Brown v. Board of Education: "separate but equal" has no place in our society.

• Author: McGrane, Miles

I think I may have met the first African-American to obtain doctorate and master's degrees in ichthyology. While attending Florida Atlantic University during the early 70s, he shared that he would be the first African-American to obtain such degrees.

I replied, "Well, that's great." He quickly jarred my consciousness by assuring me I shouldn't be too impressed. It was the 70s and a pretty sad commentary for our nation to not have a black man with those graduate degrees.

For many reasons that conversation sticks with me, and even more so now that the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is upon us. Brown helped pave the way for many African-American firsts.

The U.S. Supreme Court's case concluded that separate but equal educational facilities were unconstitutional and such facilities denied black children equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The case struck down the long adhered-to doctrine of "separate but equal" established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

The plaintiff, Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, knew his constitutional rights were being eroded each day his eight-year-old daughter, Linda, bypassed the neighborhood white school to catch a bus to a segregated school 21 blocks away. In 1951, Brown sued the city school board. The judges ruled against Brown, finding the schools substantially equal.

The Brown case was a consolidation of cases from several states including Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. In each case, the plaintiffs sought admittance to segregated schools and were conversely denied admittance by federal district courts on the basis of the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Having some success in challenging public universities that had excluded blacks, the NAACP led the assault on desegregating primary and secondary education all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Brown case featured some of the most famous names in the recent history of the Supreme Court. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued on behalf of the plaintiff. Marshall had been working as legal director of the NAACP for nearly 15 years and was well seasoned in the art of arguing before the Supreme Court. As legal director, he made the issue of school desegregation a major point of action, first targeting post-graduate educational facilities and then expanding into lower levels of education.

In 1954...