Separate is not equal: fifty years ago this May, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the nation's public schools was unconstitutional. It was a major victory in the long struggle for civil rights.

• Author: Liptak, Adam

Linda Brown, 7, was all set to enter the third grade in September 1950. But when her father, Oliver, brought her to register at the Sumner School, seven blocks from their house in Topeka, Kan., they were turned away. The Sumner School, they were told, was for white children, and Linda was black.

Instead, she attended the Monroe School, one of four schools in Topeka reserved for black children. Getting there required a six-block walk and then a half-hour bus ride, and Monroe was not nearly as nice as Sumner.

Oliver Brown thought this was unfair and sued Topeka's Board of Education. Similar suits on behalf of some 200 black plaintiffs in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., had been filed in a coordinated effort led by the NAACP. The Supreme Court eventually agreed to decide the issue and the cases were merged under Brown's name. On May 17, 1954, 50 years ago this spring, Linda and Oliver Brown entered the history books when the Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

REJECTING 'SEPARATE BUT EQUAL'

The New York Times recognized the profound importance of the unanimous 9-0 ruling. A banner headline the next day stretched across the front page, and more than 20 articles covered the decision from every conceivable angle.

As that coverage made clear, the Brown decision represented an important legal, social, and practical turning point. At the time, as the lead article reported, 17 states required segregated schools and four allowed them. A photograph of three black lawyers celebrating their victory in front of the Supreme Court building accompanied the article. One of the lawyers was Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown case and was himself named to the Supreme Court in 1967 (see "Poetic Justice," p. 15).

Marshall and other lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund had worked for years to establish the legal framework for the Brown decision. They had to convince the courts to overturn an 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which held, in a case involving segregated passenger cars on railroads, that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional.

For 60 years, courts relied on Plessy to allow segregated schools, even in the face of evidence that schools for black children almost always received less government money than schools for white children. That meant less-qualified teachers, fewer books, and poorer facilities.

Marshall's...