civil rights movement, yet it also triggered a massive institutional resistance campaign across the South that would delay meaningful integration for more than a decade.

Almost immediately after Warren finished reading the opinion, Southern white political leaders condemned the decision and vowed to defy it. The attorney for the plaintiffs, Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African American Supreme Court Justice in 1967, had successfully argued that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. However, the Court’s follow-up decision in 1955, known as Brown II, instructed states to begin desegregation “with all deliberate speed”—a vague timeline that Southern states exploited to delay integration. Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia launched “Massive Resistance,” a coordinated campaign of obstruction that included closing public schools, establishing state-funded private academies for white students, and passing laws to nullify the Supreme Court’s authority.

By 1960, the statistics revealed the success of institutional resistance: only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended desegregated schools, and in the five Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren remained in segregated schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, officials closed the entire public school system for five years rather than integrate, leaving Black children without any education while the state funded private academies for white students. This pattern of institutional defiance—using legal mechanisms, economic pressure, and government authority to resist court orders—established a template for democratic erosion that extended far beyond education, demonstrating how powerful institutions could systematically undermine constitutional rights through coordinated obstruction.