Plessy vs Ferguson

            
             Plessy, 1/8 black man, sued state of Louisiana. He was jailed for sitting in the "White's" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. State of Louisiana found him guilty under the "separate, but equal" law & so did the Supreme Court.
             Brown vs Board of Education (1954):.
             Linda Brown, a black girl attending fifth grade at the public schools in Topeka, Kansas, was denied admission into a white elementary school. The NAACP took up her case, along with similar ones in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. All five cases were argued together in December, 1952 by Thurgood Marshall. Decision in favor of desegregation came in two years, on May 17, 1954.
             Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), independence:.
             On June 7, 1776, he made his famous proposal to congress: "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." He made the first move toward independence from Great Britain. .
             Jefferson, Declaration of Independence:.
             Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, (which gave colonists right to rebel against the British government and establish their own based on the premise that all men are created equal and have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), & it was adopted by Congress on the morning of July 4, 1776.
             Marbury vs Madison (1803).
             William Marbury, sued Secretary of State James Madison to force him to deliver his commission as a justice of the peace. The critical importance of Marbury is the assumption of several powers by the Supreme Court. One was the authority to declare acts of Congress, and by implication acts of the president, unconstitutional if they exceeded the powers granted by the Constitution. But even more important, the Court became the arbiter of the Constitution, the final authority on what the document meant. As such, the Supreme Court became in fact as well as in theory an equal partner in government, and it has played that role ever since.