Board of Education, racial segregation in the United States was rampant, backed by the Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). Racial segregation manifested itself in many different areas; housing opportunity, education, medical care, transportation and employment. Whites had their own exclusive water fountains, as Blacks would drink from the "colored" fountains. Blacks had to wait on a separate line at the movie theatre. Besides for being subjected to humility, black facilities were usually not just separate, but inferior as well.
In 1951, parents from the city of Topeka, Kansas, in cahoots with The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), filed a class action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The NAACP had assigned the parents as the plaintiffs for this case, with Oliver L. Brown as the main parent that represented the case. Brown, alongside with the other parents, claimed that the concept of racial segregation in regard to educational facilities, should inherently be defined as unequal. Although many institutions pretended to be separate yet equal, the reality wasn't so, as colored institutions were generally inferior to their white counterparts. The example of inequality present in Brown's case, was the fact that his daughter was forced to walk further to school in order to attend an all black school, as apposed to the local white school. In 1952, the Supreme Court grouped Brown's case together with similar cases from other states such as Delaware, District of Columbia, South Carolina and Virginia under the title Oliver Brown et al vs. the Board of Education of Topeka.
Fortunately, the courts ruled in favor of Brown and the other parents, and agreed that the doctrine of separate but equal was an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. On May 9th, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in conclusion "We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.